CREATING AN EMOTIONAL CONNECTION WITH A VIDEO GAME player is no easy task. Creating an emotional connection with someone stepping up to play your game in a crowded bar between beers and slices of pizza? That’s even harder. It’s loud, they can’t hear. They have a quarter and expect it to keep them busy for a few minutes. If you can hook them in those first few minutes, you’re golden. If not, they move on. Even if you do win them over, it’s temporary. There’s no real promise of a lasting connection to the game beyond a simple, “Hey, that was fun.”
That’s okay, though, because there isn’t an implied expectation that either of you deserves that from the other. For most arcade games, this was hit or miss. People didn’t really expect much, but they also didn’t get much in return. Missile Command was different. It looked like a fun, colorful, flashy (if entirely shallow) gaming experience, but when you got into it, you realized it was anything but. It certainly had its share of charming gimmicks, but the mechanics and context inspired hard-core fans right away.
It’s easy to look back and attribute this to Missile Command’s amazing gameplay, but Atari was putting out dozens of games at the time, and they all seemed pretty fun to the people working on them. Still, there was a major difference that set Missile Command apart immediately: while the rest of Atari was cranking out as many games as possible based off any idea that came to mind, Missile Command was purpose-built with a very specific vision in mind. It wasn’t just made—it was designed and engineered to check certain boxes for players.
Gene Lipkin knew from the very second he laid eyes on the magazine clipping that they could build it into something that people would want to play, if only for the intriguing design. Dave Theurer agreed and knew that if he approached it right, there was a major chance for it to catch fire in arcades. As a relatively new programmer, that’s a major opportunity—one that’s certain to set you on the right career trajectory should you manage to live up to expectations. He wanted to do this and needed to prove himself. He wanted to create something that was more than just successful; he needed it to go beyond the number of quarters Atari raked in every year from the game and to find an opportunity to create a legacy with players—something that wouldn’t dissipate when they ran out of quarters. Theurer wanted to create something that stuck with players and consumed their thoughts even when they weren’t playing. He needed to create an emotional connection.
His first step in creating this emotional connection was to give players something to latch onto that related to their personal lives.
Here is the game in a nutshell: There are six cities at the bottom of the screen that the player must defend from the impending missile barrage. As the game progresses and the assault gets more intense, they’re destroyed one by one. The player slowly loses them all and the game ends. In the early stages of development, these cities were named after major cities on the California coast. Whether subconsciously or not, programmers Dave Theurer and Rich Adam chose cities that were familiar to them—or at least big enough to help fill out the landscape.
But as they progressed through development, this began to have a negative effect. Each and every day, over and over—the cities they loved faced a dreaded fate as they were blown apart time and time again by nuclear missiles. While it was still just a game to them and it was their choice to name the cities after ones they knew intimately, it began to wear on Theurer and Adam throughout development. As time went on, they began to think about their family and friends in these cities, associating that colorful blast of destruction with the ones they loved the most. They weren’t just bundles of pixels anymore, they were starting to feel something about them and associate them with real people they knew. And that hit them closer than they ever imagined it would.
It became too much. With the project being as early and incomplete as it was, they were surprised to find just how much they had internalized this. Then the full realization came through: everyone should feel this way. Through their problem they had found their solution as their own experience with the game had just given them the perfect answer to such a difficult task. Tear away the names and let everyone’s self-centeredness take over, subconsciously naming the cities after the ones local to them, and giving them the same experience that Theurer and Adam had gone through. Having these cities appear as such but remain nameless allowed players to face this same internalization. What was previously a set of unfamiliar and, at least to the player, arbitrary cities were now the ones most important to them. They were the cities the players lived in, the cities they grew up in, the cities where they fell in love, the cities where they hoped to one day raise a family. It wasn’t make-believe anymore.
It’s fair to assume that most players didn’t hold this connection to the loss of seventeen pixels on the screen in front of them, but Theurer’s message wasn’t supposed to be that in-your-face. It was about building the subconscious associations with the narrative of the game that over time helped to resonate with the player.
Before they had even begun working on crafting a true narrative, Theurer had already created one of the most important pieces for the player to grab onto. When missiles struck the city, it wasn’t just about the loss of a life; it was about the loss of life that occurred when that city was evaporated in a cloud of pixels. You’re one step closer to needing another quarter, yes, but in the span of a few seconds, millions died, and there was nothing you could do to save them.
It’s a heavy message, no doubt, but the meaning from Theurer was direct: nuclear war is a frail endeavor in which we are all affected.
To this point, there hadn’t been much in the way of narrative in gaming. In fact, it’s safe to say there just hadn’t been anything deeper than “kill them before they kill you,” which isn’t saying much. Atari’s designers weren’t really focused on building anything other than a fun game that people would dump quarters into, so it’s understandable that narrative wouldn’t be a massive focus, especially with the state of games at the time. With such primitive graphics, many found it hard to believe that games could be anything other than idle bar entertainment. As with any piece of advanced technology, those who fail to believe in the future usually aren’t those who change it. But Theurer believed. However crudely he ended up making it, he was bound to insert some sort of narrative about the dangers of war, even if most players might never notice or take even the least bit of actionable information from it. He wanted to make something that was fun—as do most game designers—but also something that would lead people away from the path of dangerous rhetoric, even if it meant that the overall experience suffered as a result. He was a man of principle, and wouldn’t let any measure of fun surpass his need to keep the experience purely defensive and anonymous. To Theurer, this control wasn’t just “nice to have”; it was a necessity.
To really understand why this was so important to him, we again need to recall the period in which it was released. Missile Command came out at the height of the Cold War—it had been going on for what felt like forever, but that didn’t mean that the tension wasn’t rising the longer the conflict went unresolved. With every passing day, the question of when grew greater than ever before. The dread grew stronger.
This was perfect for Missile Command. Without 1980, Missile Command wouldn’t have become what it eventually did. It needed 1980, and 1980 needed it. Pretend with me for a moment that technology didn’t advance, and we were focusing solely on the creation; Missile Command wouldn’t have become the sensation it did if it was released any earlier or later. It needed that dread—that ultimate sense of despair, doubt, and fear. It needed the tension, needed Ronald Reagan as president. Without this perfect storm of circumstance and culture, Missile Command would have been a perfectly serviceable form of entertainment, but would have fallen drastically short of the entertainment legacy that it has since created.
It was the perfect culmination of years of tension that built as Theurer took that fateful first step out of Steve Calfee’s office. His mind wouldn’t stop racing. He couldn’t stop thinking about how to build Missile Command into what he wanted. It had been only minutes since he first heard of the idea, but he was already beginning to draft out the core tenets of what the game would become as he walked down the hall and back to his desk.
It may have been a bit obsessive, but this early planning was vital to the cohesive and clear vision of how Theurer would shape the project. His vision began to take form. He started to figure out what would be fun for him, how it might look when programmed into the basic tools he had available to him at the time, and even how the player would control such an experience. With each additional piece coming together, it started to feel closer and closer to a manageable idea.
It was all shaking out a bit different from the magazine clippings Gene Lipkin had showed Calfee, but he didn’t care; Missile Command was now Theurer’s project, and he felt he had the ability to take things in his own direction if it meant the game was better off for it in the end. He was the lead programmer, after all—he was put in charge, and he was going to damn well do what he pleased as a result.
Theurer and his small team quickly found that his goals and ideas were proving to be much stronger than anything found in the magazines, and he committed fully to going about it his own way. He wasn’t going to ditch the original idea; he was going to make it his own. Sure, the basics weren’t too different. The primary motivator was still for it to be fun, and at no point during the development cycle did he ever dream of changing that, but he had bigger things in mind than something that looked vaguely similar to a radar system. He wanted it to be more than that, and was determined to make it happen.
The fundamentals of the radar design that Lipkin passed along were scrapped, and they moved forward with Theurer’s ever growing vision. At the time, they had the authority to do so—Atari was all about the creativity of the individual and doing things on your own until the game was ready to ship. It’s not like they had a big team that needed to be checked up on; there were only a few of them. Theurer made the decision to focus more on his direction of the game than the original design, and that was that.
Despite the lofty vision growing more complex by the second, a singular goal remained over all others: to make a fun game. In the end, Theurer had the vision he wanted to get across, but he wasn’t going to create something that gave up its fun factor to lecture the player about nuclear war. He knew what business he was in—his primary motivator was to build something that could attract quarters in a fun and unique way. Yet he kept his secondary focus in sight at all times as his true goal began to form: to convey the serious and very personal nature of the devastating events found within the gameplay.
He didn’t want to make sacrifices to accomplish this, but at no point was he going to allow fun to trump common sense and the set of morals that he held so dear. There was no compromise here—at least, not for Theurer. If there was, he would be gone.
Missile Command wasn’t just going to be fun, but would push the player toward something greater. Theurer really didn’t care if they agreed fully with his message, he just wanted to get people thinking—to him, that was the ultimate reward. He wanted to change their mind-set. Placing the player in a fully defensive role changed the attitude that most players approached games with. It didn’t put them in the situation where the game did something to the player and the player’s reaction adversely affected the enemy in return. Instead, Theurer focused on creating a game that never reacted to the player. You weren’t able to shoot out the enemy’s missile launchers, and you certainly weren’t able to kill the enemy to make it easier on yourself. You had to focus solely on yourself and your actions. In doing so, he created a feedback loop based solely on the game’s actions, not the player’s. It was all about what the game did to the player, not what the player did back. In the end, there’s nothing players could really do to stop the game, so why let it affect the incoming barrage? Nothing the player could do would end the onslaught; it could only delay it. The game was still going to execute its plan appropriately. In retrospect, it’s like The Terminator—but without the change of heart at the end of the film.
Because of this, it was actually extremely common for players to not really understand the game’s ending at first. This was partially due to current design convention in which many games didn’t have endings, you just lost and that was it, but it was also due to the game’s mechanics being similar enough that you didn’t really understand the difference in the intent behind the game. It wasn’t like most games, where you didn’t kill all the enemies and eventually they came back to overwhelm you; it was focused more on your ability (or inability) to protect yourself and the consequences associated with failure.
Most games—including Missile Command, as far as the general public was concerned—were all about scores. The higher the score, the better you did, regardless of how far you actually got in the game. This method of play incentivized a ton of different strategies. You might try to keep all of your cities alive for as long as possible, knowing you won’t get as far in the end, but that the bonus for each city reaching the next barrage might outpace where you could make it if you let some get by to focus on defending fewer targets. It was really up to you how you wanted to go about it—the outcome was always the same, so it was more about the journey than the destination.
Being unable to fire defensively at your attacker leaves you unable to change the course of action. Instead, you must focus on doing all you can to stop it, even if you know it’s nothing but a futile endeavor with a singular outcome. You must change up your city strategy, giving up one city to ensure the survival of the others. Regardless of the impending outcome, you have to give it a shot.
Theurer’s hope was that if players knew there was no way to win, only delayed loss, there would be a change in the feeling associated with their role, from one of heroism to one burdened with immense pressure and responsibility. He wasn’t trying to mess with players’ heads, but instead to get them to think about the consequences associated with such actions, however digital or make-believe they might be. He wanted them to realize through this emotional connection that they could no longer be the hero—they could try their best but would never succeed. He wanted them to feel the responsibility that comes with such power: players could be put in a place where they’re expected to save the cities from destruction, only to realize that they’re ultimately responsible for those cities’ demise.
This was purposeful role assignment by Theurer, designed with hard-core players in mind. He knew that the average players of Missile Command were just trying to pass the time with their after-work softball league buddies, not suffer an existential crisis. He wanted this small subset of players to understand the role they were assigned in this situation—a role in which all hope relied solely on them and their ability to defend the cities that looked to them for saving. They were the only ones who could do anything; the pressure was on. If they weren’t able to defend their cities from attack, that was it. There was no one else who could do it.
As we know, they weren’t able to defend their cities in the end. Even still, winning wasn’t really the point. Theurer wanted players to embrace the absolute dread that their role required. It didn’t really matter that they couldn’t defend their cities; it was no black mark on their skill record, because there was no one else who could fully defend them, either. It was truly an unwinnable battle, no matter how good at the game players got.
Theurer wanted them to encounter this invisible boundary, one that would force them to think of the cities—and the people contained within them—as more than just numbers. If you play Missile Command, you’ll notice there aren’t numbers assigned to the cities; again, the anonymity encourages players to internalize these cities and make them their own. Once players come to terms with the fact that they can’t win, they start to make choices to deter the destruction and stay alive as long as they can. As such, these choices must be rationalized, and this is where things start to get a bit more personal. Forcing players to choose between one group of people and another puts them in a position of power where they’re making life-or-death decisions that have real and direct consequences on the endgame.
This position of power is important as the player’s role shifts from that of the cities’ heroic protector to their failed defender. With nothing to show for your efforts but six craters and pure dread, you’re placed in a situation where a new best possible outcome is found. It might not be about winning; it might be about getting as far as you can and seeing where things shake out. As long as you’re improving, you’re winning, and that’s something that pervaded the collective consciousness within gaming arcades at the time. It wasn’t ever necessarily about hitting the end screen; sometimes it was just about scoring higher than your friend as you’re playing. In a way, it removed heroism from the equation, diverging from the typical hero’s journey that we’ve grown accustomed to in gaming since then. There was no rescuing Princess Peach from the evil Bowser. You weren’t able to save them—no matter what, you still lost.
We aren’t all able to be John McClane in Die Hard; some of us end up shot and used as an elevator prop to send a message. We can’t all be the action movie star who saves everything in the nick of time. It doesn’t always work like that, and Theurer’s main goal was to remind players of the futility of war in hopes that they would relate their gameplay experience to the potential situation we might find ourselves in one day. He wanted them to feel the ups and downs of the gameplay, wanted it to be something that players thought about long after they were done playing. He wanted them to not only feel these deep and wild feelings, but to internalize them to their own personal hopes and fears. He wanted Missile Command to be something that people saw not just as a game, but as a true message, the sort of message that only art can provide.
As it turns out, this was extremely difficult. Even reading this, you’re probably rolling your eyes, thinking, “Okay, buddy, let’s bring it down a notch. It’s a video game! No one is weeping about how Missile Command subjected him to the horrors of war.” Yet as his team got deeper and deeper into the development, Theurer kept pushing for this to be the main message. He knew it would resonate with some and, in his eyes, it only took one person to write a column or share her thoughts with friends to spread the message.
Little did Adam know, Theurer didn’t just have a strong feeling about this, he was experiencing this sensation himself; he was beginning to become overwhelmed with the messages found within the game. With the long hours that were common at Atari at the time, the pressure mounting on him to not fall prey to the same curse that had struck down so many first-time programming leads before him, and the intense subject matter at hand, Theurer began to find himself questioning whether it was a step too far. It was a video game meant for teenagers, after all. Maybe the message was too heavy, he thought. But time and time again, he convinced himself otherwise, pressing forward toward release.
“It’s not that bad,” he told himself, but as he lay down to sleep, he knew the horror that awaited him.