IT IS SUMMERTIME, SOMETIME IN THE 1960S, AND A YOUNG DAVE Theurer is away for the summer at Patrol Camp, the annual camping tradition for his Boy Scout troop, before starting fifth grade. This was a regular trip for kids his age to make at the time if they were in the Scouts. It was a great way to learn, to complete a ton of merit badges, to hang out with your fellow troop members, and to meet new friends, all at the same time.
One night the troop decided to watch a movie together as a bonding activity. Theurer was excited; his parents didn’t allow him to watch movies, so this was something special that he didn’t get to do very often. Despite the massive popularity of televisions in the 1960s as they became more affordable and ubiquitous, Theurer’s parents weren’t on board. It was a big treat for him to be able to watch a movie with his friends, but that quickly changed when the movie started.
In the film (Theurer can’t remember its title), a sinkhole opens that leads directly to the center of Earth. As the hole erupts, monsters emerge from it, attacking and killing any humans that stand in their path. For a ten-year-old who didn’t watch movies, this was a formative and horrifying experience that, despite how hard he tried, he would never forget. Even years later, Theurer would find himself haunted with nightmares of this monster hole appearing somewhere near him, flooding his area with monsters who went about killing everyone he knew and loved.
Though this experience happened when he was just ten years old, these visions stuck with Theurer, reappearing in his nightmares regularly for the years following the incident. And, as we’ve seen, he was a man who really took this stuff to heart. Just as he wanted Missile Command to influence people, he knew that personal experiences could inform one’s medium. He would later cite these nightmares as the basis of his work for his next title, Tempest.
Fast-forward to 1980. Missile Command has just been released, and Dave Theurer is working on prototypes for Tempest. Just as he had been given a prompt for Missile Command, Tempest was supposed to be “a take on first-person Space Invaders,” which had gone on to become one of Atari’s most successful games. They wanted to build off of that success and knew a change in perspective could be an interesting angle for people who had burned out on the traditional Space Invaders-like game.
Theurer went to work, creating working prototypes that utilized complex vector-rendering hardware that was completely groundbreaking at the time. It was still somewhat new and unproven, but once Theurer had seen it, he knew he needed to use it for Tempest. The clean lines fit his style perfectly and allowed him to quickly work on the concept without the need for complex art. At the time, vector systems were mostly used in computer rendering hardware, but Theurer knew that, when attached to the newly developed color vector system, they could create something that would be a sight to behold. The technology wasn’t without its problems, giving him a fair share of setbacks along the way, but he found that, once again, trial and error proved to be key to his success. Within six weeks he had working prototypes up and running, ready to show off at the next Coin-Op Division meeting.
Despite extremely strong source material and a decent idea of how he thought he could accomplish this, his prototypes weren’t coming together in a way that he was satisfied with. They didn’t feel right, and he knew he had to find something that he could connect with before selecting that concept to build out, especially following the success of Missile Command. Thankfully, his work on Missile Command was extremely popular, so Theurer was given the time and leeway to really dive into a concept before moving on, but that didn’t stop the prototyping process from becoming extremely frustrating for him. It just wasn’t fun, and that ate him up inside.
He had tried multiple different iterations of the idea, but it wasn’t something that he—or the internal project green-light board who give designers the approval to pursue a project—were happy with. It wasn’t that they didn’t like the idea—they just had a hard time believing that the general population would find it to be fun. In a business built off quarters spent in arcades, you really had to earn your money through repeat plays, and these Tempest prototypes didn’t seem like they were all the way there.
This was a huge issue for Theurer and his team, leaving the project in a state of limbo; the team members felt like they couldn’t figure it out and that the concept was becoming stagnant. In a company that moved as quickly as Atari did, producing countless games each year, stagnant and unfun were the last things you wanted to be.
Frustrated at his inability to find the defining features of the game, Theurer decided to focus on the more polished elements of what the concept could become, hoping they would inform the basic design principles they were struggling so much with at the time. As he did this, he was suddenly struck with a vision of his childhood nightmares. He recalled the fear he felt when he saw monsters erupting from a giant hole in the ground, utterly defenseless as they made their way toward him.
Theurer soon realized that he could transform the concept slightly to fit this idea. If he could find a way to take the 3-D plane and its accompanying vanishing point, he could wrap it into a cylinder that gave off the appearance of looking down into a hole in the ground. Then, just as the monsters did in the film, he could have them move up the plane toward the player’s perspective, tasking them with attacking them before they could escape.
He was okay with the player being on the offense in Tempest. Monsters were different. He was all aboard the monster killing train, but not keen on killing people.
Filled with excitement over this revelation, he started work on this new prototype immediately, gaining the curiosity of Rich Adam, who continued to share a lab with Theurer following the conclusion of their work on Missile Command. Theurer quickly built out a rough framework for what this could look like and, even in the rough prototype stage, it was like nothing gamers had ever seen at the time. Heck, it even caught Adam off guard as he recalled seeing it on Theurer’s monitor as he came into work one day. “Dave, what the hell are you doing?” he asked. “What is that? Where’s Space Invaders?” He was both intrigued and shocked by what Theurer had been able to accomplish and, for Theurer, that was all the approval he needed. He knew he was on the right path.
He converted his earlier prototypes into this new design and began to recruit players from around the lab. It was an instant hit. He got exactly the feedback he was looking for with a game like this, and knew he had found the right formula. He got the approvals he needed and set off on making the rest of the game. Realizing the strength of his source material, he used what he could remember from his nightmares to fill out the rest of the game. He used them as fuel for the project, allowing them to engulf and enrapture his creativity, hoping this project might be just what he needed to banish them from his thoughts once and for all.
Just as he had with Missile Command, he wanted to use a unique control method that felt as though it was custom-made just for this instance. To match the cylindrical design, he settled on a knob that players could turn to quickly spin the hole to wherever the monster was attempting to escape from. It was extremely fast, just like Missile Command, and he knew that it was the right way to go about it. There was only one issue: he got reports that it made people sick due to the vertigo created by the speed at which the game moved.
It was a quick fix; Theurer simply changed the knob to control the player’s character instead, moving around the hole rather than moving the hole itself. Once he did this, it solved all the nausea issues, and he was off to the races. He finished the game later that year, and it released in October 1981 to massive success.
This success, though exciting for Theurer, came just a few months too early, as Kassar, seeing how successful Missile Command had been, finally agreed to implement a bonus program that rewarded designers for games that met certain thresholds. He, unbeknownst to Theurer, wanted to see how Tempest performed at arcades before officially implementing the policy, costing Theurer what he believed to be “perhaps a million dollars.”
There was a bright side, however. Theurer had finished another project, and the nightmares that had haunted him as a child had finally been put to good use. On the one hand, he had put to rest and buried the nightmares he had once considered to be so negative. On the other hand, he had brought these horrifying visions to public view, fully visible to all and at the forefront of his legacy. He had made his peace with them, but he worried that the ominous and unsettling monsters that adorned the cabinet art might induce the same nightmares in others—in fact, he was so worried about this that he discussed reworking the cabinet art, but ultimately left it as it was.
It was an unsettling experience. He had to pull inspiration from something so negatively powerful and let it once again consume his thoughts in order to get the result he so desired. This was all perfectly emblematic of Dave Theurer. He took the heavy ideas that were floating around in his head and internalized them, allowing himself to dive deep into the recesses of his mind in order to thrive off the dark concepts plaguing his consciousness.
As a result, he was able to deliver a visually stunning experience so uniquely different from anything else at the time that its legacy is still evident in modern games releasing decades later. For many, Tempest was an entirely new arcade experience. It was the first time that many realized there could be depth to a game—not metaphorically, but physically. While everyone else focused on creating something easily recognizable, he chose to do the opposite, resulting in a sensory overload experience that came to define what games could become.