GAME DEVELOPMENT ISN’T EASY. IT’S A LOT OF LATE NIGHTS, caffeine, and head-scratching conundrums that seem so simple once they’re solved but prior to that leave you confused for days on end. Everything you’re doing is new. The industry centers around technology that’s changing all the time—around the drive to be the most technologically advanced, even if it lasts only for a moment.
In the video gaming industry, there’s a summit named D.I.C.E. that stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain—and that’s exactly what games are meant to do. At the crux of any basic game design, you want to tackle these four pillars, typically using innovation to drive the other three. This is why game design is so difficult: you’re essentially reinventing the wheel with each new release. If you weren’t, you’d be behind, and that doesn’t work in gaming. Failure to innovate is a death sentence when you’re dealing with such an intense community that’s so used to constant progress. Always forward, never backward.
At the time Missile Command was being developed, there wasn’t a long history of development that you could look back on for lessons. Instead, you were history in the making, pushing things through as you saw fit and creating those lessons for future generations to come. There were no experienced game developers. Games had truly only been around for a few years, and most developers were using trial and error, making things up as they went. If you were stuck on something and didn’t know how to fix it, you either asked those around you—if you were lucky enough to be at Atari, where the world’s best developers were located at the time—or just kept trying things until something worked or you gave up on it, resigned to the fact that it wouldn’t be included.
There are a million little details and a million more ways that these details won’t work together. Ten things might work together well, but the addition of just one more can break them all; that’s just how it was. There isn’t much you can do. Games are hard to make and even harder to actually finish. For Dave Theurer and Rich Adam, this was difficult and frustrating, especially as relatively junior programmers. They knew it was the nature of the beast, but that didn’t cut down on the mounting stress that Theurer began to experience as their deadline for Missile Command loomed closer with each passing day.
There were some good sides to this predicament too, though. Because there was no standard operating procedure, you had the freedom to experiment and do things your own way. You didn’t have to follow standard convention, and you certainly didn’t have to answer to anyone else on the team—because there wasn’t anyone. It was up to you to decide how to go about things, and because of that, gamers were gifted with a lot of experimental ideas that likely never would have seen the light of day had they gone through committee review.
One aspect of this design was the inclusion of a trackball. At this point in time, trackballs weren’t very popular for mainstream applications, especially gaming. They’d seen use in the military, having been designed by the Royal Canadian Navy in the 1950s out of small four-and-a-half-inch bowling balls, but they still weren’t common in modern computing appliances, as navigation was primarily accomplished with the strokes on a keyboard.
But in 1978 Atari first decided to use a trackball in Atari Football, its breakout arcade hit. Trackballs could stand up to the battering that cabinets took in popular arcades while also offering players greater precision than traditional arcade sticks. Given their military applications and the initial proposal for the game to mimic a radar screen, it only makes sense that Theurer would attempt to include this instead of the traditional—and slow—joystick.
The trackball was visually striking and gave the game an edge to it that drew players in as they passed by. The cabinet’s design was already intensely unique, with massive missile clouds filling the entire side of the cabinet launching off to an unknown destination, but the inclusion of the trackball often attracted players who simply wanted to see how it worked.
The trackball afforded the player a much more responsive and reactive level of control, allowing the game to move at a much faster pace than most other games at the time. This would later become one of Missile Control’s most defining features, and it caused decades of controversy and confusion as Atari was still figuring out the best way for it to be used at the time of release.
Though trackballs—and their right-side-up computer mouse counterparts—later became ubiquitous with home computing platforms and have been common in dozens of arcade titles since, Missile Command was one of the first to take a massive risk by replacing the most common control method with something that was relatively unproven and somewhat confusing to first-time players. If you didn’t know any better, it seemed loose, wild, and impossible to control. As more time was spent with it, it became clear that it didn’t require the same exaggerated movements of classic arcade joysticks and worked best when given finessed touches. It turned out to be a massive success, showing that with great risk came great reward, even in an era when risk and errors were unacceptable. It had been done before, but no one remembers Atari Football; they remember Missile Command.
Another defining feature at the time was that the game was multicolored. While it may sound primitive now, the first releases that Atari put out weren’t in color; Pong, for instance, was entirely in black and white. Using multiple colors was an advanced technology, one that Atari was trying to figure out how best to accomplish with the limited hardware it had at the time. With each advance in hardware, the costs soared. Just to add color, you were looking at replacing multiple parts with more expensive, state-of-the-art upgrades.
Theurer and Adam knew it had to be done, though. The graphics were just too striking to be seen in black and white—they needed color. The game needed to feel real. Though the Atari 2600 version later moved the setting to a fictional alien planet far away from Earth, Theurer wanted the colors to remind players of what they were defending, using earth tones that hadn’t been seen in games before.
Missile Command wasn’t the first multicolor game, despite what some think (at least not according to Adam), but it was the first color game done by Atari, which is where much of the confusion stems from, as many tended to conflate the two due to Atari’s strong dominance during this era. This was a huge advantage for Atari at the time, as most consumers hadn’t seen anything like it before. Missile Command would pull people from the other side of the arcade simply due to the color graphics—they stood out that much.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t a massive revelation from the start that they were going to be able to do it in color. They just did it. During this time, they were unstoppable. Whatever Theurer and Adam wanted to do, they just made happen—and the same was true for the addition of color graphics. They didn’t need to be the first ones to do it, they just wanted to do it, and the industry was so new that few had before; so they had to figure out how to make it a reality.
Adam recalls that game developers “didn’t know how lucky they truly were, because at that point, you could say, ‘Let’s make a game about this’ and at that point, it had never been done, because almost nothing had ever been done.” It was an age of exploration. You didn’t have to worry about putting out the same thing as anyone else because there weren’t other people really making games. You’d just come up with an idea and make it a reality.
This was the same with color. Theurer and Adam just thought, “What if we do this?” and made it happen. When they first got new things working, it wasn’t uncommon for them to show them to others around the office to get their opinion on where they were at. With color, the reactions were all the same: “Oh my God, that’s color!” It was something that people hadn’t seen before. It truly was an inspiring sight at the time, and they were, by their own admission, lucky to be able to bring that experience to consumers for the first time, even if it lost its novelty during development.
After a few months, the novelty did indeed begin to wear off. They had difficulties getting the hardware to work and were looking at it twelve hours a day; it became the new normal. Thankfully, they had the consumers to remind them just how unique it was every time a new player saw it for the first time.
“Oh my God, that’s color!”
Ah, there it is.
The trackball and color were just two pieces of what made Missile Command special, but they formed the basis for what Theurer and Adam had intended all along. They wanted to create something special for players, something that felt nothing like any other game they had played before. In doing so, Theurer and Adam gave people yet another reason to play their game when they might have otherwise ignored it. In an effort to make it as fun as possible and get his message heard by as many people as possible, Theurer pushed the envelope in a way that perfectly encapsulated the conditions they found themselves in: if you thought it, you did it.
Make it happen and change the world.