Lyle Rains was a senior executive at the arcade game company Atari

Atari

Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...

 and is sometimes, with Ed Logg

Ed Logg

George Edward Logg born in Seattle in 1948 is a retired arcade video game designer, employed first at Atari and after at Atari Games. He co-developed the video game Asteroids with Lyle Rains...

, listed as a co-developer

Software developer

A software developer is a person concerned with facets of the software development process. Their work includes researching, designing, developing, and testing software. A software developer may take part in design, computer programming, or software project management...

 of the video game Asteroids. In fact, Rains called Logg into his office and said "what about a game where you smash asteroids -- big rocks into small rocks?" Rains also served as Executive Producer for a large number of Atari coin-op games. An avid gamer, he wrote a popular online FAQ

FAQ

Frequently asked questions are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. "FAQ" is usually pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym, but an acronym form does exist. Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual...

 for the Atari coin-op game KLAX.

Quotations

• "I guess the way I describe it is that I'm the father of Asteroids. Ed Logg is the mother of Asteroids, because he had to live with it for nine months and deliver a finished product. All I had to do was to provide a seed."

External links

• History of Atari's Asteroids
• Article at The Dot Eaters, on Rains and the development of Asteroids
• Lyle Rains at Arcade-History.com