[CompSci87]

That's an interesting question; wish I knew the answer. Asteroids has some family resemblance to the earlier Spacewar. Wikipedia thinks Asteroids was an original development by Atari, not a clone of a game developed on larger machines in the ARPAnet community (as Spacewar was). If you were playing the game at SAIL before Atari released Asteroids, maybe Wikipedia is wrong, or maybe your memory is a bit off and either you were playing Spacewar, or the date was a bit later and you were playing an Asteroids clone that someone wrote for SAIL. Sorry, this is all just speculation.

I remember playing a version of Asteroids on a Stanford computer when I was a grad student there in the mid-80's, but I don't remember what computer it was on. Might have been a Xerox Alto; there definitely was an Asteroids clone for the Alto. I also remember playing Spacewar quite a bit earlier at MIT with my older brother. It was played on a round screen, at least at MIT.

[CompSci87]

That's an interesting question; wish I knew the answer. Asteroids has some family resemblance to the earlier Spacewar. Wikipedia thinks Asteroids was an original development by Atari, not a clone of a game developed on larger machines in the ARPAnet community (as Spacewar was). If you were playing the game at SAIL before Atari released Asteroids, maybe Wikipedia is wrong, or maybe your memory is a bit off and either you were playing Spacewar, or the date was a bit later and you were playing an Asteroids clone that someone wrote for SAIL. Sorry, this is all just speculation.

I remember playing a version of Asteroids on a Stanford computer when I was a grad student there in the mid-80's, but I don't remember what computer it was on. Might have been a Xerox Alto; there definitely was an Asteroids clone for the Alto. I also remember playing Spacewar quite a bit earlier at MIT with my older brother. It was played on a round screen, at least at MIT.