[3] Lee and Thiel previously worked on Q*bert for Gottlieb,[5] a game that was inspired by a pattern of hexagons implemented by Yabumoto.

[7][8] The player uses a flight-style joystick to move a spaceship around a dark starfield, a rotary knob to orient the ship, and a trigger on the stick to fire.

He praised the "beautiful graphics", "extremely responsive" controls, and concluded "I would rank Mad Planets right up there with other high-tension favorites such as Robotron and Tempest.

"[11] He found the player's ship to be overly large for the screen, and the lack of new elements in later levels reduced his interest in sticking with the game.

[11] Programmer Simon Nicol wrote two clones for the Commodore 64 published by Martech: Crazy Comets and its sequel Mega Apocalypse.