*All right, here we go, on to the next game in this project. In this post, I’ll be talking about Missile Command, which came out in arcades in 1980 from Atari.
*It initially looks quite familiar. I honestly hadn’t really thought about how many video games followed this basic layout for some reason, but here’s another one that finds the player at the bottom of the screen, facing enemies approaching from the top of the screen. But despite that initial similarity to Space Invaders, I think this one does a few interesting things with the formula.
*This post may be structured a bit different. I’m going to jump right into gameplay and talk about the development and psychology of the game a little later.
*Anyway, the gameplay is pretty simple. You’ve got six cities at the bottom of the screen and three missile batteries. Using your missiles, you have to take out a hail of missiles raining down on your cities.
*What makes this one a little different from the others is that you don’t want to actually shoot to hit the missiles themselves, right? You move your crosshairs across the screen and hit a button based on which of the three missile batteries you want to fire. Then, when the missile reaches the spot your crosshairs were when you fired, it explodes. So you want to fire ahead of the missiles that you’re trying to take out and, ideally, you want to fire so that your missile explosions take out several enemy missiles. Because when your missiles explode, they create this widening ball of fire that takes out any missiles it touches.
*This is, I think, pretty accurate to how missile defense systems actually work. Or at least have worked in the past.
*This injects a level of strategy to the game. Like if you see a place where two enemy missiles are going to intersect, you want to try to put one of your missiles on that intersection point at the right time to get both of them with one shot.
*In later levels, you get to more and more things coming out on the screen, like airplanes flying over and such. It’s really satisfying to take out like three missiles and an airplane with one shot. Like watching the explosion expand and keep catching things. That’s really cool.
*One reason it’s important to take out enemy missiles in this way is because you are limited on the number of missiles you have. Each missile battery starts with a set number of missiles at the beginning of each level and if you run out, you’re just out.
*The game designers originally had this added mechanic of supply lines, so there would be railroads on the screen that you had to protect as well as the cities. As long as you kept the railroads from being destroyed your missiles would replenish, but if the supply lines were destroyed, then you’d be stuck with what you had.
*The designers eventually decided this was overly complicated and decided to just simplify it to you just having a set number of missiles.
*They do replenish between levels. I mean, this kind of makes the most sense to me. Like each level is one attack, so you probably have time to get more missiles between attacks, but you have to deal with each attack with what you have. You’re not going to be like getting more shipments of missiles in the thirty seconds of an attack.
*I should say at this point that I was not able to actually play this on an arcade machine. I’ve been extremely #blessed to be able to access a lot of these early arcade games on original or refurbished machines thanks to the Max Retropub and it’s cool-ass collection of arcade cabinets. But they didn’t have this one.
*So, as has happened in the past, I resorted the Atari Arcade app which allows you to play the arcade version of the game on the screen of your iPad. I was able to hook up a joystick to it, so I got something of the flavor of the game on an arcade machine, I suppose, but, you know, not ideal at all.
*It was also recommended that I play the Atari 2600 version with a paddle controller. Wasn’t able to do that either unfortunately.
*So, speaking mechanically, I had a little less fun with this one than I’ve had with some of the others along the way, but I think that’s in large part because of the fact that I had to play it in a kind of cobbled together fashion, attempting to simulate the experience of playing on an arcade cabinet.
*Not the game’s fault.
*Like early arcade games in general, there is no real “win” state here. The missiles just keep getting faster and faster with more and more extra enemies on screen until you lose.
*And when you lose, there’s this giant explosion sound and graphic and the words “The End” start flashing on the screen. It was kind of striking. I mean, “Game Over” is just the classic way these games end; the idea of an arcade game actually having an “ending” seemed kind of unique to me.
*So, I was going to make a joke about how that’s a statement of nihilism on the ultimate pointlessness of war.
*Turns out . . . that’s not even a joke. Let’s get into the history of this game and the mind of the game’s designer. There’s more going on here than I had ever really put together.
*Something I had never really put together was the fact that this game came out at the height of the Cold War and it is, ultimately, a much more realistic depiction of 1980s era combat than any other video game to this point. It is, essentially, a simulation of an ICBM attack.
*The lead game designer of Missile Command is a guy named Dave Theurer. He got tasked with the game by his boss with the simple premise of, well, the game: “You’ve got these missile trails coming in from the top and these bases at the bottom.” That was about the extent of his boss’s direction.
*Theurer was just finishing up work on a game called Four Player Soccer and he says that at the time he felt a thrill at the idea of Missile Command and felt like it was going to be a step forward for him as a game developer. And, boy, was he right.
*As Theurer started investigating the notion of ICBMs and how missile attacks and missile defense systems worked, the game started to take shape. And it was initially going to be a much more explicit depiction of the Cold War. The game was originally going to explicitly state that the missiles were being fired by the USSR and that the cities the player was defending were American cities.
*It got even more specific than that. The six cities the player would be protecting were, at one point in development, going to be labelled San Luis Obispo, San Diego, Eureka, Santa Barbara, San Francisco & Los Angeles.
*This is kind of mind-blowing to me. The notion here is that Missile Command would be specifically about protecting the California coastline from attack by the USSR.
*I mean, we’re used to games now where the player is trying to prevent violence from happening in real world scenarios or even games where real life cities get wiped off the map in the storyline or whatever. This seems way ahead of its time in terms of wanting to actually tell that story, a story about real life world-powers engaged in war in the real world.
*The story is that the city names got dropped because Atari didn’t want the game to be more universal and not feel too specific.
*I feel like it’s also just because somebody was like, “Um, do we really want to release a game where every time someone plays it, it ends with the entire California coastline getting nuked?”
*But what Dave Theurer would say later is that during the time he was working on this game and even for months after he was finished with it, he was plagued by a recurring nightmare of San Francisco, where he lived, being hit with nuclear bombs.
*In this nightmare, he would be hiking up in the mountains and he would find a vantage point where he could see San Francisco spread out in a beautiful view. And then he would see the missile trails . . .
*I mean, man, that is pretty horrifying.
*It’s also worth mentioning that when this game was ported to the Atari 2600, the manual said that the player was defending the planet Zardon against an attack from the planet Krytol. Which is just, like, made up of whole cloth. Like there’s nothing in the actual game.
*The fascination with placing video game violence way out there in outer space is interesting, especially when you think about it in terms of this game.
*Speaking of Theurer’s nightmares, interestingly enough, his other big contribution to 1980 video games was Tempest, a game we’ll talk about a little later; that game was inspired by a recurring nightmare Theurer had been having since childhood. I find that quite interesting. It’s a very personal and emotional style of game development he seemed to have.
*I suspect his experience on Four Player Soccer was not as harrowing.
*And so, to get back to that ending, Theurer later told Alex Rubens, who wrote a great article over at Polygon, that his nightmares “motivated me to create that final ‘THE END’ explosion . . . that was the whole point of the game, to show that if there was ever a nuclear war, you’d never win.”
*Man, this took a turn.
*Gotta say, I came away from researching this game with a lot more respect for it than I had going in.
*This genuinely is probably the deepest and most emotionally complicated game we’ve encountered thus far. I think you just miss that completely when playing it, if I’m being totally honest, though I will say that the moment of “THE END” is definitely striking and, as I said, it did feel very unique.
*I perhaps didn’t react as strongly to the gameplay itself as I have to some other games. At least in part, I’ll blame that on not being able to play it really as intended on an arcade cabinet.
*But after reading about Theurer and his process, I have to say I think this game is a real work of art. I think it’s personal and that Theurer was driven both psychologically and emotionally to make an actual statement. And not even just an emotional statement, but a political one. I really didn’t have a sense of this game in terms of its context, but I think it’s just undeniably an artwork absolutely defined by coming out of the Cold War. Really fascinating to me.
*Anybody that played this game back in the day, talk about it. Did you have any sense of the similarities between the game and the real-world doomsday scenarios people were talking about? I’d be curious to know.
*Anyway, Missile Command. Turns out it’s surprisingly deep and artistic. Who knew?
*All right, so what’s on deck next time? Well, it’s time for a little game that was not only the first game of its kind, but also a game that became synonymous with the genre it birthed. Join me next time for MUD!