IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING ITS RELEASE, MISSILE COMMAND remained a steady icon of both arcade gaming and 1980s culture. It had elevated video gaming content and goals far beyond what was standard, choosing instead to craft an important narrative around the gameplay itself. Most games have a narrative, but very few craft an external narrative that isn’t just a setup for the gameplay but is instead a result of that gameplay. Missile Command stood out from the crowd because of this. It wasn’t just an arcade game from the 1980s; it was the arcade game from the 1980s.
The game became a staple of any popular arcade and went on to become one of Atari’s most popular machines at the time. It was a hot seller, and that success translated well to its developers, Dave Theurer and Rich Adam. Not only had they broken the first-game curse at Atari (a feat that would later be renamed Theurer’s Law, as he was the first to actually accomplish it), but he’d also created the hottest game on the market. Atari couldn’t keep up with demand, spinning up its local production facility to produce more cabinets than could ever have been imagined. In the end, Atari ended up producing more than twenty thousand arcade cabinets, which was a massive success for both Atari and Theurer. While this was certainly no Space Invaders or Asteroids, which went on to sell 360,000 units and 100,000 units, respectively, Missile Command was extremely successful, securing a spot as one of the twenty most-sold arcade games of all time, according to IGN.
Theurer and Adam were propelled from first-time project leads to superstars at Atari. They had taken something basic and turned it into a masterpiece. This now allowed them to do whatever they wanted. They could take another project from Steve Calfee or they could come up with something on their own. While they were figuring out what they would do now that the project was done, the game was continuing to see massive success across the world and communities began forming around their love for the game.
With such a large aspect of arcade communities being focused on score-based competition, Missile Command was a perfect fit. They had followed Atari founder Nolan Bushnell’s rule of “easy to learn, difficult to master” precisely and, as a result, created a game that could essentially run forever without worrying about someone beating the game—meaning they could compete via score battles for as long as they could go. And compete they did.
In late 1980, when the game released, we were halfway through the appointed “golden era of arcade gaming” and competition was all the rage. It wasn’t uncommon to be playing with friends and drop everything you were doing when you got word that someone was attempting to break a record at your local arcade. Arcades were the place to be, so seeing someone do something special in your spot was a big event, especially for kids who found the arcade to be their primary hangout spot. As these communities formed, it became clear that this dedicated audience would grab Missile Command and never let go. The game was perfect for competitive play: it was endless (more or less), extremely complex, and based entirely on score. You didn’t have to keep all your cities alive if you didn’t want to; as long as you had one left, you were still in the game. Missile Command’s unique approach to gameplay meant that you could go about it a million different ways, and new techniques were popping up all the time.
You may have heard of Billy Mitchell, the loud, bombastic, mullet-rocking world record holder whom many love to hate. Mitchell, along with others, were some of the world’s first pro gamers, long before you could become one while still in high school and make a career out of it. It was less about twitch reactions and more about being able to understand the patterns behind the gameplay and capitalize on them, but it was just as difficult as ever.
At the time that Missile Command was released, these guys were looked upon as rock stars. If Billy Mitchell was going to make an appearance at your local arcade, it felt like the whole town came out for it. He’d pick a machine and start trying to break the high score on it as dozens of arcade goers looked on in disbelief. Despite the game’s popularity at the time, the Missile Command scene never really had any rock stars. Sure, there were a few guys who held records and were looked up to by big Missile Command fans, but there was no one king at the top of the mountain … at least, not yet.
This changed in 1981 as one of these competitive players stumbled on Missile Command for the first time. Little did he know it would become his obsession as he engaged in a lifelong battle for supremacy. Before we get too deep into this, know that despite how crazy this sounds, it’s entirely true, even if some participants don’t want you to know that. Now strap in and prepare yourself for some betrayal and intrigue. It doesn’t get better than this.
London, 1981
Enter Tony Temple. An ordinary man by all accounts, Temple wasn’t like the rest of the competitive gaming community. He didn’t spend years in an arcade making a name for himself as he took over the arcade’s top spot on each game; he just stumbled into it. One day Temple was walking home and saw the Missile Command cabinet through the window of an arcade. It was striking, unlike anything he had ever seen before, and he couldn’t resist the urge to give it a shot. The game had just arrived from the United States, and though it had taken nearly a year for it to make the trek across the ocean, somehow no one really knew it was coming and he was able to start sinking his coins into it before almost anyone else.
He was fascinated by the trackball—he’d never seen anything like it, and fell in love with it. Most games used simple joysticks at the time, so the trackball intimidated traditional arcade goers, but not Temple. He put in his coin and began to play, experiencing total sensory overload as he defended his cities from incoming attacks. It was frantic and powerful, instilling an immediate sense of fear in him.
Even in the UK, being relatively removed from the front lines of the Cold War, the tension coursed through his veins, adding to the fear he experienced through the unique setup of the game’s controls.
Temple returned day after day, putting more and more time into the game. Eventually he became quite good at it, as he was able to capitalize on this frantic nature and use it to his advantage. The very aspect that drew him to Missile Command drove others away, allowing him to become fully immersed and continue building his skills without needing to hop off the cabinet for anyone else in line. He enjoyed the challenge, but others didn’t. “It handed you your ass every single time,” Temple remembers affectionately.
He didn’t play anything else, only Missile Command. Because of his rabid dedication, he quickly became known around the arcade as the Missile Command Guy, a title he quite enjoyed. Admittedly, he was a one-trick pony, but that was by choice. At the time there wasn’t much competition around him for Missile Command, as evidenced by the fact that he earned that nickname. This gave him the opportunity to compete against himself and to continue to hone his skills. He started worrying less about other players and focused on increasing his score, seeing how high he could push it, with no limit in sight. Then it happened: he hit a new high score, and found that the limit did exist … even if it wasn’t supposed to.
Score: 810,000
The first time Tony Temple hit 810,000 points, he was in his local London arcade, just as he was most days. Without much competition, and with a fan base beginning to build at his local arcade, Temple often drew a small crowd, including the arcade’s owner, who came to watch him performing at such a high level. Temple was able to hit 810,000 and, upon doing so, bonus cities started to appear out of nowhere, sending everyone into a panic, including Temple. Assuming the machine was broken and in danger of destroying itself, the owner ran over to it and pulled the power cord from the wall. “God bless him,” remembers Temple. “He honestly thought the thing was going to catch fire.” They didn’t know what to do—no one had ever gotten this far before.
At the time, most video games had multiple settings that could be engaged in case you wanted to have different modes enabled. Missile Command had a few, though it was typically set to Marathon Settings, as that was the most common and recommended mode for arcade play. Yet Temple discovered that under these settings you could receive a bonus city every 10,000 points once you hit 810,000. If you were able to do this, the game was essentially over as far as Temple was concerned. Handing out bonus cities at that frequency meant that you would eventually gain cities faster than you could lose them, turning it more into a game of endurance than skill. It took away the challenge for him—he had reached the peak. Luckily the bar was set high, and scoring 810,000 wasn’t a regular occurrence for him, but as competition continued to dwindle, he began to fear the worst. Things may have been fierce in the United States, but there wasn’t anything happening in the United Kingdom. Eventually there was no one left to beat, not even himself. He’d reached 810,000, and there wasn’t anyone else competing around him. He was too skilled for his own good. He never saw competition in 1982; it was too late, as interest in a competitive scene had mostly waned in his area.
Soon enough the cabinets began to disappear from arcades—often converted to house other games, smashed, or just dumped in the trash, to be replaced by newer, more updated games. It was the middle of the golden era of arcade gaming, but none of these other games grabbed Temple like Missile Command had. One day he walked into his local arcade and realized he had played his last game: the machine had disappeared, and so had Temple’s dreams of competing.
The Revival
As time passed, Missile Command was released outside of arcades, but it just wasn’t the same for Temple. “I remember playing on a PC and thinking, ‘This just isn’t as good as the arcade experience,’” he recalls. If it wasn’t as good as the arcade, he wasn’t going to play it. With each subsequent release, Temple hoped he would find a glimmer of the perfection he had experienced all those years ago, but it was lost. PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PC—nothing did it for him. He needed the unique controls to match the gameplay. It just wasn’t Missile Command to him without them. So he moved on.
The years continued to fly by. Then, when Temple was in his late thirties, he randomly bumped into someone who collected old arcade machines. They began talking, yammering on about the good old days, and Temple brought up his fondness for Missile Command all those years before. The man stopped mid-conversation and said, “Oh, come with me.”
Temple followed the man back to his house, and deep in his basement, there it was, right in front of him, as if perfectly and meticulously removed from the farthest corners of his nostalgia-ridden memories: a Missile Command arcade cabinet. At first unable to speak due to shock, he finally muttered, “My God …”
Flooded with emotions and vivid memories of his best days, he couldn’t help but relive them: the frantic play, the celebration, the elation when reaching a new personal milestone. He recalled the accomplishment he felt when he found a new pattern in the machine and was able to tame it to his advantage. This run-in was the final push he needed to regain the sense of competition and passion he had been chasing for so many years. “I had to have one,” he recalls. “I’ve just got to have that machine.”
And off the two went, finding a machine for Temple. This was quite the task, as most of the Missile Command machines that were available in the UK had, at one point or another, been destroyed or repurposed when the arcade owners no longer had a use for them. Finding one wouldn’t be an easy process, but they were determined. They asked around, talking to collectors and former arcade owners, eventually stumbling on one—or what was left of one—for sale. It was pretty beat up, not at all in the same pristine shape as the one in the man’s basement, but it was Tony’s. Even a busted machine was worth the world to him. He was determined enough that he had no issue with the work required to fix it. Lucky for him, that’s exactly what his new friend had just done. Over the course of the next few months, they went to work restoring the once-junked cabinet to its former glory. It took an exceptional amount of work and would never have been possible without the help of his new friend, but they did it, and the machine now resides in Temple’s basement, bringing some of the grandeur that his local arcade once exuded. Now that he had the cabinet, he was ready to get playing. What came next formed the basis for everything Missile Command has come to represent for Temple.
The Discovery
Though his early formative years with Missile Command were the guiding light for his desire to own the game himself, Tony Temple’s skill and passion in his second life with Missile Command would find a spotlight at heights never before achieved, and decades after his first encounter with the game.
Following the completion of his restoration, he finally sat down to play his first game on his own cabinet. It was finally happening, and Temple couldn’t contain his excitement. He had done all that work purely for nostalgia reasons, but once he played that first game, he realized something. “I’ve still got the old chops,” he said to himself, “my skills are still there.”
He began digging around on the internet for other Missile Command players to see if the game had any kind of competitive community. He hadn’t been able to do this the first time around—the internet wasn’t around then, and he had to rely on those in his local arcade for information. He found the high scores that were widely considered to be the best at the time and was a bit surprised. “Well, I reckon I can get those,” he said to himself. He’d excelled in his earlier years, and it didn’t seem like his skills had deteriorated that much. He figured it was worth a shot. Looking at the scores again, he realized there was something different from when he had played the first time. These scores were all achieved on Tournament Settings, something Temple had never heard of before. He wasn’t even aware there were multiple settings for the game; he just thought everyone had the same game and had encountered the same issues he had. Once he did some digging, he realized just how big of a game changer this was for him.
He quickly discovered that he had been playing on Marathon Settings all along, as had most people who casually enjoyed Missile Command. But Marathon Settings suffered from the 810,000-point bug Temple had encountered all these years ago. Because of this bug, most people didn’t consider it to be a truly competitive mode. They wanted something that was a challenge without giving the player handouts to survive. This is where Tournament Settings come in. In this mode, you get your six cities to start and that’s it. There are no bonus cities for achieving certain milestones or progression points; once you lose your cities, they’re gone forever. As you might have guessed, this appealed to Temple, and he was hooked once again.
Had he known all along that this mode existed and there was still a competitive community formed around the game, things wouldn’t have ended so limply back in 1982. He was rejuvenated and excited about the prospect of competing again. With a newfound understanding of modern competitive Missile Command, Temple went to his basement and opened up his cabinet. He dug out the manual and started tinkering around to enable Tournament Settings. If he was going to play competitively again, he was going to do it right.
Though Temple didn’t find Marathon Settings to be challenging, many others did, and competition continued to flourish. At the same time that Temple had initially given up, one man had just finished a thirty-hour game of Missile Command, taking place entirely on Marathon Settings. With a score of 41,399,845, Jody Bowles became the new world champion.
This record was short-lived, as his record was doubled the following year by Victor Ali, who was reported to play for fifty-six hours straight to achieve this score. This record stood for more than thirty years, until 2013, when Victor Sandberg surpassed Ali’s score by 1,431,040 points. Sandberg later broke his own record with a score of 103,809,990, a feat that took nearly seventy-two hours to accomplish.
Judging by the numbers, Temple’s assumption that it was all an endurance game was correct. In order to compete you had to be willing to play for days at a time. As you played, you built up a reserve of extra cities that many players would use to give themselves breaks away from the game. You couldn’t build up too many, though—if it went above 256 cities, the game would crash, making the challenge much more difficult, as you had to keep track of that over time.
As of 2018, there is still much competition for the title of world champion.
Little Time for a New Record: 2005–2006
Temple felt alive. He had not only rebuilt something that was such a large part of his life all those years earlier but also discovered that he wasn’t alone in his love for Missile Command. Toward the end of his time with the game in the early 1980s, he had started to feel as if he was the only one who cared about Missile Command in the UK. Sure, people cared enough to watch him, but his standing as the Missile Command Guy should tell you everything you need to know about how much competition there was. He now hoped that having the internet would mean he didn’t have to be alone, even if he was the only one in the UK really competing. For something as physical as arcade gaming, it was surprising to him to see such a strong online community built around the game, whether they were playing it or just watching as former players.
He made the switch to Tournament Settings and set off to beat what he believed to be the standing world record at the time. He put in the work, his skills quickly coming back to him, and reached the 1,000,000-point mark with ease, a feat he deemed to be quite significant based on other competition. Despite the large online community built around competitive arcade play, there still weren’t a ton of people playing Missile Command competitively at the time. Because of this, Temple’s score attempts really lit up the scene. Though he may have left the spotlight nearly twenty-five years earlier, Temple was regaining notoriety in the scene and was beginning to gain an audience determined to see him crowned world champion. It was certainly nothing like the arcade rock star days of the 1980s, but he was just happy to know people were out there rooting for him.
In just a short time Temple had surpassed even his original skill level; he was continuously posting scores over 1,000,000 points. Believing he was in the running for the world record, he got in touch with Walter Day, the founder of Twin Galaxies, to get an update on the competitive scene and where his own score landed on the charts. Even to this day, Twin Galaxies is the beall and end-all of competitive arcade gaming. Anytime you’ve seen a story about record-setting competitive play, whether in Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, it went through Walter Day and Twin Galaxies. Just as Guinness is synonymous with world records, so are Day and Twin Galaxies for arcade gaming records. Day held competitions and flew around the world to help officiate record-setting runs; if it had anything to do with competitive play, he was there in his famous custom Twin Galaxies video-game referee jersey.
Walter Day was the founder of Twin Galaxies, a video game record-keeping company that is widely regarded as the gold standard for world record scores. The company has found itself at the center of many controversies that all stem from score impropriety over the decades that Twin Galaxies has been in operation. Whether falsified scores or unclear guidelines, there’s never been a shortage of something to debate about Twin Galaxies.
If anyone knew anything about the current competitive scene for Missile Command, it was going to be Walter Day. Unfortunately for Temple, he didn’t have good news. Temple’s score was short of the current world record set at around 1,690,000 points. Temple may not have held a high enough score to claim the title, but Day continued to encourage him to compete. He clearly showed promise, and it was just a matter of time before that score gap shrank. For Day, it was even more exciting to know that there were people competing in Missile Command again. It was a classic for many, but had been shunted to the side in favor of more modern, technically challenging games. Everything that made Missile Command special—the beautifully colorful graphics, the unique control setup, the antinuclear narrative—also made it a product of the time. As newer games made their way into the scene, Missile Command was easier to replace than other classics like Pac-Man or Space Invaders.
Day was especially happy to see someone building out a competitive scene in the UK. Even if Temple wasn’t competing with anyone else in Britain, Day liked the story of it all. Most of Twin Galaxies’ records across all titles were tracked in the United States, so he liked the rivalry this added to the scene. With most records being in the US, it felt like an invasion from the outside anytime Temple came close to the mark. He wanted to put the UK—and himself—on the map for competitive play, and he would stop at nothing to accomplish it.
Perhaps the most important challenge of all came at the end of that conversation. “As it happens, we’re talking to Guinness,” said Walter Day, “If you can beat that world record by the end of March 2006, there’s a good chance we can get you into the Guinness Book of World Records.” That was all Temple needed to hear. He was going to beat that record, and he was going to beat it good. At the time, it was one of the highest accomplishments a competitive arcade gamer could hope for.
It wasn’t anything like modern e-sports. There was no stadium filled with adoring fans, no multimillion-dollar prize money, no major glory. In 2005, competition wasn’t anywhere near as developed as it is now. You couldn’t live on winning tournaments—the prize money barely covered the costs of traveling to the event and competing. No one was making this a full-time job, but that wasn’t really the purpose. The purpose was to build a legacy. If you could set a record and create a following, you were among the best. And that’s just what Temple intended to do.
In 2005 Temple attended an arcade gaming convention in the UK. For those in attendance, it was a celebration of the games they’d spent their whole lives playing, even if the rest of the gaming community had left those games behind in favor of newer titles. It was a chance to get back into the games they’d once dedicated so many coins to and, in some cases, do so in front of a live audience. As a part of this convention, they had flown in Walter Day and Billy Mitchell, among other arcade competitors, to make appearances and play some competitive games onstage for the audience. As a result, Temple was able to play a game of Missile Command in front of a live audience.
He hadn’t met these arcade legends before; he’d only seen them online and on the scoreboard. Though he was nervous, he was confident that he could perform when put on the spot. Under all the pressure in the world from performing in front of these legends and a massive audience of fans who had just watched them, Temple scored 1,500,000 points, just shy of the world record. Though everyone was disappointed that he wasn’t able to beat the standing record, what he’d just done had been extremely impressive, both to Temple and the audience.
From that point on he was sold. He wanted to compete, and he would stop at nothing short of 1,695,266 on his quest for the title of world champion. It was his sole mission. “I played my guts out,” he remembers, putting in time every day to improve. Temple hadn’t been playing all that long since rediscovering this passion, but he knew he was already operating at 80 percent capacity. He didn’t know everything there was to know, but he knew that improving in a few key areas would help his score drastically, and he was fine with putting in the time to learn these. It was the only way he was going to be able to reliably get a winning score past 1,695,265.
He raced home the second the expo was over and set up his video camera pointed at the screen of his cabinet. He was going to do it, but he’d need it on video if it were to be accepted by Twin Galaxies. He was inspired by what he’d seen at the expo and threw himself into it fully, half expecting it to be a relatively quick feat. Instead, he tried and failed hundreds of times.
It was brutal. Set up the camera, hit record, start the game, fail, walk over to the camera, and restart; repeat one hundred more times that day before finally calling it a night. This went on for months as Temple became more and more aware of the looming March 2006 deadline. He was still confident he could do it, but with every failed attempt, things began to look bleaker.
March was nearing, and Temple knew this was his last shot to make something happen. While he loved the return to competitive Missile Command, he needed a win—he needed to show that there was something bigger for him here. He needed to beat the record. He knew that if he could do it, he could cement his status in the competitive community, despite his location. If he wasn’t able to, there was no telling when his next shot might be.
He tried and tried; starting the tape, stopping the tape, time and time again. It was a tiresome process, but he wanted every detail of his record-breaking run captured, both for Walter Day at Twin Galaxies and also for himself. Though the competition was fierce and he faced extreme difficulties in breaking this record, Temple just loved Missile Command and never wanted to let that enjoyment escape in the process.
With just days left before the deadline, Temple knew he had to throw himself into this completely. With everything that Missile Command meant to him, he’d be kicking himself if he let this opportunity to be immortalized alongside his favorite game pass him by. He would put in the hours, running back-to-back-to-back attempts until he finally did it—if he finally did it.
Then, on March 9, 2006, he had the game of his life. He pulled together everything he had in him, all the passion and skills, a lifetime of love for the game, and beat the 1,695,265-point record that had stood since 1985. In fact, he didn’t just beat it, he destroyed it, setting a mark never believed to be possible in competitive Missile Command: 1,967,830. He was ecstatic. With blood rushing through his veins, he ran to the camera and stopped the recording, ensuring everything was just as it needed to be for his submission. It was as if the pressure had finally built to a point that his body found the skills that had been hidden deep within him for so long. He celebrated, realizing the gravity of what he had just accomplished: he was now the world’s best Missile Command player.
In his excitement he almost forgot the most critical next step: he needed to send the tape to be verified by Robert Mruczek, head referee at Twin Galaxies, to be included in the Guinness Book of World Records. He made a backup copy of the tape, ensuring nothing would get in the way of him and his title, and sent it off to New York. Though this was the culmination of years of play for Temple, it was just the start. This is where the fun begins.
To the Mecca:2008
With his new title of world champion on full display for the world to see, Temple felt as though he had finally conquered the beast. He wasn’t done playing though—not by a long shot. Instead he played more than ever before, enjoying it just as much as he had back in 1981. For Temple, it was never really about just beating the record; he wanted to create a legacy that went far beyond one score. He wanted his skills to be so well known that they transcended the game itself. He wanted to show he was the best to ever play the game constantly, not just that one time he got a high score. He wanted to continually push himself and the score higher and higher, showing that he was the greatest of all time (the GOAT, as most refer to it)—and he wanted to have some fun in the process.
For arcade players, Funspot Family Entertainment Center at Weirs Beach is a heaven of sorts. Located in the small town of Laconia, New Hampshire, home to only 16,470 people, Funspot is the mecca for arcade gaming, sporting the title of the world’s largest arcade, with what some believe to be the largest collection of Missile Command–era arcade games. Because of the wide selection of games available and the legacy associated with the venue, it’s widely regarded as the best possible arcade at which to set a world record and in 2008, this came to a head as Funspot played host to the Tenth Annual International Classic Video Game and Pinball Tournament. This was a massive event—one of the largest ever in the arcade gaming community—and it attracted the best players from around the world to one venue for multiple days of competition.
Temple had made it a habit to take an annual trip out to Funspot to soak up the culture and meet other players, but this was an event he couldn’t miss. He booked a plane ticket and made the trek across the Atlantic to New Hampshire. Little did he know this trip would be unlike any other.
The second Temple entered Funspot, people recognized him. They’d seen him online and knew what he was there for. With his infectious personality, bald head, and British accent, he stood out a bit, too, so it was easy for people to figure out who he was right away. As he walked around and took in the spectacle of the event, people started to follow, hoping they’d get the chance to see him play Missile Command. He was the world champion, after all. He wasn’t there to compete; he just wanted to have a great time, but he couldn’t help himself from playing a few games.
He found the Missile Command machine and pulled up a stool, sitting down for a casual game to pass the time. What came next was nothing short of magical. From the second he put the quarter in the machine, everyone there could tell it was going to be something special. Casually, as if no one was there watching him, Temple just started to play. He quickly shot up past 1,000,000 points, and the crowd went wild, but then they realized what was happening. He passed 1,500,000. He passed 1,690,000—the previous record before him. Then they realized just what they might be seeing: a new world record run. As Temple approached the 1,900,000 mark, the intensity grew. For Temple, it had started as just another game, but for the crowd, it was a euphoric experience as they watched what was clearly some of the best Missile Command play ever seen unfolding in front of their eyes. He got closer and closer to his previous record when, suddenly, he passed it and celebrated as the crowd went wild. They were seeing history in the making—and it wasn’t on the stage. He hadn’t even been attempting to set the record, but there he was, just being Tony Temple.
When he finally lost his last city, he wrapped up with a final score of 2,200,000, setting a new world record and becoming the first person to break the 2,000,000-point mark. For Temple, this was a moment of elation and relief. For years he had always felt like a bit of an outsider. He lived on a different continent from most of the community. He didn’t go to as many events as some of these other guys because of his location. He hadn’t been in it since the 1980s, when most of these superstars first gained their fame. Despite holding the world record, there was still an air of outsider mistrust. Some had never been sure that he had actually achieved the 1,900,000 score legitimately. There was nothing that gave them any inclination that this would be true, but that didn’t stop them from spreading doubt within the community:
“Is it really him playing?”
“Is he manipulating something?”
“I can’t see his hands. What is he doing?”
With one quick game, he’d now eliminated any questions surrounding his legitimacy. Who could challenge what they had just seen with their own eyes? He had played a casual game on a random machine at Funspot; there was nothing he could have done to manipulate that. There wasn’t any question of its qualifications to be used for a competitive score; he had achieved the impossible within the belly of the beast, and he could not have been happier. With this new record, he finally felt like he belonged.
Legendary Status: 2010
Two years removed from his impressive performance at Funspot, Tony Temple found himself yet again dissatisfied with the current state of competitive play. Since he had set the record, no one had even come close to beating him. Though he’d always been competing against himself, he felt as though he needed to up the ante and see how far he could take things.
Since starting his competitive career, he’d always wondered about the Missile Command kill screen. He believed it existed, but no one had ever scored high enough to actually experience it. He didn’t know what it would take, but he knew he needed to be the first to hit that point.
He once again returned to the classic “start camera, fail, stop camera, repeat” routine, but found that he was making more progress than ever before, and had a clear shot at beating his 2,200,000-point record and getting closer to the ever-elusive kill screen. This is when the next evolution of Tony Temple was created. Just months after setting this goal, he hit the kill screen by reaching screen 256, scoring over 4,400,000 points and doubling his previously set world record.
When most didn’t believe the kill screen actually existed, Temple persisted, knowing that at the very least he would eventually beat his high score—and that was still something to be celebrated. That’s the beauty of Temple as a competitor. He doesn’t need someone to challenge him in order to compete. He’s more than willing to best what he’s already done in pursuit of greatness. “[It] was a goal of mine for some time,” he recalls, speaking fondly of the idea to go after the fabled end game. “To be able to have gotten through that, and then to have added quite a slug of numbers on top of it, I was really pleased.” As he should be. He proved something possible that most believed to be impossible, and he did it with style.
Temple was happy with what he had achieved and knew that it only further cemented his status as the best Missile Command player in the world. And while most recognized that and knew they could never compare, others saw it as an opportunity to take a shot at the king.
Enter Mr. Awesome
“Oh, God help us all.”
In every community, there’s always a villain. It might be a top competitor who everyone wants to see dethroned, it might be a cheater who ruins the integrity of the game, or it might just be someone who doesn’t want to admit defeat, unable to let go. No matter who you ask in the competitive coin-op community, Roy Shildt—or Mr. Awesome, as he lovingly refers to himself—is that villain. For everything he claims to do to make the competitive community better, everyone else sees it as doing little else than causing damage and irrevocable harm.
At one point in time, Shildt—who regularly waxes poetic about all the women he gets, and who dresses up in a combination American-flag/European military outfit somehow inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger—was the world record holder for Missile Command and found a deep identity in that title. It represented who he was as a person, and he wanted everyone to know it. He would attend meet-ups and harass everyone with his stories of how great he was and how everyone else sucked—that is, until 2006, when Temple posted his 1,900,000 score, beating Shildt’s score of 1,695,266 set in 1986.
With this defeat taking away the one thing Shildt held so dear, he kicked his antics into overdrive. He began attending every event possible, running around proclaiming that he was the rightful world champion. Instead of attempting to compete with Temple, Shildt opted to presume that something was wrong with Temple’s run. He believed that there was no way anyone could beat him and that they must be cheating if they were able to do so—he set out doing everything he could to find out what this was. He tricked Temple, unaware of Shildt’s reputation, into breaking down every component of his run so that Shildt could find something wrong with it. He started spreading rumors that there wasn’t something right about it, that no one could have beaten his score out of nowhere all these years later.
Eventually he reached the conclusion that this all came down to a trackball setting. You see, throughout Atari’s development of the Missile Command cabinet, the company ended up making changes to the cabinet’s operating manual that discussed the best way to set the machine up, which was fairly common at the time. In two different versions of the manual, Atari listed different positions to have a specific switch in. This switch, when activated, decreased cursor resistance, allowing you to move the cursor at a higher rate of speed. According to the final manual, this switch should be activated, allowing for faster cursor movement. This is what Tony Temple played with, but not Roy Shildt. Shildt used the switch in the off setting, which resulted in a slower cursor, which he believes is the correct way to play, and how he set the original record.
Temple didn’t know any better. He’d set everything up exactly according to how the manual instructed him, and Day didn’t seem to have any instructions to do the opposite; Temple just played the game and got his score. No one would have known any different, but Shildt was determined to assert his findings as the reason that he had finally been beaten. He believed that without this setting enabled, Temple never would have been able to get anywhere near his score—thus equating Temple’s use of the fast cursor as a crutch necessary to keep up with Shildt’s high-level gameplay.
Despite there being two manuals, with no indication of which one was “definitive,” Shildt was adamant that the game should be played with the switch in question in the off position, with the slow trackball setting, and that any other scores were invalid.
Twin Galaxies, the regulating body of competitive arcade scores, disagreed. In 2008 it issued a joint statement with Guinness World Records explaining how they were going to move forward with this, essentially presenting a solution that merged the two divergent paths into one single record accounting for both settings, allowing Temple’s score to stand as the official Guinness World Record and setting the standard rules as “player’s choice.”
This infuriated Shildt and sent him off the deep end more than when Temple had broken his record. Due to his outlandish personality, Shildt had always been seen as a bit of a thorn in the side of the community, but some people sided with him. It essentially boils down to two camps: the first believe that Temple’s settings were the most updated and therefore correct, with the second believing that, regardless of what settings were chosen, Twin Galaxies should have stepped in before awarding Temple the title and later changing the rules to fit what they had awarded. Ultimately, whichever path you believed, it never came down to being Temple’s fault. He was an unfortunate pawn stuck in the middle of a much bigger battle between Roy Shildt and Walter Day. Temple had been told to play on those settings by the Missile Command operating manual, and that’s what he had done. And it doesn’t change what he accomplished.
As a result of the ruling, Shildt began finding every opportunity he could to tell the world of this injustice against him. He believed to the deepest levels of his being that he was in the right, and he wasn’t going to stop until he finally got the recognition he believed he deserved. Unfortunately, as a result of this, he drove everyone away from him by going about this the wrong way. Instead of trying to win people over by explaining the situation, he became irate and attempted to make his point with loud rants that came off just one step above the worst of internet message board conspiracy theories about Area 51.
Shildt became so obsessed with proving his superiority that he tracked down Dave Theurer, demanding an explanation. Theurer, nearly thirty years after the release of the game, had no recollection of this single switch. Even if he had been asked in 1980, he wouldn’t have had an opinion one way or the other. He had nothing to do with the physical production of these boards—that had all been the Atari engineering team—but that didn’t stop Shildt from harassing him at every opportunity he could.
Theurer had already been haunted enough for one lifetime. He didn’t need anymore of it from Shildt, and disavowed anything to do with the Missile Command community as a result of this experience. He would rather never touch it again than have to deal with Shildt yelling about board setting switches and how he was screwed over.
When Theurer didn’t give him the answers he wanted, Shildt turned his sights on Tony Temple, the very man who had dethroned him after twenty long years. He figured that if he could get Temple to dig himself into a hole and somehow discredit himself, he could take these findings to the press and regain his title. This also did not work as planned. Temple, not really knowing who Shildt was at the time, was more than happy to share everything he knew about the game with Shildt.
Unbeknownst to Temple, the documentary King of Kong was being filmed at this same point in time, and featured Shildt prominently as one of Billy Mitchell’s many antagonists. In the film, Mitchell’s Donkey Kong play is challenged by up-and-comer Steve Weibe, who is laid off from his job as an engineer and dedicates his life to breaking the Donkey Kong world record. After much trial and error he finally does, throwing the entire competitive arcade gaming scene for a loop as this unknown player takes the crown. Mitchell, in an attempt to verify this score, sent someone to look at Weibe’s machine, only to find that the cabinet’s board was provided by Roy Shildt, who had vowed to enact revenge on Twin Galaxies for allowing Temple’s score to stand. This immediately threw up red flags for everyone involved, leaving them to believe that Shildt had manipulated the board to trick Twin Galaxies into accepting a bad score and thus invalidate its reputation in the community. This didn’t work, as any association with Shildt’s name was enough for Twin Galaxies to throw out Wiebe’s score for fear that it was invalid, and the plan was foiled.
This wasn’t Shildt’s only run-in with Day, either. At the E4All Expo in 2008, Shildt approached Day and others from Twin Galaxies with a camera, asking them why they didn’t consider his scores to be valid. Day explained to him the statement they had released and his plans for updating their site to better display the differences between scores before challenging Shildt to demonstrate his skills on the machine present at the show. Shildt scored just over 800,000 points, claiming the glare made it unplayable. During this altercation, Day also explained how the lack of physical evidence—which Shildt claims Day had and purposefully destroyed to refute Shildt’s score—and contradictory claims hurt Shildt’s case and made his score unclassifiable.
As much as Tony Temple tried to help Roy Shildt, he was often his own worst enemy. Not knowing when to stop or how best to approach things, he often squandered any chance he had at regaining credibility within the community. In his naïveté, Temple offered multiple times to mend the bridge between Day and Shildt, but to no avail.
In August 2010 Billy Mitchell was inducted into the International Video Game Hall of Fame for his lifetime of achievements in the competitive arcade space. To show his dismay, Shildt had a Douchebag Hall of Fame plaque made, which he presented to Mitchell before being thrown out of the event.
Eventually both Walter Day and Billy Mitchell were forced to threaten restraining orders against Shildt following continued harassment and a letter from Shildt’s attorney threatening an injunction from publication if they didn’t recognize Shildt’s Missile Command score as the true world record.
When Temple eventually stopped replying to him, Shildt turned to the one person he believed could help him: Howard Stern. (Yes, this is serious.) Now, during this time, Shildt did some weird stuff. Whether it was the stress of trying to prove his claims or just the need for recognition, we’ll never know, but Shildt had his sights set on stardom. He wanted to become famous, no matter what the cost. In order to accomplish this, he took out a full-page nude advertisement in Playgirl magazine that spoke of his accomplishments as Mr. Awesome and requested people contact him for acting gigs.
According to Shildt (but entirely unconfirmed by any other source), he received many responses from some of Hollywood’s biggest producers, who he claims tried to get him to engage in sex acts with them in exchange for jobs. He didn’t get any jobs out of this (he claims it’s because he didn’t do it), but years later, on the Howard Stern show in his full Mr. Awesome getup, he claimed he had recorded everything and was in the process of selling it to Madonna (yes, that Madonna) for publication. (Who knows what he thought she would do with it?) Despite all indications to the contrary, Shildt thought this to be a successful opportunity to get the word out about how corrupt Walter Day, Tony Temple, and everyone else in competitive arcade gaming was. Despite making the most noise, this was perhaps the least effective method of getting to the bottom of his claims, and it left Shildt with very few options other than finding more ways to be as loud as possible.
It then became his main objective to attend these events, whether competitions or conventions, and spread his message as far and wide as he possibly could before often being asked to leave.
Schildt has created an entire series of videos using footage of Day and Temple, secretly recorded around the time of Temple’s 2006 world record, that he believes devalues Temple’s score, giving him back the rightful place as Missile Command world champion. This nearly hour-long series of videos, titled Donkey Kong and Missile Command Conspiracy, chronicles the transgressions that he believes were levied against him by Day, Mitchell, and Temple, as well as other members of the Twin Galaxies staff, over the course of his investigation.
Despite many accusations levied against Day and the Twin Galaxies staff over the years, Shildt’s have been given very little credibility, with most chalking it up to an unfortunate circumstance and series of miscommunications that have only been amplified by a man unwilling to let go.
Roy Shildt’s record was broken by Tony Temple more than a decade ago, but Shildt is more fired up than ever before. He believes every word of what he’s saying and stands behind his actions fully, but won’t compete on similar settings as he doesn’t feel he needs to prove anything, despite his saying the version of the game that Temple played is much easier. For Shildt, the longer it festers, the more passionate he becomes about it. Tony Temple? He still loves the game more than ever.
In 2010 an additional layer was added to the controversy as pinball legend Jeff Blair passed Shildt’s score with the slow trackball setting, finishing with a score of 1,874,925, surpassing Shildt’s score of 1,810,630. At this point, Shildt could no longer claim even the self-imposed title of slow-settings world champion. He continued to cause a stir in the scene, claiming that due to the two variations in settings, the scores couldn’t be compared, despite Blair using the same settings as Shildt. Instead, you had to take the score you were able to score by the 100-round mark, and whoever had the highest would be named world champion.
While there’s some merit to the notion of a more universal scoring metric, this was yet another scheme concocted by Roy Shildt to invalidate those who had bested him and to return to his former glory. Under this new scoring method, he believed that he would outscore both Blair and Temple, who typically achieved their massive scores during the late game of Missile Command. Though Shildt continued to press the issue in the years following, the public now widely acknowledges Temple and Blair as the first- and second-place winners, respectively for Marathon Settings, relegating Shildt to third place.
This is just one aspect of what makes Missile Command so special. For decades, these guys have dedicated their lives to competing around the world in hopes of setting a record and winning the title of world champion. They’ve spent countless hours doing score runs and discussing the most minute details of how the game was set up, all in pursuit of a singular goal. While they undoubtedly made this choice because they were good at the game, those initial hooks of beauty, uniqueness, and difficulty made Missile Command an attractive package that hooked these guys in from the very start decades earlier. And while these may be extreme caricatures of the average Missile Command fan, it’s undebatable that the effect the game had on these guys rings true as a definitive example of just how powerful Dave Theurer and Rich Adam’s game had become in the minds of players.
Missile Command may have started out as a small project they just wanted to get out the door, but it blossomed into something much more meaningful. Theurer’s ultimate goal was always to create something that would be powerful enough to stick around for generations—and for Blair and Temple it has done just that. They’ve dedicated their lives to Missile Command, competing and traveling the world spreading the message of their love for arcade games, and they wouldn’t have it any other way.