Maybe youâre like me and never heard of 1980s arcade game Meteors. If you guessed that it was a clone of Asteroids, though, youâd be right. The coin-op arcade game stood at the center of a lawsuit aimed by Atari at competitor Amusement World.
Video game designer/scholar Ian Bogost runs down the impact of the court case in a blog post. Essentially, the landmark judicial decision ruled that Meteors didnât infringe on Asteroids because an idea canât be copyrighted. Amusement World won the lawsuit but was hit hard by financial repercussions and Meteors faded in the limbo of half-remembered games.
But Eric Holnikerâson of Amusement World CEO Stephen Holnikerâfound one of a very few Meteors cabinets and powered up it this week. Watch the video and feast your eyes on a game that people havenât seen for more than two decades.
