THIS ISN’T A TECHNICAL MANUAL FOR MISSILE COMMAND. I’M not going to pretend to know how the circuit boards work or how Dave Theurer and Rich Adam accomplished any of the programming feats—I’m not qualified to tell you about any of that and won’t insult you by pretending I am. I’m here to tell you about why it matters. But I do think it’s important to get into some of the deeper aspects of Missile Command’s design to really understand how these impacted the player’s experience and reception of the game’s narrative.
With such an iconic title in gaming history, it’s easy to forget that it went through the same development process as every other game that’s been released. There were ups and downs, and things certainly didn’t go as planned, but Theurer and Adam eventually worked through it and got it to where it is today—though not without a few bumps and bruises along the way.
But first they had to get the project approved. The order had come down from above to make the game, but that didn’t mean they had completely free rein over where they went with it. Calfee trusted them, and was there more to ensure that they had the right executive sign off in case Lipkin or someone from above inquired about the project. He wasn’t involved in the day-to-day process, and he sure wasn’t going to tell them how to make their game.
After coming to terms with what their concept wasn’t going to be, they had to outline what it was going to be. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. They had the rough concept they had been given from Lipkin, but there was a ton of gaps that needed to be filled in before they could begin production. If they didn’t do it now, it would slow them down during development, and that was the kiss of death. If they were to go about this right and get the game released to arcades, they needed to plan enough to get it moving in the right direction from the start.
They took the guidelines that they were given and fleshed them out into basic concepts—a radar screen, incoming missiles, bases to defend, scoring, and so on—and started to work out how they might actually be implemented. It wasn’t as easy as saying, “You’re looking at a radar screen filled with incoming missiles. You must fire back to defend your cities.” That was the easy part. They needed to work through how it might actually work in an arcade setting.
First they needed to think through what the player might be defending. Knowing they would need multiple missile launch points to fire their defensive missiles from, they chose to have three missile bases, one on each side of the screen and a third in the middle. This would allow players to fire from multiple areas, spacing out the number of missiles they would be able to fire from any one point, curbing abuse. This was a big factor they had to consider in the arcade. With any arcade game, score was the ultimate objective, and players would do their best to find any exploitable mechanic to use to their advantage. Once this mechanic made its way into the wild, there was no going back; your game was done. There weren’t patches like there are with current games. It needed to be right when it gets burned to the boards and sent out.
Luckily, these were things that Theurer and Adam found pretty quickly when playing the game for hours on end. Since so much of the process was trial and error when developing, you really had to play the game a lot. You couldn’t program these mechanics for a few hours and come back for a quick test game—you really had to get in deep with the game, just as your players would, and find out how they would feel about it. This often meant test plays at the office within their shared lab. Here other game developers at Atari would play the game and offer feedback on what they thought worked and what could be improved.
Though there wasn’t a very long development cycle, Theurer was obsessive about testing out every possible outcome that could occur. This meant that he played more Missile Command than anyone, really putting in the extra time, even on things that didn’t work, to find out why and to tweak things to be better for the player. It’s just the way his brain worked.
Once they nailed down the locations of the missile bases, they had to figure out what you were defending. Ultimately, there wasn’t really any option other than cities. It was easy to group multiple cities together and give the player something to latch onto. Plus, each city could take a few hits and some parts would still remain, just as if a real city was hit with a missile. But once these cities were implemented, the bottom of the screen became an amorphous blob that all merged together—it wasn’t clear what players had to defend and what they didn’t. Adam turned to Lyle Rains, Steve Calfee’s boss, who had been in the original meeting with Gene Lipkin, for assistance.
Rains quickly solved the conundrum, simply suggesting they elevate the missile bases on mountaintops to have them stand out more. “Why don’t you just do it where you have these raised bases on these little mountaintops?” he said. “You have three of those. One left, middle, and right; with cities in between those. Just do that.”
He eventually figured out the best way to position it, using Rains as a resource, and that created the basis for Theurer’s defensive message. There were rumors of railroads being implemented at one point that would give the player another target to defend, but Adam doesn’t recall this being the case, claiming the cities were the main focus for what the player would be tasked with defending.
They even realized that simple missiles wouldn’t be enough. Eventually, the player would grow too good and it would cease to be challenging. If there’s one thing Theurer wanted most, it was for the game to be a hybrid of challenging and fun. Arcades were filled with games that didn’t offer much in the way of competitive play. They were aimed at children, but he wanted to go for the teenager-to-adult demographic. It had to be challenging, and they needed more enemies to make that a reality.
They eventually came up with the idea to add planes and satellites that would fly by, starting at a lower elevation on the screen to give the player less time to react. This required the player to look at multiple places on the screen and have a much better sense of the entire playing field, not just where the missiles were entering from the top of the screen. It was all about the balance. But even then, Theurer didn’t think it would be challenging enough.
They decided to make one last addition: multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), missiles carrying multiple warheads that split off toward different targets after they were launched. These were missiles that would appear to be flying in as a single missile, but would branch off randomly, turning into multiple missiles flying in different directions. Players would need to react quickly to ensure they would get all the stray missiles heading toward different cities on the coastline. It added a frantic, but fair, element to it that Theurer liked; he was finally starting to feel like the game could hold up against high-level players, offering a drastic increase in difficulty with each ensuing wave of enemy fire.
But he wasn’t satisfied. “Yeah, it’s fun,” he said, trying to figure out what to do next. “It just sort of plateaus, and we need more.” He wanted something for the ultra-high-level players, something that, should players make it far enough in the game to see one, would strike them with devastating effect. Then he figured it out. “What if they could avoid your explosion?” he said to Adam, trying to find a mechanic that eventually led to a Game Over.
This is where smart bombs come into play. These weren’t your average missiles; they could maneuver around and dodge your defensive missiles. They didn’t blindly dive into explosions in the same way that the simple missiles and MIRVs did. Theurer created a way for the missiles to recognize that the flashing color in their current path was a defensive shot and attempt to divert their path. This effectively allowed the smart bombs to see what was in front of them. It didn’t always work, obviously, but required much more attention from the player, and made it so they couldn’t just spam the top of the screen with defensive missiles. They had to be thorough and meticulous—calculated. This ultimately gave the game the edge it needed to offer players something new each time and to crank up the difficulty as the levels rose, giving it a more timeless nature as it took away the forced ending.
As Theurer and Adam were sorting through all this, they eventually put pen to paper and settled on what would become the basis for everything to come, as is noted in their original pitch:
FROM: D. Theurer and Rich Adam
DATE: May 30, 1979
SUBJECT: GAME DESCRIPTION FOR COASTAL DEFENSE GAME
Possible game titles: “World War III,” “Armageddon,” “The Edge of Blight.”
Object of the game: To save the displayed coast from several waves of in-coming nuclear warhead bearing missiles by blasting them out of the sky with defensive missiles.
Hardware: color monitor, 1 trackball, 3 push (fire) buttons.
Number of players: either a one or two person game. In two person mode, players would take turns defending their coasts. The switch point would be between incoming missile waves.
Display and control description:
The color monitor will display a radar scan view of the coast and the offensive and defensive missile action.
The coast will be displayed across the bottom of the screen. Cities and missile bases will be identified on the coast. Color coding will be used to indicate their status (unattached, damaged, demolished) and importance (large or small population, depleted or full stocked missile base).
The offensive missiles will come down from the top of the screen and go toward the coast, leaving a trail. They will appear as a blip on the monitor as the radar beam scans over them, from left to right. These missiles will attack in waves. Succeeding waves will be more difficult to intercept. Later waves may also contain MIRV type missiles, which break apart into several missiles after a certain length of time. These missiles will be targeted toward a city, missile base or barren area by the computer.
The defensive missiles will rise from the missile bases displayed on the coast and fly to the location on the radar screen requested by the player. There will be 3 missile bases, each one associated with a fire button on the player’s console. When a fire button is depressed, a defensive missile will be fired from the associated missile base. Before the beginning of each wave, the missiles in each undamaged base will be restored to a predetermined number.
A cursor will be displayed on the screen and guided by the trackball. When a defensive missile is fired, it will be guided by the computer toward the cursor. A new mobile cursor will appear so other, simultaneous shots can be fired.
When a defensive missile gets to the cursor it explodes, destroying all “close” incoming missiles. If a defensive or offensive missile collides with the coastal area, an explosion will occur. Points will be awarded for effectiveness in defending the cities and missile bases. The score will be displayed at all times, and color-coded status of coastal areas will be updated after any impacts. ABM’s [antiballistic missiles] will travel faster than incoming ICBM’s [intercontinental ballistic missiles].
The game will be terminated when a player’s 3 missile bases are destroyed or when 2, 3 or 4 attack waves are done. The number of waves will be option switch selectable for a game, so the destruction of that number of waves will terminate the game.
Alternatively, if an unlimited number of waves were given per game, each wave would be more difficult to intercept. The game would be terminated by the destruction of the player’s 3 bases.
The feature allowing entry of player’s initials if his score is in the top 10 will be supported.
Game options:
The appearance of the coast will be customizable to the area in which it is played to give it local appeal. Coastlines for California, the U.S. East Coast, Western Europe, and Mediterranean would be available, possibly as monitor overlays. This option will depend on available memory.
The number of defensive missiles restocked before each wave could be an operator option.
The number of incoming missile waves, if fixed, could also be an operator option.
Theurer and Adam outlined the core tenets of the experience, creating what they believed to be the most fun game possible. That’s really all they wanted at this point: to give the player something memorable, and this was unlike anything that had really been done at the time. Things like smart bombs hadn’t been used in video games; this was an entirely new way of approaching ramping up a game’s difficulty. They didn’t just make things more punishing; they created an enemy that could dynamically react to the player’s actions—just as they would in real life. This was an entirely new technology and one that Theurer and Adam hadn’t really anticipated they would need—hence their absence from the initial green-light pitch—but would later come to find as one of the strongest pieces of gameplay at higher levels.
They might not have been the most experienced programmers at Atari when they started on the project, but they knew what they wanted to get from it and were going to do everything in their power to ensure that it ended up as it should for players. They always wanted to do right by players. They might not know how to do something, and it might take them a while to figure out, but they would figure it out—no matter what. That was the culture Atari had developed, and Theurer and Adam thrived on it at the time.
Now that the general gameplay designs were locked, they knew they had to move on to the most important part: How would it all come together, and why should the player care? This was a tough question for them to answer at the time. They felt they were making something fun, and knew that players would eventually think so too, but they needed to get them to drop in that first quarter if they were to have a real effect. They needed the hook and didn’t want to rely on other people to give it to them.
As they set to figuring it out, they discovered just how powerful what they were looking to create was. It was a tough time; people often used arcades as an out, an escape. But they saw this as a responsibility to share a powerful message and touch the lives of those living through these struggles. If they really wanted to connect with players and break through in such a critical and vexing time as this, they needed to do something more than just provide them with fun. They had to break through that barrier and transcend beyond that level to something that players could actually associate with, to something that gave them a deeper understanding of the time they were currently in and what effects video games could have on the world at large.
For most people, video games were simply an escape. But for others, they allowed something deeper, a second narrative. It wasn’t so much the story of what you were experiencing in the game itself, but rather the experience of you experiencing the game. This kind of connection was unheard of at the time, something that Theurer wasn’t sure they were going to be able to pull off, but if you know anything about Theurer by now, you know he was going to try anyway. As he looked to drive that connection home with the player, he struggled with one major question: How?