You haven’t played Asteroids until you’ve played it sitting in a chair, scooting around a two-dimensional field of dangerous space rocks scrawled in laser at your feet. If you find this idea slightly terrifying (?), don’t worry, here’s a video of Nolan Bushnell having a crack at it first.
Human Asteroids, as it’s called, is just one of the diversions people will be able to play at “STEAM Carnival”, a “modern travelling carnival unlike any you’ve ever seen” featuring “”high-tech games” and “completely re-imagined amusements”, according to the event’s recently successful Kickstarter.
Unfortunately, the “travelling” is limited to San Francisco and Los Angeles, so an explanation of Human Asteroids by Eric Gradman, one of the guys behind the carnival, will have to do instead:
To play this game, you sit in you chair, and you roll around on the floor. You have a mobile phone in your hand which you use to fire [and it’s] also used to figure out which direction you’re facing … The system is tracking you using a Kinect camera which is mounted high above in the ceiling. It’s watching to see where you are, relative to where it’s putting the asteroids.
He goes on to credit Bushnell as the creator of the game, which isn’t exactly accurate, but you get the idea — having the 70-year old founder of Atari giving your virtual amusement a whirl has a high degree of awesome attached to it.
Human Asteroids with Nolan Bushnell [YouTube]
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