Lyle Rains was a senior executive at the arcade game company Atari and conceptualized the original idea for Asteroids, which was then developed and implemented by Ed Logg.Rains reportedly called Logg into his office and said "Well, why don’t we have a game where you shoot the rocks and blow them up?"
Rains also served as Executive Producer for a large number of Atari coin-op games. An avid gamer, he wrote a popular online FAQ for the Atari coin-op game KLAX.
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Asteroids is a 1979 multidirectional shooter video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for arcades; in Japan, it was distributed by Taito and Sega. The player controls a spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy the asteroids and saucers while avoiding colliding with either or being hit by the saucers' counterfire. The game becomes more difficult as the number of asteroids increases.
Asteroids was conceived and designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg, who decided to use hardware developed by Wendi Allen (then known as Howard Delman) that was previously used for Lunar Lander. Asteroids was based on an unfinished game titled Cosmos; its physics model, control scheme, and gameplay elements were derived from Spacewar!, Computer Space, and Space Invaders and refined through trial and error. The game is rendered on a vector display in a two-dimensional view that wraps around both screen axes.
Tank is an arcade game developed by Kee Games, a subsidiary of Atari, and released in November 1974. It was one of the few original titles not based on an existing Atari property developed by Kee Games, which was founded to sell clones of Atari games to distributors as a fake competitor prior to the merger of the two companies. In the game, two players drive tanks through a maze viewed from above while attempting to shoot each other and avoid mines, represented by X marks, in a central minefield. Each player controls their tank with a pair of joysticks, moving them forwards and back to drive, reverse, and steer, and firing shells with a button to attempt to destroy the other tank. The destruction of a tank from a mine or shell earns the opposing player a point, and tanks reappear after being destroyed. The winner is the player with more points when time runs out, with each game typically one or two minutes long.
Tank was designed by Steve Bristow, who had previously worked with the founders of Atari on Computer Space, the first arcade video game, and was developed by Lyle Rains. It was created as part of Bristow's vision to move the company away from only producing copies of Atari's games into also developing original titles. The game's cabinet was designed by Peter Takaichi. In September 1974, during development, Atari merged with Kee. The game was commercially successful, selling over 10,000 units and buoying Atari's then-troubled finances. It led to a cocktail cabinet release of the game and to three sequels: Tank II (1975), Tank 8 (1976), and Ultra Tank (1978). A dedicated console version of Tank II was announced in 1977 but cancelled later that year; the joysticks for the game, however, became the standard joystick controllers for the Atari 2600 (1977). Variations on the game were included in the Atari 2600 game Combat, as well as in the Coleco Telstar game Telstar Combat!, both in 1977.