[4] Company president Stephen Holniker played Asteroids and felt that he could produce a game to compete in the marketplace.

[4] Both games involved dodging and shooting space rocks, but a notable difference was that Meteors featured color graphics.

[5] The controls for the ships were functionally identical, and both games awarded the player an extra life if they scored 10,000 points.

[5][10] Calling most of these similarities "inevitable",[4] Judge Young reasoned that the two games were different in terms of their overall feel, due to Meteors being faster, more difficult, and more graphically realistic.

[5] At the time, it was one of the only cases to rule in favor of the defendant, based on the idea-expression distinction that copyright does not protect broad ideas, only the unique expression.

[7] Intellectual property attorney Stephen McArthur notes that Atari v. Amusement World was the first of nearly a dozen rulings in favor of alleged video game clones, "pav[ing] the way for developers to create games closely resembling established and successful games", with courts only shifting nearly 30 years later in Spry Fox, LLC v. Lolapps, Inc. and Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc.[5] The line between a free idea versus copyrightable expression can be seen by contrasting this case with Tetris v Xio.

[11] Greg Lastowka states that the idea-expression dichotomy established in Asteroids was difficult to apply in the Spry Fox and Tetris Holdings disputes from 2013.

He compared the Amusement World case to other early copyright cases, questioning "what made a video game involving spaceships and space rocks an unprotected idea", while contrasting it with the court in Atari, Inc. v. North American Philips Consumer Electronics Corp., which gave copyright protection to Pac-Man's "pie-shaped gobbler and four ghost monsters as a particularized form of expression".