Asteroids

1982 • Kid Stuff Records

I know what you're thinking: "Asteroids barely had any music!" Yeah, it was basically two notes, like the Jaws theme, and nothing else, both on the Atari 2600 and the arcade version most people are probably familiar with (and the one I played most; there was a cabinet at our local roller skating rink: pretty neat!). Fortunately nobody was dumb enough to release that terrible two-note monstrosity as a real soundtrack, but this little promo EP that came out for the Atari 2600 version isn't much better. Its three annoying songs are painfully stupid and simply aren't very good.

In short, we have a very dated '80s-sounding fanfare for the Atari theme, an incredibly cheesy space-age-pop tune with embarrassing vocals and lyrics, and a less-awful synth-pop-ish tune with some robotic-sounding vocals. None of them are any good, especially the second one, but as promotional material goes they could have done worse. Their decision to include lyrics that mentioned things that weren't even remotely related to the game is a bit sad though (there's no time warping anywhere, for one), and the only two features of the game ("HYPERSPACE! ... THRUST CONTROL!") are way more banal than the songs make them out to be.

It's an interesting piece of game history, I suppose, but even if video gaming was still in its infancy in the early '80s, music was not, and this could have had some actually decent music on it. Oh well.

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