Mission Asteroid (1980)
Mission Asteroid is a 1980 adventure video game made by On-Line Systems and All American Adventures.
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.
Quick answers
What is Mission Asteroid about?
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.
When was Mission Asteroid released?
Mission Asteroid was released on 31 December 1980.
Who made Mission Asteroid?
Mission Asteroid was made by On-Line Systems, All American Adventures and StarCraft.
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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.