A popular technique used to get high scores in Asteroids was to eliminate all but one small rock and then stay near the opposite edge of the screen and pick off flying saucers as they appeared. This technique was called "lurking", and it was made possible by the saucers' programmed behavior. During development, saucers were originally able to begin shooting as soon as they appeared on-screen, but this was disabled for unknown reasons. Saucers were also now only able to aim at the player's ship on-screen, and were unable to shoot across screen boundaries.

Lurking allowed players to earn points for hours on a single quarter, and arcade operators complained to Atari that this exploit was causing revenue losses. In response to this strategy, Atari issued a patched EPROM for Asteroids with improved shooting from the saucers and worked to prevent similar exploits from cropping up in future games. These fixes would stay in the game's sequel Asteroids Deluxe, which also added new clustered hexagonal enemy ships called "death stars" (a reference to the superweapon of the same name from the Star Wars franchise) that break into smaller triangular ships when shot at and chase the player.