Dave Theurer | Code Like It's 198x

Dave Theurer made three arcade games in four years for Atari, and each one tried something new. Missile Command (1980) asked them to save six cities from a nuclear attack that could not be stopped, and ended not with “game over” but with the words THE END. Tempest (1981) was Atari’s first colour vector game. I, Robot was built from solid, shaded 3D polygons at a time when other arcade games were flat. Dreams run through two of these stories, in different ways. Missile Command was Atari’s idea, but working on it gave Theurer nightmares about nuclear war that lasted long after the game was finished. Tempest grew out of an image of monsters climbing out of a pit that had haunted him since childhood.

Fast facts

Education: Wheaton College, Illinois; a psychology degree, after starting in chemistry and physics.
Employer: Atari’s coin-op division from the late 1970s, which became Atari Games in 1984; he left in 1990.
Games: Four Player Soccer (1979), Missile Command (1980), Tempest (1981), I, Robot (1983–84) and, as a programmer, APB (1987).
After Atari: author of DeBabelizer, a Macintosh graphics conversion tool published by Equilibrium Technologies from January 1993.
Honour: the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards, 2012.

From pigeons to Pong

As a boy Theurer kept a chemistry lab in his basement and made rockets and small explosives. “I just wanted to blow stuff up,” he told the magazine Morph’s Outpost in 1994. At Wheaton College he started in chemistry, moved to physics, and with two years to go switched to psychology. “I learned all about motivation and getting people addicted and it came in real handy for designing video games,” he said. “We studied how to get pigeons to do things, and if you use the same techniques on people, it works.”

He taught himself to program on the college computer, then worked as a junior programmer for Bunker Ramo in Connecticut, which built computer systems for supermarkets. There, in a bar one night, he played Pong for the first time, saw Atari’s name on it and decided that was what he wanted to do. In 1976 he moved to California to join National Semiconductor. Six months later the man he shared an office with left to become Atari’s manager of programmers, and hired Theurer “without even an interview”.

Atari gave him a sport he disliked for his first game. “They said, ‘Do soccer.’ I said, ‘I hate soccer.’ They said, ‘You’re new here, do soccer.’” Four Player Soccer took him about four months. It used Atari’s big trackballs, and testing it meant four people “wailing away on these monster trackballs” until they were soaked with sweat.

Missile Command

The idea for his second game came 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.” Gene Lipkin, the head of Atari’s coin-op division, suggested the name, over rivals including Ground Zero, The End and Armageddon.

Theurer wrote the program in 6502 assembly language, working with the hardware designer Dave Sherman, who built a board for this one game, and a junior programmer, Rich Adam. Development took about six months. Theurer wanted players to defend, not attack: “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.” The game went on field test at the Oasis, a bar in Palo Alto, where people lined up to play.

The nightmares came from the work, not before it. In 1994 Theurer recalled living near the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where the roar of the U-2 spy planes taking off terrified him. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare where I’d see these streaks coming in, and I’d be up in the Santa Cruz mountains and I’d see it hit Sunnyvale and I’d know I had about 45 seconds until the blast reached me. I had those nightmares once a month for a year after I finished Missile Command, I had internalized the game so much while working on it.” He told the same story to Polygon in 2013, then saying the dreams tapered off to one every two or three months for a couple of years, and that they “probably motivated” THE END. The Atari Book, in 2012, put it as regular nightmares “for several months during and after the game’s development”.

The program’s source code is now public. The historicalsource archive published it on GitHub in October 2021, with no licence stated. Its files still call the game by a working title, WWIII: the file directory is headed “MISSILE COMMAND (WW3)” and the first module is titled “W3DSUP-WWIII”.

Tempest

Next Theurer wanted to make a “first-person Space Invaders”. It looked interesting but did not play well, and his colleagues let him know. Ed Rotberg, the designer of Battlezone, remembered that “we used to kid him about how his first attempts looked like things attacking you on a bowling alley. One day, we came in and the whole game had changed into Tempest!” Rob Fulop told a similar story in 1998: Theurer scrapped the game, and “four weeks later he showed us Tempest”.

The new idea was a picture Theurer had carried since childhood: monsters climbing out of a deep hole in the ground. He has described its origin in two ways. The Atari Book (2012) calls it a strange, recurring dream from his childhood, and he told the book those nightmares came from “a very short period when I was very young”. In the Polygon interview a year later, he traced it to a film about monsters coming out of a hole from the centre of the Earth, which he saw at camp in the fifth grade, having grown up in a home where he was not allowed to watch films. “That movie haunted me over the years,” he said. Wrapping the 3D plane of his Space Invaders prototype into a cylinder gave him the hole, and the monsters could climb out of it. The Tempest entry tells the rest.

I, Robot

“My next game was I, Robot,” Theurer said in 1994. “That was the first game to use three dimensional solid objects.” The game could rotate and draw 300 or 400 polygons each frame, which he called “a big deal at the time”. The player was the “Unhappy Interface Robot #1984”, rebelling against Big Brother by running over the red squares of a platform to break the shield of a giant Evil Eye, and jumping only when the eye was not watching. A second mode, Doodle City, turned the game’s 3D objects into a drawing tool. The Atari Book, Retro Gamer and the Game Developers Choice Awards date it to 1983; Theurer himself said it “came out in 1984”, and the British magazine TV Gamer reported it reaching American arcades in November 1984.

Critics saw both sides of it. Reviewing it for Electronic Games in January 1985, Bill Kunkel called I, Robot “the most beautiful arcade game this planet has ever seen”, then added: “So why do I have feeling in my gut that this game is doomed?” It looked too abstract to be understood at a glance, he thought, and underneath the graphics was “a fairly simple shoot-out”. He was right about its fate. Retro Gamer later called it “a commercial disaster”. The Game Developers Choice Awards later described it as the first commercial video game with filled 3D polygon graphics and the first to let the player control the camera.

Leaving Atari

Missile Command and Tempest had been, in Theurer’s words, “basically a one-man job”; after them he began to get help with graphics and sound. The Atari Book lists APB (1987), a police chase game, among his work for Atari Games. By 1990, he said, “every arcade game was a kick, punch, and jump game, and I hate those games”, and he quit, after 11 years in the business.

At Atari he had written small programs to fix artwork that arrived in the wrong palette or a pixel out of place. When his friend Allan Murphy, an Atari artist, left and wanted to move pictures between the Macintosh and the Atari ST, Theurer wrote him a converter, then kept adding formats as other artists asked. The result was DeBabelizer, named after the Tower of Babel. Equilibrium Technologies released it commercially in January 1993 at a list price of $300, which Theurer chose so that his artist friends could afford it. The Italian magazine MC Microcomputer, reviewing it in 1995, credited the original project to Frank Colin and Dave Theurer. By 1994 Morph’s Outpost was calling it “indispensable for working with images in multimedia development”.

Looking back on his Atari years, Theurer offered one warning. “If there’s anything I could communicate in this interview it is that people should watch out for their personal lives when they get sucked into these projects,” he said in 1994. “It’s really seductive and all consuming.”

Away from the screen, Video Games Player reported in 1984 that Theurer had chased down a hit-and-run driver who had seriously injured a 15-year-old boy, and persuaded the driver to turn himself in.

In 2012 the Game Developers Choice Awards gave Theurer their Pioneer Award, for the work on Atari’s arcade games that began with Missile Command.

Sources

“Blowing Things Up”, interview with Dave Theurer, Morph’s Outpost on the Digital Frontier, May 1994 (web mirror, secondary): his childhood chemistry lab, Wheaton College and the switch to psychology, the pigeons, FOCAL, Bunker Ramo, Pong in a Connecticut bar, National Semiconductor in 1976, being hired without an interview, Four Player Soccer, the Oasis field test, I, Robot as the first game with solid 3D objects and “came out in 1984”, Doodle City, the U-2 flights and the nightmares about Sunnyvale, “11 years”, leaving Atari, DeBabelizer’s origin, release in January 1993 and $300 price. https://diginoodles.com/writing/interesting/blowing-things-up
Darran Jones, “The Making of Missile Command”, The Atari Book (Retro Gamer, 2012), pp. 140–143: Steve Calfee’s brief, Gene Lipkin and the name, “nuking entire cities”, THE END, Dave Sherman, Rich Adam, the six-month schedule, the nightmares “for several months during and after”.
Paul Drury, “The Making of Tempest”, The Atari Book (Retro Gamer, 2012), pp. 148–153: his Atari career beginning in 1979 with Soccer, the “first-person Space Invaders”, the recurring childhood dream and “a very short period when I was very young”, I, Robot as his next project, the timeline listing APB (1987); Ed Rotberg’s “bowling alley” memory.
Alex Rubens, “The creation of Missile Command and the haunting of its creator, Dave Theurer”, Polygon, 15 August 2013 (web, secondary; read via the Internet Archive): Four Player Soccer, Moffett Field and the dreams, their frequency after the game, THE END, the film about monsters from a hole. https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/15/4528228/missile-command-dave-theurer
Wireframe issue 8, February 2019, p. 32: the Polygon interview and the recurring nightmares; Steve Calfee’s brief.
Edge issue 217, August 2010, “When Videogames Ruled the World”: Missile Command and Tempest and the nightmares behind them.
Orphaned Computer and Game Systems issue 6, October 1998, pp. 8–9: Rob Fulop on Tempest, “four weeks later he showed us Tempest”.
Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: I, Robot (1983), the “Unhappy Interface Robot #1984”, Big Brother and the Evil Eyes, a “commercial disaster”.
Bill Kunkel, “I, Robot”, Electronic Games, January 1985, pp. 83–84.
TV Gamer, November 1984, p. 84: I, Robot reaching American arcades.
Missile Command program files (Atari, 1980), historicalsource/missile-command on GitHub, October 2021: the “MISSILE COMMAND (WW3)” file directory and the “W3DSUP-WWIII” module. https://github.com/historicalsource/missile-command
MC Microcomputer issue 155, October 1995: DeBabelizer’s name, from the biblical story of Babel; “nato da un progetto originale di Frank Colin e Dave Theurer”.
Video Games Player, vol. 3 no. 1, April 1984: the hit-and-run driver.
“GDC Awards honor Missile Command creator, First Amendment game lawyers”, Game Developer, 24 January 2012 (web, secondary): the Pioneer Award and its description of I, Robot. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/gdc-awards-honor-i-missile-command-i-creator-first-amendment-game-lawyers ; Game Developers Choice Awards, “Pioneer Award” (web): Dave Theurer, 2012. https://gamechoiceawards.com/pioneer-award/