THE STORY OF MISSILE COMMAND IS NO ORDINARY TALE. IT doesn’t weave together multiple conflicting perspectives or tell of the time when an idea magically came to its designers during a drug-infused trip to the California desert. It does, however, tell the story of one man who was tasked with creating a simple radar-based game and found a message that haunted him so greatly that he was uncontrollably compelled to share it.
This is the story of Missile Command, no doubt, but it is also the story of Dave Theurer, the former Atari programmer who took a simple request asked of him by his bosses and found himself so engrossed in it that it consumed his every thought, haunting him out of the gaming industry and away from the very culture that allowed such a powerful topic to manifest itself within his consciousness. He did not live through a time of tragedy or witness grisly monstrosities; rather, he created them in his head and was engulfed by his own self-obsession with these very creations.
A relatively ordinary man by all accounts, Theurer was a young computer programmer starting off in the still-developing world of video game production. He was fresh out of college and new in the industry, so he didn’t have much experience; he needed a chance to stand out and make his mark.
We’ve already covered how this new startup was breaking records and pioneering the early days of the gaming landscape, but let’s take a moment to examine the company’s surroundings and contextualize this a bit. This was the late 1970s, early 1980s. The world was covered in a shroud of nuclear war. Would it happen? Who knew, but the thought alone was scary enough. No one could be trusted, not even computers. The relationship with technology was tricky at the time, as it was still an emerging phenomenon and, while most could see the benefits to it, some were still wary of the enormous power that it provided. Leading up to this point, computers took up entire silos and controlled most of the world’s weapon systems, so there was an inherent fear that came with them as a result.
Showing just how much distrust there was in welcoming computers into the average American home, Atari was forced to make the Atari Video Computer System with wood-grain paneling on the front to downplay its technical capabilities. People didn’t know if they wanted computers in their home yet, so the paneling allowed it to blend in with the home audio and television setups that were common at the time. In doing so, this changed the way most consumers looked at the VCS, transforming it from a computer to a home entertainment device, something they were much more comfortable with.
The average consumers weren’t skilled enough to understand how computers worked or why they would really need one, but everyone could understand gaming. We hadn’t yet reached the peak of Pac-Man fever, but it was beginning to build up as coin-op games became a much more public mainstay through the innovations and culture that Atari was creating with hits like Pong and Space Invaders. Though these had previously been looked at as nothing more than gimmicks used to pass the time, they started to break through as more people were able to get their hands on them and understand why they were fun. Popularity started to increase, and Atari couldn’t order games fast enough. They’d hire a new programmer on and immediately give him or her a game to work on, trying to push new titles out as fast as they could to keep up with the demand.
In 1980, Theurer joined Atari and was immediately put on Atari Soccer, a four-player game that followed in the line of Atari’s successful sports series. It wasn’t groundbreaking, and certainly didn’t offer him opportunities to be creative with the idea, but he was a junior programmer and it was his first project, so he didn’t really mind. Theurer handled his portion of the development with relative ease, and Atari Soccer was released in April 1980, putting him on the hunt for a new project.
Through this arcade craze, Theurer was given the perfect chance to make a name for himself as a junior programmer. Even in those days, a junior programmer would never be given his own game to work on; he’d likely join on as a part of a larger team and just tag along where he could be of assistance. It was an okay path, but it was slow. But because Atari couldn’t keep up with demand at the time, Theurer was given the opportunity to own something from start to finish, taking everything into his own hands.
This opportunity came from none other than Gene Lipkin, then president of the Coin-Op Division and vice president of sales at Atari, who had a game he wanted made and needed someone to take it on. Lipkin was a big-time player at Atari, a head honcho for sure, and was ultimately responsible for every game that Atari published in a coin-op cabinet, so when he asked you for something to be made, you started making it regardless of whether you believed in it or not.
One day Lipkin called department head Steve Calfee, Theurer’s boss, into his office. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence, but Calfee could tell the vibe was different this time as Lipkin sat behind his desk slowly flipping through the pages of a magazine. Turning his attention to Calfee, he flipped the magazine around and pointed powerfully to a story about satellites. In this story, one thing caught Lipkin’s eye: a radar screen. “Steve, make me a game like this,” Lipkin said.
Oddly enough, no one who was there can recall the contents of the story or whether it was actually a story at all, but perhaps rather one of the terrible ads you see at the back of magazines that make bold claims about the future. Regardless of what it was, it set into motion the initial concept for one of the most influential video games in history.
Having just wrapped Atari Soccer, Dave Theurer was free to take on the project and had proven himself more than capable of leading something like this, even if it was a bit of a big ask for someone so new to game development. But to be fair, everyone at Atari was relatively new to game development. Some had been around longer than others, but it wasn’t like anyone was sitting on twenty-plus years of experience. They were all new to game programming and were to some degree figuring it out as they went along. Every project was filled with innovation of some kind, whether it was adding color, a new control style, or new mechanics; every game was innovative and this required a bit of luck and a whole lot of experimentation. Calfee saw something in Theurer and gave him a shot to try to make something similar to what Lipkin had asked for.
Calfee called Theurer into his office and gave him the lay of the land. “Gene wants something like this,” he said, showing him the magazine cutout. “Think you can do that for me?”
Theurer understood and agreed that he could, officially taking on Missile Command as his next project. Well, sort of. What they asked him to make versus what he ended up making weren’t exactly on the same page, but we’ll get into that later.
At the time it was very common to jump around from game to game, trying to find something that stuck. Atari needed to get as many games out as quickly as possible, so if one wasn’t working, programmers often just jumped to another project that seemed like it was going somewhere. They’d often finish these games, but sometimes they just weren’t good enough to put out, so they were scrapped and the programmers moved on. It was almost impossible for programmers to knock things out of the park with their first project, so it was extremely common for them to devote themselves entirely to a project for months, only to move to another project right as they finished and as it became clear that their game would never see the light of day.
At the time, no first-time programmers had their first games published. They worked on them for a bit, learned the ropes, and subsequently moved on to other things. It was well known to Atari employees that this was the case, so for many new programmers, it was a bummer knowing that all their hard work would be for nothing and the game would inevitably be scrapped. This common occurrence was eventually renamed Theurer’s Law after Missile Command’s release in 1980.
Back then, big games weren’t three-year projects worked on by two thousand people like they are today. If the resources were there, they might have allotted a junior programmer to the team to assist, but for the most part, it was just the one programmer handling most of the development process. At this early stage in game development, having multiple programmers on a single project wasn’t common practice, if only due to the intricacies of how games were worked on at the time. It wasn’t as simple as today (“Simple?” those in game development gasp); there weren’t giant servers set up to sync data across an entire team to ensure you were working on the right code base and that it wouldn’t all break upon being compiled. It was just a single person working at his or her desk from start to finish, not relying on anyone else to ensure the project was ready for release.
With Missile Command, things were different. Theurer might have been one of the newer programmers on the team, but this was direct from the boss, so it was all hands on deck. Even so, “all hands on deck” meant one additional programmer, and he wasn’t flush with experience either. Rich Adam, who was also in the initial pitch meeting in Calfee’s office, was assigned as Theurer’s junior programmer on the project, and the two set sail on making a masterpiece.
I say “set sail” because there’s actually a good parallel here between early game development and the discovery of new land. They knew where they were starting and had a rough idea of where they wanted to end up, but getting there was uncharted territory and they were certain to encounter massive challenges along the way.
Theurer and Adam started to pull things together somewhat quickly, but coming up with ideas was one thing; making them happen with the hardware that was available at the time is another.
“Okay, so you’ve got these missile trails coming in from the top, and you’ve got these bases at the bottom. The trails are missiles coming in and you shoot missiles up from your bases to intercept them. You try to save your bases,” Calfee recalls, sharing what he envisioned from the magazine clipping. That’s all they had to go with.
As young designers without a ton of experience, where would they start on a project like that? Luckily there was at least something to go on, and it’s not as though the average American had seen a real missile strike, so there was some room for interpretation, but it wasn’t the slam dunk they likely thought they were going to score when they signed on. Could they really make that happen in a world of Pong clones and slow, simple-action games? They weren’t sure, but they were ready to find out—no matter what it took. They were at the forefront of crafting the future of entertainment, and that meant encountering a lot of important questions with difficult, yet-to-be-discovered answers.
Lucky for us, Theurer and the programmers at Atari weren’t the type to let a little trial and error get between them and success. In fact, that’s how most of their programming went. They’d try something, see how the game reacted, and adjust from there. In modern game development, there’s a lot of graphics-based building tools so you know how something is going to turn out before actually running the code; but that wasn’t the case at Atari. They were building the graphics engine literally bit by bit.
Lucky for them, Atari wasn’t too concerned about it being exactly as they had envisioned. They just wanted it to hit one core beat: nuclear missiles fired from the USSR toward the US, which was defended by the player. That’s all they really wanted; everything else about how to make that happen was secondary.
Theurer was shaking with excitement after leaving Calfee’s office and could barely contain himself. He finally had a project he was in charge of, and he would finally be able to prove to himself and to others that he could break his losing streak and release his first game to the public. “My spine was tingling,” he remembers. “I just had this feeling it was going to be fun.”
Fun, yes, but as the excitement subsided, Theurer was starting to realize the gravity of creating something like that in the current political climate and, despite the project being in its infancy, reservations began to bubble up.
Theurer understood the concept of civil duty that Lipkin wanted to instill in players, and he knew how powerful it was to feel that sense of patriotism that came with standing up to defend one’s country, but he was worried about his work being used to instigate any of the less than ideal manifestations of patriotism that came along with the good. The political climate at the time was dicey; a single mention of any potential claims of communism or anything less than full devotion to the mission of the United States could lead to ostracizing and name-calling, all under the veiled guise of patriotism. Theurer wanted nothing to do with that; he didn’t believe in it as a viable approach, and certainly didn’t want to give legs to such actions.
Though it wasn’t a popular decision and directly contradicted requests from his bosses, he believed that labeling the enemy as the USSR in a hostile role against the United States would come back to haunt Atari, so he pushed back to use a nameless enemy and remove all association with both the United States and the Soviet Union.
Looking back at this now, this one decision had perhaps the most impact of all those made throughout the development—not only for political reasons but also for design implications. Initially, the six cities were listed as Eureka, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara—all major cities in California. Oddly enough, this wasn’t for any reason other than just how full of itself Atari was at the time. “Atari headquarters were in California. We were so egocentric that we had the missiles coming across the Pacific aimed directly at us,” Rich Adam recalls.
Once they allowed their egos to subside and were able to take a step back to rethink this approach, Theurer and Adam realized just how big of a mistake simply naming the cities would have been from a gameplay perspective. The simple removal of these cities allowed them to take the game in a direction many game developers still haven’t been able to recapture to this day: they let the player choose what cities they were, though it wasn’t so much a choice as it was a subconscious attachment.
Even with this choice pushing them in the right direction, there was a part of Dave Theurer that still didn’t feel right about it. Most games at that time were so basic that they tended to focus on an enemy attacking you, and you killing the enemy to stop him. Theurer didn’t like the idea of the player taking any kind of offensive action, even if it was in retaliation.
Just as he had fought to keep any kind of political and potentially jingoistic label on the attacking force, he didn’t want the game to be the cause of any kind of incitement, and felt putting the player on offense did just that. If you were simply defending, that’s one thing; but you striking back in return was another path that Theurer didn’t want to have anything to do with.
In his acceptance of the project, he made it clear that his work on the project was conditional based on two qualifications: (1) there would be no names of countries attached to either the attacking force or the defending force, and (2) the game would be purely defensive and never put players in situations where they would be the aggressors.
In doing this, Theurer ensured that players would retain the sense of patriotism that came with the theoretical service of protecting their country from foreign attack while taking away any notion that retaliation was necessary. He wanted players to be so focused on survival that the thought of striking back never even crossed their minds.
To Theurer, the thought of retaliation didn’t fly with the sense of patriotism that he held to. He morally couldn’t make a game in such a climate that advocated for the player releasing a counterattack without proper context. He just couldn’t do it; it wasn’t the kind of person he was.
In his eyes, the purely defensive standpoint preached of a higher calling, a duty—one that, in the end, accomplished the same goal without taking offensive action to escalate the situation any further. You were saving your nation; it didn’t matter if there were consequences for the opposing force. It was less about mutually assured destruction and more about doing what you could to aid your country in its greatest hour of need.
He was worried that pairing the touchy political climate with such direct incitement of those very shallow patriotic tendencies could result in players leaving the game with the inverse feeling of what he wanted to portray. He wanted nothing to do with the heightened sense of militarism found in America at the time, and was worried that enabling players to act in opposition would breed a new generation filled with misguided, unstoppably blind patriotism that hurt their fellow Americans who did nothing but share distant genes with those who were now our enemy.
By refusing to give players the opportunity to fire on other countries, especially the USSR, Theurer was instead breeding a new generation of players who strived for alternative methods of survival, however temporary they might be. It wasn’t about finding a way to come out on top in a battle, but finding some way to stay alive as long as possible, even if you ultimately lost in the end.
Even if he wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, this was Theurer’s ultimate challenge. He wasn’t just building out an arcade game; he was also attempting to use that game to modify the pervasive mind-set at the time. Landing in the latter years of the Cold War, when things were really coming to a head, this was a brave undertaking, but one that he felt necessary if he was to take on the project.
For Theurer, giving players the opportunity to defend their nation was just as heroic as giving them the option to fight its enemies; it was something they could be just as proud of in the end. This didn’t line up with how the rest of the world was thinking at the time and certainly wasn’t something you experienced in video games.
The thought of defending one’s country wasn’t just heroic to Theurer; it was selfless and one of the most moral things someone could do for the country. War is aggressive by nature, but by removing the option to respond to that aggression in kind and instead focusing on protecting oneself, he felt that nothing could be more honorable. It was a noble effort, and he felt that offering players the opportunity to strike back without the context of what leads up to a nuclear attack was the opposite of noble.
“Realizing that these bombs would kill all of the people in a targeted city, I did not want to put the player in a position of being a genocidal maniac,” explains Theurer. Only a crazy person would sling nuclear weapons without context, right? That’s what Theurer was convinced of, at least. In his heart he felt that putting players in that situation made them no different from the aggressors they were fighting so hard to defeat.
The solution was simple: by giving players direct control over the defense of their own cities, they could take pride in their survival and feel pain in their loss. They had to choose which cities would survive and which would perish, who lived and who died. In Missile Command, you can’t save all the cities. There is no winning, only surviving for longer than you did before and doing a better job at it. Make no mistake about it; you’re going to lose.
Players had only a split second to make a move, a choice that controlled whether someone lived or died. Would they focus all their efforts on protecting one city? Would they try to keep all their cities alive for as long as possible? It was really up to them, and every game was different. In one game players might focus on trying to keep every city alive that they could, while in the next they might let cities fall, as it was easier to defend just one.
This wasn’t merely a gameplay strategy, though. It was meant to create an emotional connection between players and what they were experiencing on screen. It associated the players’ quest for survival with the building dread of their impending loss. As the game progressed and resources dwindled, it created a deeper and deeper sense of fear in the player, a fear that there was nothing one could do to stop it. It was over, and you had lost. Theurer’s goal was ultimately that in this realization players would understand—or at the very least deeply feel—the consequences of what the game was forcing them to do: choose between the death of many or the survival of a few.
This sort of secondary narrative was something that hadn’t yet been attempted at the time. In fact, most games hadn’t even started to develop a narrative. How could they? At this point in the lifespan of video games, they consisted of a handful of pixels on the screen shoved together to make some semblance of a recognizable figure. We didn’t have the ultrarealistic graphics that we’ve come to expect in games today. Because of this, it was difficult to really get players invested in your story, especially when they were experiencing it one quarter at a time.
In the creation of this narrative, Theurer was one of the earliest narrative pioneers in the beginnings of modern video games, and he accomplished this without saying a single word. He wasn’t forceful with his message; it didn’t say, “The United States of America is under attack, defend your country with honor,” and it certainly didn’t say anything about the loss of life occurring in the process. Rather, it let players internalize those conclusions on their own.
Now, let’s not get too deep into this without letting it be said that most of the people who played Missile Command never even thought about this. They didn’t lie awake at night thinking about the people who they weren’t able to protect, and the only time they thought about their decisions was in reference to their final score, not the compounding destruction of life associated with it.
This wasn’t what the average player wanted from the game, either, especially during this time period. Arcades were an escape from the everyday terrors of reality. Players didn’t need despair thrown in their faces. They just wanted to have some fun, and for most, that’s exactly what Missile Command gave them. It was bright and beautiful, fun and complex. There wasn’t a deeper message for them, but its legacy was cemented regardless.
As with all great art, it didn’t need to be heavy-handed. You could like it for what it was. Hell, you could like it solely because it was all that was available and you were on your last quarter. It didn’t really matter. In the end, Theurer didn’t craft the narrative for people to walk away talking about how it made them feel. He wanted them to experience the concept and eventually make the connection to an unrelated futile effort—in this case, nuclear war.
In doing this he unknowingly crafted one of the earliest instances of player-created narrative presented entirely through gameplay where the player was in complete control. This was unique in so many ways, not the least of which was that, as I’ve mentioned, games barely had any story to begin with, let alone one that the designer had anything to do with. The game wasn’t in charge of how your game played out—you were. It didn’t control whether Santa Clara was the first to go—you were. It didn’t choose to defend all cities evenly until finally failing—you did, developing your own story of how things went down as a result.
How the game ended was all up to you, the player. No matter what you did, you couldn’t win, so it was merely a futile decision in order. You might choose to sacrifice one city for the temporary safety of another, only to lose both in the process. What decision you made was up to you; the only requirement was that you had to make one.
This is what sets Missile Command apart. It isn’t about the creator, or even the game itself; it’s about you, the player, and what you want to do. Through all aspects of the game, it all funnels back to your decisions and the narrative you craft for yourself. You can play the game however you like. Just as you live your life different from how I live mine, the same is true when it comes to the decisions we might make in the game.
In any apocalyptic story, there are always two kinds of people: there’s the guy who wants to figure out what happened and get to the bottom of it, and there’s the guy who just wants his Twinkies. We all approach situations differently, and that’s what makes our stories unique. The sandbox of Missile Command allowed this to shine through in each unique play, ensuring that no two stories would ever be the same. You can focus on your heroic patriotism and save the nation; I can ensure my one city in the corner makes it longer than the others.
It’s up to the player how to proceed, but in the end—the singular outcome is made clear with the explosive destruction of that final city: THE END. There is no winner. You cannot win. No matter how well you played and what decisions you made, nothing you did made a difference to change the outcome and stop the inevitable. “The End” is a common sign-off for many works of art across all mediums, but in this instance the strong, capitalized font is meant to signal more, to drive home the desecration that comes with nuclear war.
Heavy, right? Especially for an arcade game mostly played by children and teenagers who hadn’t fully come to terms with what a war might actually mean. Adults had seen war and knew its terrors firsthand; American adults were coming off a string of wars at the time, and had seen many during the long-standing conflict with the USSR, so for them there was proper context. For the youth? Not so much. They didn’t have to experience the monstrosities of war—heck, most of them probably had never even imagined what war was actually like. There was no draft. It wasn’t something you had to think about at the time, especially if the Cold War had been going on for your entire lifetime. For this group of kids, this was their picture of war: nothing happened, there was no fighting, it was all drawn-out mind games that had been going on forever and didn’t show any signs of ending soon.
Theurer knew that to get his message across, it couldn’t have a heavy hand; it had to be subtle and unobtrusive. He didn’t want to force the message on anyone who wasn’t willing to hear it. As luck would have it, he was making a video game! Turns out most people don’t play games for the social commentary, so he was already off to a great start. He could instead focus his efforts on making the game enjoyable to play, as that’s ultimately what would have the largest impact on the reach of his message.
Using games to tell a narrative was still uncharted territory. They were beginning to earn recognition as more than just a waste of time for children, but the general population was still trying to figure out if video games deserved a seat at the table. Thankfully for us, whether they deserved it or not at the time, they were given a shot, and became ingrained as an everyday part of popular culture.
Presented in any other format, Missile Command doesn’t work—not in that moment in history when it was released, anyway. Books would fall on deaf ears. Movies would be deemed too sensational to apply to our daily life. Games were the perfect medium—subtle and exploratory. It was up to the players to make that connection themselves, but it was also totally cool if they didn’t and just wanted to play a video game. It wasn’t giving the player a big wink-wink, nudge-nudge the entire time—if you didn’t want to see it, you didn’t have to. You could just enjoy the gameplay without it being turned into something bigger that might not resonate with every player.
Atari wasn’t going to come out publicly spreading the fear of imminent nuclear war; it wasn’t going to tell players their patriotism was misplaced. What Atari was going to attempt was to explain the futility of war. That was all a part of the message, but the company didn’t say it—the player did. That’s where the beauty of Missile Command lies. It’s always about the player, never the game. It never tells, always shows. It put the onus on the player, attaching real-world consequences and emotions to pixelated cities and explosions in a way never seen before. In many ways, it still hasn’t been seen again even now, even decades later.
As these core components of the game’s design philosophy began to formulate for Theurer, he realized just how large of an undertaking this would be. Fearing that Missile Command had the potential to fall victim to the same fate as the first project of so many other Atari programmers, he was determined to break that streak and release Missile Command to the world. He believed in the game concept and the message that he could share. It was a special opportunity, and one that he just couldn’t pass up.
Would he end up like everyone else who had felt just as confident at one point or another? We all know that the game came out, but that’s not the real story. The real story is how close Theurer came to that very fate, and how it would alter the course of gaming history.