Missile Command

Missile Command is an arcade game released by Atari, Inc. in North America in June 1980. It was designed by Dave Theurer, who also wrote most of the program. The player uses a trackball to aim counter-missiles at warheads falling on six cities, and the game cannot be won: it ends, when the last city is gone, with the words THE END.^[1][2] Molecular Reality Corporation lists it among the inspirations for its planned game SARS Invaders.

A crosshair follows the trackball, and one of three buttons, one for each missile base, launches a counter-missile that bursts at the crosshair. The burst is a fireball that lingers on the screen and destroys any warhead that touches it, so one well-placed shot can catch several. Each base holds a limited number of missiles, and the middle base fires faster than the two at the sides. Each wave of attackers is faster than the last, and some of the warheads split in flight. The attackers include ballistic missiles, aircraft and satellites.^[2][1][3]

Nothing the player does saves the cities for long. "Eventually every city falls, and instead of Game Over, the screen says The End."^[2] The ending is skipped when the score is high enough to enter initials in the table.

Theurer told an interviewer in 1994 that his first game at Atari was a soccer game for four players, played on trackballs four or five inches across, and that he was then given the idea for a second: "The Russians are attacking the U.S. with nuclear missiles and your job is to defend the country." On leaving the office, he said, "my spine was tingling, I knew instantly it was going to be a hot game." He wrote the program in 6502 assembly language, on a development box that ran FORTH and loaded programs from paper tape onto the game board, which had about 11 kilobytes of memory in all.^[4] The cabinet used a 6502 and one POKEY sound chip, a horizontal color screen and an optical trackball.^[1]

An early plan for the game set the attack on California.^[5] Theurer lived then near the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where U-2 aircraft took off, and he said that they "go straight up and sound like an atomic bomb exploding". He woke from dreams of "streaks coming in", in which he stood in the Santa Cruz mountains, watched a missile hit Sunnyvale and knew he had "about 45 seconds until the blast reached me". The dreams went on after the game was done: "I had those nightmares once a month for a year after I finished Missile Command."^[4]

He stayed at Atari until 1990. His next product was a program for converting images between formats, DeBabelizer, which Equilibrium Technologies released in January 1993.^[4]

Atari released the game in June 1980.^[2] Rob Fulop wrote the version for the Atari 2600, which appeared in 1981.^[6] Theurer's next arcade game, Tempest, followed in October 1981.

In the memo Early Releases on Maxine's Quest, the game later called SARS Invaders is "Inspired by: 2d Galaga, Missile Command, Defender, and Megamania". It was to use polystyrene beads and lipid particles as samples, with "no real viruses involved in the early phase".^[7] Of the four flat games, Galaga comes first and Missile Command second, ahead of Defender and Megamania. The memo does not say what the company took from it.

• Star Raiders
• Space Invaders
• Atari 2600