Missile Command

Did You Know?

• Dave Theurer suffered from nightmares of being destroyed by a nuclear blast while crunching on the game's development.
• The screen displays 'The End' instead of 'Game Over' to signify that 'in the end, all is lost. There is no winner'.
• The Atari 2600 port includes an Easter egg on level thirteen: if you exhaust your missiles without scoring, the right city shows 'RF'—programmer Rob Fulop's initials.
• Rob Fulop was paid for his work on the Atari 2600 port with a Safeway coupon for a free turkey, which motivated him to leave and co-found Imagic.

Development

Gene Lipkin, then president of Atari's coin-op division, found a picture of a radar screen in a magazine and tasked department head Steve Calfee to create a game like it. Dave Theurer, who had just finished Atari Soccer as a junior programmer, was offered the project, loosely defined as a radar screen showing missiles fired from the USSR toward the US, defended by the player. Because the project was requested by a boss, it was considered high profile, and junior programmer Rich Adam was assigned to Theurer. Calfee, Theurer, and Adam refined the concept. Early iterations represented six cities in California: Eureka, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Theurer was hesitant about violent incitations given the political climate, so he set two conditions: neither the attacking nor defending states would be named, and the game would be purely defensive, never putting players in the role of aggressor. City names were removed, and players could not retaliate, as Theurer did not want to simulate mutual assured destruction. The only possible outcome of total destruction was intended as a message on the futility of war. To make the game fast-paced, Theurer chose a trackball over a joystick. It was Atari's first color game, and the cabinet featured an extra panel of light indicators tied to in-game events.

Ports

Missile Command was ported to the Atari 2600 in 1981 by Rob Fulop. The instruction manual describes a war between planets Zardon (the defending player) and Krytol, though the arcade original contains no such references. On level thirteen, if the player exhausts their missile supply without scoring any points, the city on the right displays 'RF' – Fulop's initials. This Easter egg was documented in Atari Age and is the second publicly acknowledged by Atari. Fulop stated that Atari paid him with a Safeway coupon for a free turkey, which motivated him to leave and co-found Imagic. The game was released for Atari 8-bit computers in 1981, and an identical version appeared for the Atari 5200 in 1982. That same port was built into the Atari XEGS in 1987 as a boot-up game if no cartridge was loaded. Accolade released a Game Boy version in 1992, later re-released by Nintendo in a double pack with Asteroids in 1995 as part of the Arcade Classic series. Hasbro Interactive published a Game Boy Color version in 1999.

Legacy

Missile Command has been included in numerous compilation titles. It appears in Arcade Classics for Sega Genesis and Game Gear, and in the Master System compilation Arcade Smash Hits. Microsoft released it for Windows as part of Microsoft Arcade in 1993. Midway Games published it in Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection 1 for Sega Saturn, Super Nintendo, and PlayStation. It is also in Atari Arcade Hits 1, Atari Greatest Hits, Atari Anniversary Edition, and Atari: 80 Classic Games in One!. The game appears as a bonus unlockable minigame in the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Both arcade and Atari 2600 versions were included in Atari Anthology for Xbox and PlayStation 2 in 2004. It is part of Retro Atari Classics and Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 for Nintendo DS, the former including a remixed art version. Both arcade and 2600 versions are in Atari Vault (2016). The Atari 2600 and 7800 versions were released on Evercade as part of Arcade Collection 1 and 2 in 2020. The arcade, 2600, and 5200 versions were included in Atari 50 (2022) for multiple platforms. A two-player sequel, Missile Command 2, was field tested in late 1980 but never released, though a prototype appeared in Santa Clara, California. In 1992, Atari developed a prototype called Arcade Classics for their 20th anniversary, which included an enhanced remake of the first game, not the unreleased sequel. An enhancement kit by General Computer Corp. in 1981 converted Missile Command into Super Missile Attack, adding a UFO. Atari's 1982 game Liberator was seen by some as a sequel with the situation reversed, where the player attacks planetary bases from orbit.