Missile Command gave the player six cities, three missile bases and a sky full of falling warheads, and no way to win. Every game ended with the cities gone and the words THE END swelling across the screen in an explosion. It came out of Atari’s coin-op division in 1980, when, as The Atari Book put it, the threat of nuclear war was “high on the agenda”, and it was played with a trackball whose “blurring speed” home players would miss. Electronic Games found that the theme hit harder than most: unlike Space Invaders, it wrote, “it takes little imagination to picture yourself actually within the imperilled command center”.
The idea did not start with its designer. Dave Theurer was handed the brief, and the nightmares he later described came from making the game, not before it.
Fast facts
- Maker: Atari, coin-op division, 1980.
- Design and program: Dave Theurer, with Rich Adam as junior programmer; hardware by Dave Sherman.
- Control: a trackball to move the aiming cross, and three missile bases with ten missiles each.
- Ending: there is none to win. When the last city falls, THE END fills the screen.
- Home versions: Atari 2600 and Atari 400/800 in 1981; a Game Boy version from Accolade reviewed in January 1992.
- Source code: published on GitHub by the historicalsource archive in October 2021, with no licence stated.
A brief from above
“I remember my manager, Steve Calfee, told me to create a missile defence game wherein the player would defend against incoming missiles, which could be seen on a radar display,” Theurer told The Atari Book. “We took it from there, tossed out the radar screen and added cities, missile bases and so on.” The book traces the concept higher still, to Gene Lipkin, the president of Atari’s coin-op operation, and Theurer remembered Lipkin suggesting the name. Other candidates were Ground Zero, The End and Armageddon, dropped partly because not everyone knew what the words meant.
Inside the program the game had a blunter name. The module headers in its source files call it “WW3”: the main module is “WW3 MAIN PROGRAM”, credited to “DFT” and dated 20 July 1979, and the display module is titled “W3DSUP-WWIII”.
Theurer chose to make the player a defender. “I didn’t want to put players in the position of nuking entire cities, as entertainment,” he said. “The final lesson, though, is that nobody wins in a nuclear war, and that’s why we have ‘THE END’ explode to fill the screen, after all the cities are gone.” Rich Adam felt less strongly: “our concept was always [that] we’re blowing up pixels. It’s an abstract, conceptual game.”
The pressure left its mark. The Atari Book reports that Theurer had regular nightmares about nuclear attack “for several months during and after the game’s development”; he gave a longer account in 1994 and again in 2013, which the Dave Theurer entry sets out.
Building it
The development took about six months, and Dave Sherman designed a board for this one game. “He knew that the bottom portion of the screen needed more colours for the cities, bases, land, etc.,” Theurer said. The whole program had to fit into about 12K of 6502 assembly language, and the team had to invent fast ways to draw lines and circles so that the missile trails and expanding explosions moved smoothly.
Many ideas were tried and thrown out. Submarines surfaced to fire missiles, which made no sense when every other threat came from the sky. Railways hauled missiles between cities and bases, and were too complicated. Operators could type in the names of real cities, which made the game more pointed near those places and too much work for everyone else. A large panel of flashing lights and status displays above the screen was too expensive, too hard to maintain, and too distracting to watch while playing. Adam’s first coastline was meant to look like California; Lyle Rains replaced it with the fortress-like cities that shipped.
The enemy grew the same way. “We did the original incoming missiles and that was cool but not enough,” Adam said, “and so we added the satellites and the planes and the things that dropped them… and so we added MIRV missiles… and then we added smart bombs and that turned out to be enough.” A MIRV splits into several warheads partway down the screen. The smart bombs were the hardest part: they checked the colours around them to steer round explosions. In the source code the satellite is called SPUTNIK and the smart bombs are “cruise missiles”. Each base holds ten missiles.
On test, Adam remembered, the game had an advantage simply from being “one of the first colour games”. Theurer knew they had something before that: “I’d be asking co-workers to step back from playing the development prototype so that I could continue working on it.” A sequel, Adam’s two-player Missile Command 2, in which players attacked each other on a screen turned on its side, was tested and cancelled “because it just didn’t earn”.
At home
Atari converted the game for its own machines in 1981. On the 2600, Rob Fulop took it on as a challenge while Brad Stewart did Asteroids, and the cartridge used 8K of ROM through bank switching. Electronic Games called it “the most successful conversion of a commercial arcade supergame to the more limited confines of a home programmable system”, missing only the trackball’s speed and the splitting missiles. The cartridge’s manual moved the war to space: the player defends the peaceful planet Zardon from the Krytolians. Fulop hid his initials in the game, which Atari managers disliked; he told Electronic Fun in 1983 that “a few hundred went out with initials” before they were taken out. Electronic Games’ Arkie awards, published in March 1982, named it Best Solitaire Game, for letting a good player start at a harder wave instead of sitting through the easy ones.
The Atari 400/800 cartridge followed in 1981. ANALOG listed its enemies as “nuclear missiles, bombers, killer satellites, and ‘smart bombs’”, with a lost city restored at 10,000 points. Electronic Games thought it so close to the coin-op that only its single, central command centre gave it away.
Accolade’s Game Boy version, reviewed by Game Informer in January 1992, brought back an idea Atari had dropped: the player defended real cities, starting with Cairo and moving on through 16 of them, including London, Paris, Moscow and New York. A 3D remake with a classic mode reached the PC and PlayStation at the turn of 2000; PC Zone advised anyone who wanted the original to “get a time machine, or an emulator”.
The source code
The historicalsource archive published the arcade program’s files on GitHub in October 2021, without a stated licence. They include the 6502 source modules, the memory map and a file directory headed “MISSILE COMMAND (WW3) FILE DIRECTORY”. The sound module, a routine for Atari’s POKEY sound chip, names Rich Adam as its programmer.
Sources
- Darran Jones, “The Making of Missile Command”, The Atari Book (Retro Gamer, 2012), pp. 140–143: Steve Calfee’s brief, Gene Lipkin and the names, “nuking entire cities”, THE END, Rich Adam’s “blowing up pixels”, Dave Sherman’s board and the extra colours, the trackball, six months, 12K of assembly language, the dropped submarines, railways, city names and light panel, Lyle Rains’s cities, the enemies added one by one, the smart bombs’ colour detection, “one of the first colour games”, the prototype, the nightmares, Missile Command 2.
- Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 1, December 1981, p. 50: review of the Atari 2600 cartridge (the “imperilled command center”, the trackball’s “blurring speed”).
- Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 2, March 1982, p. 48: Arkie award, Best Solitaire Game; p. 54: Bill Kunkel’s review of the Atari 400/800 cartridge.
- Electronic Games, November 1982, p. 102: the 2600’s 8K bank switch in Missile Command and Asteroids.
- ANALOG, no. 1, January/February 1981, p. 3: the Atari 400/800 cartridge announced for the first half of 1981.
- Phil Wiswell, interview with Rob Fulop, Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, vol. 1 no. 10, August 1983, p. 79: the 2600 conversion, Brad Stewart and Asteroids, the hidden initials.
- Blip, vol. 1 no. 1, February 1983, p. 8: the 2600 game’s Krytolians and planet Zardon.
- Game Informer, issue 3, January 1992, pp. 56–57: the Game Boy version by Accolade.
- PC Zone, issue 88, April 2000, p. 90: review of the 3D remake. PlayStation Power, issue 48, January 2000, p. 22.
- Missile Command program files (Atari, 1979–80), historicalsource/missile-command on GitHub, published October 2021, no licence stated: the W3MAIN header, “W3DSUP-WWIII”, the file directory, SPUTNIK, the cruise missiles, ten missiles a base, the sound module credited to Rich Adam. https://github.com/historicalsource/missile-command