You can finally pay money for one of gaming’s weirdest reboots yet.
Publisher Atari announces today that Asteroids: Outpost is available for purchase through Steam’s Early Access portal. This means you can spend around $20 to experience the unfinished sci-fi shooter right now and help the company complete development. Unlike the original version of Asteroids, which was an arcade space shooter where you blew up incoming rocks to avoid getting crushed, Outpost is a first-person open-world multiplayer shooter. You play a minder who is digging for ore who must defend your outpost form attack.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1686793,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"C"}']Check out the cinematic trailer that Atari released today that looks very little like it’s for an Early Access game:
While this game has little in common with its predecessors, Atari is alluding to the original by charging $19.79 for Outpost on Early Access, which is the year that Asteroids hit arcades.
In a statement, Atari chief executive officer Fred Chesnais said that Asteroids: Outpost combines “survival and crafting gameplay mechanics in a multiplayer intergalactic setting.” He went on to explain that his company plans to use the Early Access phase to add new features and build on what is already in place.
Those ideas that are already in place sound a bit like DayZ or other recent survival games. Players gather resources and tools to craft items and weapons. You’re responsible for expanding and maintaining your base. Regular asteroid showers pummel your headquarters, and you, of course, have to shoot them down. You also find and loot other players’ nearby bases.
That’s a long way from what Asteroids started as, and Atari says that is the new plan.
“This is part of our new strategy,” Atari chief operating officer Todd Shallbetter said in a statement. “We are going to be teaming up with young and innovative studios to take a refreshing look at each game from our extensive portfolio. Releasing Asteroids: Outpost through the Early Access program will also help us get feedback from the community. Asteroids is the first of a long series of re-births, and we are considering doing the same for our other iconic games such as Warlords, Adventure, Tempest, Missile Command, and many more.”
It’s worth noting that Atari’s plans for Tempest recently earned it some negative headlines when the company went after the creator of Tempest 2000 creator Jeff Minter with legal threats. In 2013, Minter released a spiritual successor to Tempest 2000 called TxK on his own, and Atari said it would take him to court if he moved ahead with plans to port the tunnel shooter to PC and other platforms.
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Minter claims he offered to work with Atari, but the company wasn’t interested. Apparently, it has bigger and weirder plans for its games than working with the people who made them great in the first place.