FROM RECRUITMENT TOOLS TO FLASHING MIND CONTROL PATTERNS, conspiracy theories surrounding arcades and their most popular titles were rampant during the late 1970s, often involving mysterious suited figures watching from afar in arcades.
The public was in a state of distrust. Though events weren’t as dramatic as you might see on television, the Cold War served as a reminder that life wasn’t always as simple as it seemed. Could you trust those around you? Probably. But what if you couldn’t?
The scenario goes like this: You’re at your local arcade one day and suddenly there’s a new game, one you’ve never seen before. You give it a shot—and immediately die. It’s much harder than the other games in the arcade, but you aren’t yet sure if that’s by design or the result of poor programming. Could this be a purposefully difficult game that’s going to become the next big challenge between you and your friends, or is it just some poorly designed, unknown arcade game the owner added to bump up his intake of your hard-earned quarters? Who knows, but you’re hooked.
Your mom has sent you there for a few hours and you have to make your quarters last the whole time. You’re in it to win it; quarter after quarter, it’s all starting to come together—you’re figuring out the patterns and adapting, making it farther with each attempt until it finally happens: you make it to the kill screen, the point at which the game can no longer be played, as the player has exceeded the programming capabilities of the hardware.
The screen flashes an incoherent pattern—brainwashing you with a complete mind dump of classified government material before shutting down. You pull your attention back to the room and hear “Mr. Rubens, we need to speak with you,” at which point you’re inducted into the CIA on the spot.
This is an extreme example, but this is what kids were thinking of at the time—it seemed like something that could be possible, mainly because your friend’s cousin in Cleveland heard it had happened, and they never heard from that kid again. We knew your friend’s cousin was making it up, but it didn’t really matter; there was some part of us that wanted to believe it.
Maybe you didn’t even need to reach the kill screen, but instead one day you’d come back to the arcade and the machine would be gone with the arcade owner having “no recollection of that machine.” Soon enough, you get a visit where guys in suits are asking if you’re “ASS” from the top of the leaderboard, ready to recruit you for a top-secret program.
So you might be thinking, “Um, that sounds like the plot of the 1984 film The Last Starfighter.” And you’d be right.
People like to believe in such conspiracies. It’s the same feeling many share about aliens: you aren’t going to be the guy running around telling everyone that you believe aliens are real, but you aren’t ruling it out either. That’s more or less how the conversation went around these theories.
“Well, they have to recruit from somewhere, don’t they?”
“It makes sense as they’d probably want someone who’s good with technology!”
“They need young recruits with fast reflexes to train into supersoldiers!”
But was any of it true? Who knows. Perhaps some of it was, but it was likely much stealthier than a group of guys nervously watching from the corner of the arcade. In fact, that group some kid probably saw and told everyone was the government? That was more likely programmers like Dave Theurer and his team running a “field test”—a series of tests where companies like Atari would pay an arcade owner to place their machine inside the arcade for a few days so they could observe player behavior and then make changes where necessary. This was a required step of production at Atari and is still something done with video games today. Nowadays they just bring a focus group of players into a development studio for a day and make them sign a boatload of nondisclosure agreements, but the idea is still the same.
These field tests were vital to the success of the game; not just for squashing bugs and ensuring that what they were asking players to do was feasible, but also to ensure that players were actually having a good time and that they weren’t just being distracted by a new shiny cabinet that was a nice break from their usual favorite. Programmers were required to do a few of them for each game, making changes as quickly as possible and burning a new circuit board (or ROM), to get it right back out there for another test. Because of this speed and the importance put on these tests, this was often one of the most stressful times of production—a fact that only amplified the nightmares that Theurer was experiencing.
In order for these tests to take place, he had to have a playable build of the game ready in time to be burned to a ROM and placed in a machine. It wasn’t like it is now, where you can just patch in fixes; it had to be ready for the public once it went in that machine.
These tests were a great opportunity for bar or arcade owners. Typically with a normal arcade cabinet, quarters would be split between the venue owner and the cabinet operator. With these field tests, however, Atari would pass 100 percent of the revenue through to owners in exchange for letting the company conduct its tests. All the owners had to do was have one of their staff members keep a tally of how many people were playing on the machine for a specific period of time.
The real challenge came from the secrecy required for this task, as the company had to keep a low profile so word didn’t get out it was testing something unreleased. If it did, competitors would show up almost immediately, posing as normal patrons; they’d pull out a small notepad and begun to take note of everything they possibly could about the machine. They’d dump quarter after quarter into it, trying to figure out the gameplay mechanics, systems, and programming tricks so they could create a clone and distribute it prior to the full release of the game being tested.
This is where Atari itself was causing a bit of a slowdown. With just a single programmer assigned to design and create each game, a competing team could easily implement the programming aspects of the design and create a knockoff in a much faster time frame since they didn’t need to go through all of the processes that Atari required at the time. They didn’t need to field test. They didn’t need to go through layers of approval. They’d just find a game that was already designed, take as many notes as they could about it, and immediately attempt to re-create it for immediate release, often beating the original game to market, though with a much inferior product.
Even with that risk ever present, these field tests were vital to figuring out what players thought would be fun. The development team would sit nearby, blending in as typical bar or arcade patrons, and take notes of how players were reacting to the game so they could make changes to the gameplay between field tests and fine-tune aspects of how the game worked.
These tests weren’t just for the gameplay, though; they were also used to test how people reacted to the cabinet and their attraction to it. This proved to be an extremely vital aspect of the Missile Command tests, as major revisions were made to the cabinet throughout these tests.
Though these tests were stressful, their outcomes reinforced why leadership was so adamant about these tests being such an important part of the overall development process at Atari.
Time lines were different back then though. Developers couldn’t spend years working on a game; they had to get it out and get started on the next one. Because of this, Theurer didn’t have forever to fix stuff after a field test. Instead, he had to make what changes he wanted to make and get the next one set up. This resulted in an overwhelming schedule for Atari programmers, especially Theurer, who was so focused on getting ready for the next field test that he wouldn’t sleep for days on end. In one instance, this caught up with him, as he didn’t leave the office for nearly four days—ninety-six hours straight—as his deadline was quickly approaching, and he wouldn’t have been able to finish in time working mere eight-hour days.
It got to the point where, though he had finished the work he needed to on the game, he lost motor functions and was unable to operate the machine that burned the ROMs for the arcade cabinets. He had finished what they needed for the next round of field tests, but physically couldn’t manufacture it to take with them the next day. “I couldn’t remember how to punch the buttons on the keyboard,” says Theurer. He had finished all he needed to, but he had fried his brain in the process and just couldn’t figure out how to work a keyboard anymore.
Unable to continue on his own, Theurer ignored the signs that his body was telling him to take a break; ignoring the metaphysical alarm bells ringing in his ear, he opted to call in a favor. He called a friend to come to the office and work the machine for him. He explained to his friend what they needed do and exactly how to do it. Missile Command was ready for the field test that next day, but Theurer was left exhausted and barely functioning.
These were the lengths to which Theurer’s obsession grew. His constant striving for perfection left him working his body to the point of physical deprivation. Hearing stories like this, it becomes a lot easier to understand the obsessive nature behind the project for Theurer and see how easy it can be for a single thought to completely take over one’s every waking moment. It’s no wonder that his mind had room for these visions to manifest themselves into obsessive nightmares that, even once his sleep habits recovered, couldn’t be completely flushed from his subconscious.
Theurer isn’t alone in this type of all-encompassing obsession; it’s something many creative people struggle with, and it can be found in video game creation backstories to this day. Following the indie gaming revolution of 2008-2011, there were hundreds—if not thousands—of creators out there who believed that they alone could build something to be enjoyed by millions of people. These developers didn’t have a ton of experience or a specific story to tell, so often their game’s narratives centered around their own personal stories. This personal drive to tell a story is different from what Theurer experienced, but the end result is still the same.
While Theurer and others at Atari might have been responsible for some of the confusion around these field tests and the urban legends that surrounded them, there are plenty of such stories they had nothing to do with. In a time when espionage was rampant and homegrown spies were one of the commonly held fears of the everyday American, it wasn’t totally unusual for people to see what they wanted to see.
Atari employees sneaking over to a machine to insert a new test ROM into the game could easily be mistaken for government officials pulling data from the machine to start recruitment, or spies dropping information that could hurt the United States. There were rumors flying around about all types of games, not just Missile Command, but the game’s thematic elements and the anticommunist spirit of the country at the time helped lend some credibility in the eyes of conspirators (or those they were just trying to convince) that cemented theories surrounding this game slightly more than those of other games.
For most, they were nothing more than silly chatter spouted by the same conspiracy theorists who were still shouting that the CIA killed President John F. Kennedy and that the Apollo moon landings were faked, but for some, the fact that it was connected to a relatively new medium that was experiencing nearly supernatural growth added just a tinge of believability. In their eyes, it made total sense that the government would try to recruit those who were able to decode a game’s basic systems and find a way to circumvent them, all in the short time frame that a single quarter provided. That kind of high-functioning approach to creative problem solving was exactly the type of thing government agencies were looking for, even—or in some cases, especially—at such a young age. When it came to in-game performance, some thought top scorers were sure to be extremely capable of the piloting of aircraft or other combat vehicles—much like the plot of The Last Starfighter or Future Man. The former held greater weight despite being the more ludicrous of the two, if only because it was the dream of every teenage boy at the time.
Finally, there were rumors of secret machines placed in arcades that were programmed to deliver mind-controlling information via the flashes of light on the screen. While there’s no definitive proof that any such cabinets ever existed, that doesn’t stop people from claiming they experienced it at the time. One such rumor that is often cited is that of Polybius, a mysterious arcade cabinet that is reported to have appeared in Portland, Oregon, arcades in 1981. These reports claim that those who played it ended up suffering from amnesia, night terrors, and a host of other ailments, and that men in black suits were sneaking into the arcades later to retrieve data from the machines.
Then, one day, all the machines disappeared without a trace. They were never seen again until 1998, when a post online appeared from someone who claimed to be in possession of a Polybius logic board. Many consider this post to be the real start of Polybius, with revisionist history building on unsubstantiated conspiracies theories to fill in the backstory. With these conspiracy theories flying around at the time, it’s likely that people just piggybacked off the popular theory to help attach some validity to their claims, but whether it actually existed or not, it’s another example of just how profoundly the culture of mistrust and misdirection spread roots in everything, including pop culture.
Regardless, Theurer refutes all claims of outside influence on Missile Command, as does the rest of his former team at Atari. Just like most other arcade urban legends, these are patently false. Though it’s fun to imagine that something much bigger was going on, anyone who did see anything was likely a part of one of Atari’s many field tests and was lucky enough to take part in it.
The endless urban legends from this period are prime examples of just how deeply video games had engulfed the American consciousness. Even when they weren’t playing, people wanted these games to be a part of their life. They wanted there to be a bigger story, something that went far beyond what they knew to be true at the time. It was like a ghost story: it didn’t matter if you really believed it or not; there was always that 1 percent that thought maybe it was true, so you might as well pass it along to your friends.
A kill screen is an endgame state of an arcade release. Essentially, it’s the point where the game can no longer progress any further, and it was required to stop the game due to technical limitations. Missile Command does have a kill screen of sorts, but it doesn’t work in the same way. For Missile Command, the game reaches a state in which you just continue to play forever, doing the same thing over and over again with new cities being awarded with each round under the game’s Marathon Settings. It was extremely common for arcade games to encounter a kill screen at some point and, in many famous examples, like Pac-Man, was actually the result of a design flaw. Many of these games weren’t programmed with an official ending in mind. For the most part, you just played for as long as you could, and the game ended when you lost all your lives. There wasn’t a final boss, final level, nothing. This meant that if players were good enough, they could continue to increase their score or reach a numerical point where the game’s processor couldn’t handle it anymore and crashed. It’s essentially what everyone feared would happen with computers when Y2K came at the turn of the twenty-first century: the games weren’t made to accommodate numbers that high, and would crash once they rolled over to a certain point. For Pac-Man, this manifested in the form of a perfect score that cannot be beat. This disappeared when we reached the 16-bit era, as hardware improved and programmers no longer had issues with the score exceeding the limited amount of memory available.