Mission Asteroid (1980)
Mission Asteroid is a 1980 adventure video game made by On-Line Systems.
A rock big enough to end everything is headed for Earth, and Sierra hands you the job of stopping it with a two-word vocabulary. Mission Asteroid is one of the earliest Hi-Res Adventures, an illustrated text game where you type commands like GO NORTH or TAKE KEY and watch a simple picture answer back. Released as entry zero in the series because of its gentle difficulty, it works as a training ground: a straightforward countdown premise, a handful of rooms, and a parser that only understands the basics. A quaint look at where the graphic adventure began.
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Mission Asteroid in our writing
- Companion guide: Sierra On-Line: The Golden Age of the Quest
A few thoughts on Mission Asteroid
If the doomsday-clock premise grabs you, the disaster films push it to blockbuster scale. Meteor plays the same asteroid-on-collision setup dead straight, while Deep Impact takes the countdown seriously and human. Both swap the parser for spectacle but keep that one clean question: can it be stopped in time?
Stop the asteroid before it hits Earth
Mission Asteroid built a whole game around the countdown to impact years before Hollywood turned it into a summer staple. If the doomsday-rock premise is what pulls you in, these are the films that live and die by the same ticking clock, from oil-riggers with nukes to a comet nobody can stop.
Explore Sierra's Hi-Res Adventure roots
This was an early illustrated text adventure from Sierra, released as entry zero in the Hi-Res line because it was so gentle. To see where that parser-driven, one-screen-at-a-time style grew up, play the studio's later golden-age quests that turned the same DNA into sprawling worlds.
Watch the world nearly end
The stakes here are total, a planet with hours left. That end-of-everything mood carries into other retro and modern doom stories where a slime, a rock, or a countdown threatens to wipe the slate. These screen picks chase the same last-chance dread from cheesy to sincere.
Read and stream space-rescue sci-fi
Saving the day from orbit is a genre unto itself. If you want the print and animated versions of racing against a cosmic threat, these Star Trek novels and old-school anime send crews out to intercept disaster on high, trading Sierra's parser for pulp adventure.
