Asteroids
Trivia
1001 Video Games
The Arcade version of Asteroids appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.
Atari 7800
Asteroids was one of the "Fabulous Eleven" launch games for the Atari 7800.
Controls
The original Asteroids arcade control scheme (five buttons, no joystick) is identical to the configuration employed in the early PDP-1 Spacewar! implementation.
References
Internally at Atari the two flavours of UFO in Asteroids (slow and fast) were referred to as "Mr. Bill" and "Sluggo", after characters in Saturday Night Live skits. After this was disclosed in an interview, Atari was sent a cease-and-desist letter by NBC's lawyers.
References to the game
Asteroids was popular enough to have a song inspired by it on the full-length Pac-Man Fever album: Hyperspace.
Technology
The original Coin-Op game of Asteroids in the arcade machines contained 4 kilobytes of code and 4 kilobytes of graphic data. Programmers managed to squeeze it in to 1 kilobyte of data for the Atari 2600!
Information also contributed by PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual, Scott Monster and FatherJack.
Trivia contributed by Guy Chapman, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.