Munificently Assured Destruction

In 1981, Atari released a mass market arcade game by the name of Missile Command.  It was the brainchild of one Dave Theurer, a California resident and energetic game designer who had just finished work on a four player soccer game.  His boss at the time ask him to make a game similar to some magazine clippings of an article about satellites.  Rich Adam, Dave's junior and assistant on the project, recalls Theurer's pitch being a rather straightforward three sentence summery: 

"Here's the idea: you've got these missile trails coming in from the top and you've got these bases at the bottom. The trails are missiles coming in and you shoot missiles from your bases to intercept them. You try to save your bases."

Taken at face value it doesn't come across as a particularly standout concept for a video game, but Dave Theurer was fired up by his idea the moment he got the greenlight to proceed.  Development took six months and ultimately became a case of design by subtraction.  One of the first things decided on was the game being purely defensive.  There would be no way to counterattack because Dave "did not want to put the player in the position of being a genocidal maniac."  Giving players the job of saving lives also introduced one of the first instances of having to make tough moral choices in the context of a video game.  In modern titles this typically presents itself as a rather blatant good/evil, paragon/renegade, black/white dichotomy, but in the case of Missile Command, the decisions were a lot more subtle...so much so, the player might only register them on a subconscious level.  

The layout of the game is simple.  There's only one screen.  Threats come from the upper part, the stuff that needs protecting is down at the bottom.  There are three mountain-top bases located in the bottom-middle, as well as the bottom-right and bottom-left corners.  Each one of these bases is equipped with a defense system that holds ten shots (thirty in total).  The player aims via an on-screen cursor guided by a trackball.  Which of the three bases takes a shot is decided by pressing one of three corresponding buttons.  There are also six cities (three on either side of the central mountain base) that need to be defended.  Originally, these cities were supposed to be San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Eureka, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.  In other words six major cities in California which also happened to have Atari offices residing in them.  Eventually, the city names were dropped to make the experience more universally relatable.  Still, I could have sworn that I played a port of Missile Command in my teens that reintroduced the city naming concept...  

Moving on, the missiles come down in waves and it's up to the player to use their limited resources to prevent these threats from reaching their targets.  It's usually possible to catch more than one incoming missile in the blasts caused by defensive fire.  This is especially true if the player is quick to target bombers and missiles armed with MIRV warheads, but if the player runs out of ammo they're basically stuck waiting until the wave ends.  Bases fully reload between waves.  In the original design document, this was going to be tied to a railroad supply system traveling from the cities to the bases, but it was dropped during development with the reason citied being "it was too complicated."  Regardless, the player has to be conservative with their thirty shots while still preventing the annihilation of their bases and cities (the former because they are needed for defense and the latter because the loss of all six results in a game over).  As the game progresses though, the waves consist of more and faster incoming missiles along with self-guiding bombs that can adjust their downward trajectory as they approach.  As the situation becomes increasingly hectic, the player has to make split-second decisions about what to prioritize.  A hit to one of the mountain bases will knock it (and any shots left) out for the remainder of the wave.  Obviously, a hit to a city will destroy it.  However, there are chances to gain bonus cities based on the player's performance.  Even so, there will inevitably be times when the player is overwhelmed and must sacrifice one thing to save another.  Abstract as it all is, in the form of a golden age arcade game, this is heavy stuff to think about.  It also led to Dave Theurer having bad dreams.

In Dave's own words, at the time "Missile Command embodied the Cold War nightmare the world lived in."  While putting in long hours in a state of gaming crunch that remains all too common today, Dave would suffer from reoccurring visions while he slept:

"I would dream that I was hiking in the mountains above the Bay Area, with the fabulous views of the San Francisco Bay. In the dream, I'd see the missile streaks coming in and know that the blast would hit me while hiking there on the mountain.  These nightmares were common occurrences during the development of Missile Command and continued after development was finished."

To make matters worse Dave lived near an Air Force base that would launch planes at all hours, sometimes causing the overworked and drowsy game developer to wake to a loud roaring noise "and for a moment wonder if it was an atomic blast."  Succinctly put, "It was a sobering experience."  

After removing the unworkable idea of a sweeping radar scan that would only reveal a portion of the screen at any given time, Missile Command was ready to be field tested.  In an interesting bit trivia, Atari would put together prototypes of their arcade machines and place them quietly in a bar or entertainment center.  This was an excellent deal for the owners since they were allowed to keep all the quarters that went into the machine.  In lieu of any kind of rental fee the establishment was only required to keep records of how many people played the game and their general reactions.  This was especially important for gauging the reception to tweaks and changes made to the game during field testing.  All this was conducted with an emphasis on maintaining a degree of secrecy out of a genuine fear that, if the game became too widely known and too publicized, a competitor would clone the mechanics and beat Atari to market. One change that was made to Missile Command at this time was an overhead display on the cabinet that indicated the status of the three mountain bases during play.  It was found to be too costly to make and needlessly distracting such that is was not included in the mass-produced arcade machines that followed.

In war there are no winners, only losers.  It's a saying that feels well suited to Missile Command.  There is no path to victory.  The missiles never stop coming.  Eventually every city gets destroyed...or perhaps another way to look at it would be, the only way to win is not to play.  Despite carrying this almost subliminal message about the futility of war, Missile Command went on to become one of the most famous arcade games ever made.  It has spawned countless ports, copycats and remakes over the years.  It even appeared briefly in "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" (perhaps as a subtle reminder of the approaching nuclear apocalypse that serves as a major plot point in that film).  Atari later field tested a two-player cooperative prototype of the game entitled Missile Command 2, but this was never made available to the public aside from a brief appearance in one arcade in Santa Clara, California.  Dave Theurer went on to make the highly regarded Tempest, a game that was partially inspired by another bad dream (this one from his youth) involving monsters climbing out of a pit in the ground.  As for the reoccurring nightmare about thermonuclear war, "It tapered off after the game, but still, [Dave] had them for a couple years afterward, maybe one every two or three months."  

While I have played the arcade game on several occasions, the version I spent the most time with was for the Atari 2600.   Oddly enough, the manual (that comes with the game cartridge) mentions the conflict is between the peace-loving Zardonians (represented by the player) and the warlike Krytolians.  It's unclear if this (previously non-existent) story background was added to to make the horrifying situation more palatable or simply an attempt to indirectly tie the game to hot science fiction properties at the time.  Either way it helps explain why the guy featured prominently on the box art is wearing a rather strange looking helmet, as well as the occasional in-game appearances of UFOs.  

Generally speaking, Missile Command on the Atari 2600 is inferior to the original...and yet, it has one little creative flourish that was not in the arcade game.  Once the last city is destroyed and the wave ends, the sky is rocked by one final cataclysmic explosion that darkens the heavens and turns the ground to a lifeless brown.  Where once there were shrieks and roars only an endless, empty silence persists (at least until someone pushes the reset button).  For a child that grew up in the final years of the Cold War, it's a haunting sight that I still haven't forgotten.  Hopefully, it's also something that will never be seen outside the realm of fictional media.   

Sources

Web Pages:

https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/15/4528228/missile-command-dave-theurer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Command

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Theurer

Videos:

https://youtu.be/JQJA5YjvHDU

https://youtu.be/6lWDbwmsz9E

Books:

"Missile Commander: A Journey to the Top of an Arcade Classic" by Tony Temple, 2021

"8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari's Missile Command" by Alex Rubens, 2018