“ALL-CONSUMING PASSION.”
This was the one phrase Dave Theurer used to describe his work on Missile Command. He didn’t care what anyone else wanted; he had already deviated so drastically from what Steve Calfee and Gene Lipkin had initially proposed that he didn’t really care to hear input from anyone else. He wanted the game to be both appealing and smart—those were his two requirements. He wasn’t going to stop working on the project until he felt that both of those requirements were satisfied to the best of his ability, even if he lost a bit of himself in the process.
Theurer takes his work very seriously—even if it’s “just a game.” He’s a creative person at heart, even if games aren’t entirely creative endeavors. If he’s going to do something, he’s going to work at it until it’s unequivocally right in his eyes. There isn’t another option—there is nothing less than 100 percent perfection for him.
He was absorbed by these thoughts. “Missiles armed with atomic warheads are weapons of mass destruction and one should be deeply affected by their use,” he explains. In his eyes, the commonplace acceptance of these missiles in everyday life had minimized their shock factor. Use of these missiles would have life-altering effects for everyone, not just the people under attack. He wanted to bring this notion back to the forefront of our thoughts when the topic arose.
Theurer wasn’t alone in the gravity of this feeling either. After realizing the incredibly dangerous position the world was in due to the invention of the atomic bomb, many notable politicians and scientists spoke out about how deeply this issue troubled them—most notably Nikita Khrushchev, head of the Soviet Union until 1964, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead Manhattan Project scientist and the so-called father of the atomic bomb.
The fact that those who were so closely tied to the bomb’s development and rise were scared enough to speak out against it deeply affected Theurer. He knew that he could no longer blindly be a part of a culture that perpetuated this as the new norm, a norm in which nations were racing to grow the largest stockpile of these weapons, “just in case.” He understood their purpose was more defensive than offensive, just as he had forced Missile Command to be, but the prospect of mutually assured destruction left him uneasy.
It was heavy stuff, and it scared the hell out of him. He didn’t enjoy that feeling (who would?) but the Cold War didn’t show any signs of abating anytime soon, so he wasn’t confident relief would ever come. Hysteria was at an all-time high. Everywhere you went, war was at the forefront of America’s mind. Go see a movie: nuclear war. Turn on the TV: nuclear war. Watch a speech by President Ronald Reagan: the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), defending us from nuclear war.
Dave Theurer went to work every day, spending hours on a game that carried these same heavy themes. He didn’t have the escapes that everyone else did. In fact, it was the opposite. The general public was exposed to generalities and hypotheticals, but Theurer had to watch nuclear war play out on his screen over and over again. Rather than let real-world fears consume him, he buried himself in Missile Command, doing what he could to get his project out, doing his part to spread pleasure and excitement in a time of fear. In doing so, he poured every bit of himself and every waking hour of his day into the game. He often found himself staying at the office for days at a time, hiding the fact that he wasn’t going home from his coworkers, who would have undoubtedly been worried and concerned by his growing obsession. Missile Command became his life, and he was determined to see it through, first-game curse be damned.
In the early days of the project, Theurer sunk everything he had into development. It was his singular goal, both personally and professionally, like an Olympian training to compete. It consumed him. “[The game] is all I think about, almost exclusively,” he says. It was his obsession, his singular focus—but he didn’t see it that way; he was just working on the project, and it worked for him.
Theurer worked a bit differently from the way most designers did at Atari. Most designers would sketch out as many different gameplay scenarios as they could for any given concept, pick the best one, and build it. Theurer built them all to find out which one actually played the best, chose that one, and worked on it until he came to another fork in the road, and then he repeated the process. This had always been his style, even when he was just learning. With teams this small that typically relied on the decision of their lead designer/programmer, he found this to be a critical part of finding out how to make the best game possible. They hadn’t been game designers for very long, so he knew there were always better ways to do things, but often these weren’t discovered until they played out every scenario. In doing so he was able to constantly find the best way to approach each mechanic, but this obsessive style of experimentation also opened his mind up to endless thoughts of different styles of death and destruction. His focus on making the game as enjoyable as possible turned to an obsession engulfed in nuclear war.
“I imagined the missiles streaking in, imagined the explosions, but with sounds and visuals, over and over, day after day, until they felt just right,” he explains. He didn’t just want it to feel right in the moment; he wanted it to feel right while fitting in with the game’s tone stylistically. He didn’t just want something to succeed in isolation; he needed it to feel like a complete package if his message was ever to resonate with players.
This constant pursuit of perfection left him overworking his mind and body to their breaking points, and Missile Command’s potent premise began to take hold in his subconscious. It was no longer just a game. In his mind, parts of it seemed entirely real. Those detailed scenarios that he had envisioned when deciding which to pursue now felt real. They filled his every thought, leaving the pixelated world and entering his personal world. These thoughts soon became dreams, and these dreams soon became nightmares.
ONE EARLY MORNING Theurer is up in the mountains above Silicon Valley. He is getting in a hike, finding it to be the perfect start to the day before heading into the office, when suddenly, he hears a roar from above. He raises his head to the sky to get a better look at what made the noise. “It must have been a jet from Moffett Field,” he thinks to himself, but as he turns, he realizes it’s moving much too fast. The missile becomes clear to him just as it impacts the city below, sending out a shock-wave of heat and dust, obliterating everyone within miles of the impact. Millions are vaporized instantly. As the fireball grows into a mushroom cloud, he feels the air getting warmer and warmer, but he can’t move—he is frozen, gazing at the horror before him.
The heat wave overtakes Theurer, jolting him awake. He lies in bed, covered in sweat, horrified at what he’s just seen. But there’s no time for him to reflect on what he’s just experienced; he needs to get back to Missile Command, so he gets up and readies himself for his workday.
SPENDING EVERY WAKING moment consumed by thoughts of nuclear war had finally gotten to Theurer. Day in and day out this horrifying nightmare began to take hold and he found it evolving from a bad dream into something much more dire. As development on Missile Command continued, these nightmares began to occur much more frequently, escalating brutally as they grew more vivid and realistic with each passing occurrence. They may have started with a simple explosion, but quickly grew to much more horrifying visions.
For most, something of this nature would be extremely concerning—and it was for Theurer as well, but not enough for him to say anything to anyone about it. Despite working with him on the project every day, he never said a word to Rich Adam. He kept it bottled up, dedicating even more time to finishing the game, hoping these visions would subside once he was able to detach himself after the game’s release. He figured that if he couldn’t sleep, he might as well be working on the game, and started pulling all-nighters at the office, believing it was a better use of his time than attempting to sleep, only to wake up sweating and in a state of shock. He worked for days on end, often pulling multiple ninety-six-hour shifts.
As his sleep decreased and his obsession increased, these nightmares began to bleed into reality. Theurer lived near Moffett Field, in Santa Clara County, and would often be startled by planes flying overhead, convinced the engine rumble was the sound of an atomic blast heading his way.
After just six months of working on Missile Command, Theurer had done exactly what he was hoping the player would do: he had internalized the game’s message, but to a dangerous and unintended extreme. With this sobering realization, he knew that he had finally done it. It worked, though perhaps just a little too well.
Though his internalization was unintended, he knew that this meant he was on to something. He had taken it to the extreme because of his obsession with the project, but he wasn’t the only one who was constantly thinking about nuclear war; everyone else was, too. He knew he finally had a real opportunity to share this message with a world that needed to hear it, even if it came at the cost of his sanity.
For Theurer, it was all worth it—even the stress that caused his nightmares. But others disagree, including Barry Krakow, a leading sleep disorder specialist. In the early days of development, Theurer didn’t know how to separate the game from the rest of his life. As with anything, putting that much time and effort into any project allows it to seep into unintended aspects of one’s life. “[Anything] attended to with great intensity during the day frequently appears in our dreams,” explains Krakow, drawing the connection between Theurer’s obsession and the way that our brains process sleep. Most of the time, Krakow explains, this isn’t really noticeable. We might spend the day with friends doing a single activity for the majority of the day, but it doesn’t consume our dreams. But when paired with overwhelming stress and anxiety, there’s a pretty good chance that what you spend your time on during the day will make its way into your dreams at night.
It’s something we don’t really notice most of the time. What we spend our time on seems normal to us, so it doesn’t trigger anything unique when we encounter it in our dreams. But nuclear war? Yeah, that’s something you remember.
Theurer’s reoccurring dreams were terrifying; they weren’t your average nightmares. They felt real, often leaving him questioning whether he was still in this dream state when he woke up. But upon forcing himself to encounter these atrocities constantly, day in and day out, for six months at a time, he began to wear down. The constant overconsumption of such dark and powerful material began to take hold, taking something that was once a terrifying, irregular occurrence and turning it into the new norm.
As development continued, Theurer knew that these nightmares were beginning to become an issue. He had to finish Missile Command—and quickly. They had only been working on the game for six months, but it had begun consuming his every thought, something that increasingly worried Theurer as he raced toward the finish line, repeating, “It’ll be worth it. It’ll be worth it. It’ll be …”