Mad Planets was released in 1983 by Gottlieb. The prior year Gottlieb, who had previously been exclusively a pinball company, struck gold by releasing the incredibly popular Q*Bert arcade game. Hot off their success with Q*Bert, Gottlieb jumped into the arcade business with both feet, releasing a number of games in '83 including Krull, based off of the movie of the same name; Q*Bert's Qubes, a sequel to the original hit; and M.A.C.H. 3, a laserdisc game that tried to leech off the popularity of Dragon's Lair. However, their most important release of the year (at least for this article) was the space shooter Mad Planets.

At it's heart, Mad Planets is a descendant of Asteroids, but instead of avoiding giant space rocks and saucers, you've graduated to fighting comets and entire star systems. The action takes place on a single screen and stars your Star Destroyer inspired spaceship. While innocently tooling around the galaxy, you are suddenly attacked unprovoked by a gang of delinquent planets.

Piloting your spaceship is done with two separate controllers. A joystick allows free range movement on the playfield while a 360 degree knob rotates your ship. There is also a trigger on the joystick that fires your ship's guns. Movement is not based on the direction your ship is pointing so you can fly one way and shoot in another. (Only the most wily Mad Planets veterans can pull off what is known as the Corey Lewis Maneuver. That is where you spin the rotating knob as fast as you can and hold down the fire button, causing an insane burst of fire in all directions. It rarely hits anything but it's really cool to watch.)

The game is broken up into levels. The level starts with a number of the offending planets closing in on your location (bet you didn't know that planets came equipped with hyperdrive). If you can blast them all before they get to your location, you get bonus points! But if you let them linger too long, they pop up fully formed with an armada of hostile orbiting moons. The planets will then chase you around the screen, occasionally hurtling their angry satellites at you. To kill a planet, you must first blast away its layer of protective moons. Unfortunately, that makes the planet angry, and you wouldn't like it when it's angry.

Without it's moons, the Mad planets become even Madder, picking up speed and desperately trying to ram your poor spaceship into oblivion. Luckily for you, without their gang of punk moons to protect them, the planets can be taken down in one hit. But wait, there's more! While you're busy fighting off entire pissed off solar systems, rouge comets will swoop around, trying to bust up your sweet space ride.

You may think that this game is all violence and killing, but there is gripping human drama to be found as well. Random astronauts can be found floating around the battlefield, waiting to be rescued from a horrible fate. Rescuing stranded spacemen is simple, just fly right into them! (Don't worry about hurting them with your high speed heroics, astronauts are surprisingly durable.) Every few levels, you get a bonus round of sorts where you can pick up swarms of lost spaceguys while avoiding comets. (Why are there so many random astronauts just floating around out there? Maybe there should be some sort of intergalactic AAA for emergencies like this.)

Gottleib never included a backstory to this game, so there's a lot of speculation as to why those planets are so mad. Some have suggested that planets are sentient beings and stirring up trouble of their own free will. (This could be troublesome for Earth. What if Mars decides one day to cop an attitude, show up uninvited, and chuck Deimos right at our face?) Others believe that these rouge worlds are controlled by their evil inhabitants, turned into colossal weapons of mass destruction. (You'd think they would come up with a better plan then picking a fight with a massive ship that's bigger then their entire planet.)

No matter what the reason, those Planets are Mad, and it's your job to stop them. Mad Planets is a blast to play. It's frantic nonstop action, simple to learn yet difficult to master gameplay, and thumping soundtrack all form the epitome of what a great arcade game should be. Run down to your local arcade (those still exist, right?) and play this awesome title today!

Many planets were harmed in the making of this article, but they all had it coming. Jerks.