Kabang!

Short story The Tesseract associated with defunct web-comic Project: Ballad (by Michael Peterson and Kevin Czapiewski, made available under a CC BY-SA license) describes a trip to a video arcade and Super-Kabang! in particular.

You play an astronaut with a magnet (represented by a sixteen-pixel stick man) who is reeling in mines that drift through space. The stick controls the astronaut’s rotation in place just left of center. His magnet can catch and grab one mine, and then a second mine can attach to the first, and so on in a chain,but the chain can only add mines at its end – a mine that hits the middle of the chain causes a reaction that blows up the astronaut (the screen blinks white and then displays the score).  The chain’s swing is very fancy programming for its time, but the collision detection is stolen from earlier games.

Then, Kabang! itself, the original to have a Super-version, not yet two-player, and not concerned with the fancy chaining animations.

When I read it, I could see most of the implementation, so I gave the TIC-80 a whack.  To my shame, that original 2023 version of the game includes an LLM-generated theme.  Revisiting the game recently, I fixed some bugs, replaced the music with a human-written (also CC BY-SA), and added a "cartridge label" for this version.