11

Into the Wild

IN MODERN GAMING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE GENERALLY, THE term “beta” is thrown around pretty loosely. It used to be that beta tests would go live six months or so before a video game was set to hit the shelves so that its developers could actually implement any changes that needed to be made. Now, more often than not, very few drastic changes based on player feedback will actually go into effect, and a beta test is seen as a marketing opportunity to get the game into players’ hands prior to release. Back in the day, though, these field tests were a massive part of the development process.

When Dave Theurer, Rich Adam, and their team at Atari did field tests for Missile Command, they were making substantial changes after each visit. Theurer’s style has always been to run through as many options as possible to find out what plays the best, so these field tests were heaven to him—that is, if you don’t count the accompanying stress. Being able to get real-time feedback on what players did or didn’t like before sending that information out as changes to be pressed onto millions of arcade boards was extremely valuable.

How did players like the trackball? How did they like the colors? Was the game too difficult? Was it fun? These were all questions that field tests sought to answer. As Theurer got his answers, he continued work on the project, pouring in more hours than ever before as he neared the finish line. He knew he was getting close and that he couldn’t take much more of the hell that the game was putting him through. Sure, he could have quit, but that wasn’t who Theurer was. He wanted to get his message out there, and knew that it could only succeed if he did it right then.

With deadlines in place and workers at the ready, they needed to start finalizing designs to get Missile Command out the door on time. One major aspect of this was the cabinet that would house the game. As with most games at the time, the cabinet was a player’s first impression. If you didn’t have a cool cabinet, the chances of someone giving your game a shot were less than optimal. During the arcade craze of the late 1970s and early 1980s, you really needed to stand out—and that meant more than having pretty artwork.

As a result, Theurer and Adam decided to do something totally different with the cabinet, something that hadn’t been done before. They wanted to replace the typical marquee top of an arcade cabinet with a function light panel that was tied to events in the game. This attempt to bring the game to the physical world was something entirely unique, and they weren’t sure how players were going to react.

The panel would display status indicators about your cities and how close incoming missiles were to destroying them. It was extremely cool, and no other arcade game at the time had it. Yet upon taking it out into the wild for some field tests, they realized a fatal flaw of their unique design: players had to take their eyes off the gameplay. As they progressed in the game, they kept looking up at the panel, which made Theurer and Adam happy, but when they looked back at the screen they had lost track of what they were doing. At high-level play, this loss of focus was undesirable.

It sounds so obvious in retrospect that this wouldn’t work, but they were so focused on making the cabinet design cool that they hadn’t really thought about how it would play out on a practical level. As a result of this discovery, they decided to remove the light-filled panel and create a very simple design that would catch the eye of potential players but leave the gameplay to do the talking. “[The players] kept looking up to check the status lights and stuff, so we just chopped off the whole top of the cabinet,” recalls Theurer, who has the prototype in his garage to this day.

There was another hidden benefit of getting rid of this panel: cost reduction. At the time, having to manufacture an arcade cabinet for every copy of the game was a massive cost. In fact, even without the light panel, Missile Command’s build cost, not including labor, was $871. “[We] saved ourselves a whole lot of money without hurting the gameplay any,” Theurer remembers.

With this reduction in scope, they were finally ready to wrap up production and send the game off to manufacturing. Theurer and Adam poured countless hours into double-checking every aspect of what they had done. With these small teams, they didn’t have massive quality control departments that ensured everything was up to the company’s standards. They only had their team. All the same, they pushed through, knowing they were so close to completion.

Deprived of sleep and haunted by his own creation, Theurer finished up his last few tasks, becoming emotional as he pressed the key to start the final compiling of the build for the circuit board they would put into production. It had only been a few months since Theurer had started on Missile Command, but it felt like eternity, and the emotional toll was much greater than he had ever imagined it would be when he set out on the project. He had entered as a man determined to finish a project and get his name out there; he left reconsidering whether he ever wanted to make another game again. The cost of getting his message out there was high, but he was elated to finally be done with it.

Theurer finished the build and handed it off to the engineering team to make it a reality. They began work so that it could be sent off to the manufacturing plant down the road to begin pressing the boards. Getting in his car to drive home, Theurer hoped it had all been worth it. He wouldn’t know for sure until a few months later, when the game was ready to be sent out to arcades, but for now he was content. Who knows, perhaps he might finally get some rest.

WHEN THE FIRST completed cabinets began shipping out later in 1980, Theurer sat at the office working on his next project, Tempest. With everyone at the office fawning over Missile Command during tests, he was as confident as he could be that the game was going to be a hit. He eagerly awaited results back from arcades and couldn’t help but be excited to know that the first players were experiencing what he had dedicated his life so fully to for the last few months. It had been a passion of his and he wanted so badly for that to show in the message he crafted into the gameplay.

As the game hit arcades and players were given the first opportunities to play it, the feedback started rolling in. They loved it; it was an instant hit. It was hailed for its uniqueness, color graphics, and challenging score-based gameplay, all of which were massive draws for arcade games at the time. It was truly revolutionary, like nothing most people had seen before, and arcade fans actually traveled to be among the first to play it at one of the arcades that received the first few units. Most of all, it was extremely fun even in spite of the moral limitations he had imposed on the game.

Theurer was ecstatic. They had done it: they had taken an idea pulled from a magazine advertisement seen in passing and turned it into the most popular arcade game in the world. It wasn’t an easy task, and it certainly wasn’t without its casualties along the way, but looking back on it, their work pushed the boundary of what was possible in an arcade game at a time when most people were just trying to produce as many as possible. They had done something different, and the overwhelming response reflected that creativity.

It was the most popular game in arcades at the time, a title that most game developers would be proud to hold; even so, for Theurer it was always about the underlying message about the state of the world at the time. He wanted to craft an experience that lasted beyond a quarter, that pushed players to experience the fragility of war through their own eyes. And that’s exactly what he did, even if most players didn’t realize it at the time. Just as Theurer had been affected by the message of the game, so had his players. Many of them were getting their first taste of what nuclear war might actually look like. They had heard about it everywhere they went, unable to escape the conflicting narratives surrounding its simultaneous narratives of destruction and protection, but now they were actually witnessing a version of it.

Rhetoric was strong at the time. The general underlying theme of all discussions around nuclear war was that the United States would never strike first. It wasn’t about engaging in war, it was about protecting ourselves from war. “We aren’t going to do anything, but if they do and we’re going down, they’re going down with us.” This concept of mutually assured destruction left many confused about the right path forward.

But Theurer’s message was different. What if we didn’t do this? If we weren’t going to survive an attack, what good would it do us to counterattack? What if we instead focused on addressing this devastating scenario from the start and came up with a better solution than stockpiling weapons that wouldn’t benefit us? These were the questions he wanted people to ask. He wanted to give people a look at how nuclear war would end in the hope that they would realize just how devastating it could be. He wanted them to know that there is no winner in nuclear war.

Most people didn’t get any of this from the game. They had fun and they kept coming back, watching as their cities blew up and moving on with their day as if nothing had happened, but it had lasting no effect on them. And that was okay. Theurer knew he wasn’t going to get his message across to everybody. Heck, he knew only a small percentage of people might even be able to detach the scenario from the game to really think through it, and even then, they might disagree with the basic premise. He didn’t care; even getting the message across to one person was worth it.

It took time for this message to truly take hold; it wasn’t something that people were able to grab hold of immediately. They didn’t have time to extract deep commentary about the Cold War because they were still too close to it; they were living in it. The message was there, and people were digesting it, but it wasn’t yet clear how much of an impact it could have on the average player’s understanding of the situation. It was a connection that most were unable to make at the time, but the hope was for long-term impact.

Theurer knew that this would be the case. That’s why he needed something that wasn’t just fun, but was so fun and unique that it would be capable of lasting for generations to come; that’s what he needed from Missile Command. And while the game’s qualities and technical achievements cannot be understated, it was this mind-set and Theurer’s approach to the message that allowed it to achieve the success that it did. Without that, Missile Command would have been just another arcade game. It needed that lens to captivate the audience, and captivate it did. It was fun, exciting, and joyous to play. It captured the American consciousness and took hold of an industry in a way that few games had done before. To this day, we’re still in awe of Missile Command as a technical and entertainment marvel, despite the fact that it was surpassed technologically in the years following its release. We were given something so basic as an arcade defender game, but with a complicated and deep message that even today works to show that games can be more than just entertainment; they can be art.