WHILE MISSILE COMMAND IS WIDELY REGARDED AS ONE OF THE best and certainly most popular arcade games to have ever been released, it couldn’t hold the spotlight forever. What most consider to be the golden age of arcade gaming ended in 1983, and people began to move on. The megahits like Pac-Man and Space Invaders survived, but games like Missile Command, which were graphically advanced at the time, were replaced by games with newer advances in visual fidelity.
Despite Missile Command nailing the perfectly timeless look of the 1980s and capturing it for all to remember as they look back fondly on the era, it began to feel dated as time progressed. Games moved away from line-art and toward 3-D modeling and advanced sprite (a collection of pixels that resembles a more lifelike character) work.
It was also hampered by the very control scheme that made it unique in the first place: the trackball. Though the trackball offered completely unprecedented gameplay at the time, it soon became the key to the game’s downfall. People didn’t want to play with a trackball when everything else used joysticks. If they were going to branch out from the traditional joystick, they wanted it to be so completely out there and unique that it felt custom-made for that title. As the machines aged, so did the trackball systems, resulting in difficult-to-repair machines with a dwindling supply of replacements. With each machine that fell victim to time, the likelihood of finding Missile Command at your local arcade grew smaller and smaller, until it finally became the exception rather than the rule.
Yet even as Missile Command’s presence in arcades began to fade, its legacy did not. Though it was understandably pushed aside for newer and more modern games, its unique and memorable gameplay had left people constantly in search of something to fill that same niche. Many games offered similar experiences, but nothing could replicate the whole package of what made Missile Command so special. When players couldn’t find that, nostalgia kicked in.
In the years since Missile Command’s first release, Atari has released dozens of ports of the game, including one for the Atari 2600 in 1981. Ported by Rob Fulop, a new engineer at Atari who was fresh out of school at the University of California–Berkeley, where he earned an electrical engineering degree in 1978, Missile Command for the Atari 2600 was Atari’s gamble at porting one of its most successful arcade titles to its new home console. It was a bit of a two-sided bet. On the one hand, Missile Command was extremely popular, and one of Atari’s most successful titles to date at the time. On the other, it was so reliant on the trackball control scheme that there was a chance it might not work when ported to the Atari 2600’s more traditional joystick. Ultimately this bet paid off, as Missile Command went on to be one of the best-selling titles ever for the Atari 2600, eventually landing in fourth place in sales, at 2,760,000 copies, beating out games like Space Invaders and Frogger.
In the Atari 2600 version of the game, Fulop took some liberties with the narrative that Theurer had created, adding his own backstory to the instruction manual that came with the game. In this manual he notes that the game doesn’t take place in California, or even on Earth, but actually takes place in space and concerns two warring planets. In this version of the game, the enemy planet, Krytol, is at war with the player’s planet, Zardon, and is launching its full arsenal of weapons upon the latter. Though this was never Theurer’s intended story, and resulted in a pretty disconnected message compared to the arcade version, it ultimately didn’t end up being a big deal to Theurer. Most people didn’t read the manual, and were still likely to approach it as if it were taking place in a region close to them—inserting their own cities and internalizing the gameplay.
For many players, this became the primary way they played the game, even if it wasn’t considered to be the best or most competitive way to do so. Through this it became clear that for most it wasn’t even about the really high skill gameplay, just the experience of it all. As Theurer had always intended, fun was the first priority and, when paired with the beautiful graphics that had not been seen before that time—especially on a home console—players gravitated to it. They wanted to be able to experience the game on their own terms—as was the main benefit of the burgeoning home console movement. This holds true even today, as Atari continues to release updated ports of the original Missile Command on modern home consoles and mobile devices, attempting to introduce the game to new audiences that may never have experienced the earlier arcade or home console versions.
Missile Command’s unique premise and stunning art direction have allowed it to stay relevant in pop culture even today. During the golden age of arcade gaming, it could be found in the most popular television shows and movies of the day, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), which is set in 1984 but shows kids crowded around a Missile Command machine, enjoying the game years after its release. It was also heavily featured in an episode of the police sitcom Barney Miller in 1980, in which a detective finds himself hooked on the game while trying to solve a series of crimes. Though these may be small appearances, it was still somewhat unheard of for arcade gaming to penetrate mainstream culture.
Perhaps the most notable and thorough appearance of Missile Command in pop culture came decades later, in 2008, with NBC’s Chuck, in the episode “Chuck versus Tom Sawyer,” which features Missile Command and builds off the culture that it created. The episode played on some of the fears that people had in the 1980s, with the urban legends of mind control and government interference, taking them to the next-level extremes that make Hollywood what it is. Chuck wasn’t a stranger to incorporating gaming and pop culture content as a main plot point. In fact, most of the show revolved around these nerdy story beats. The show’s main character, Chuck Bartowski, played by Zachary Levi, is the perfect incarnation of a “perpetual slacker with potential,” working at the show’s fictional version of Best Buy’s Geek Squad, affectionately named the Buy More Nerd Herd. Chuck accidentally downloads all of the CIA’s secrets into his brain, and is forced to become an undercover agent to defend the world. He’s a massive gamer and nerd, so the show relies heavily on integrating these tropes into the plot. Yet very few, if any, other topics received the same treatment of an entirely dedicated episode. Though it was aimed at this aspect of popular culture, the show was fairly popular and a fan favorite for the five seasons it ran between 2007 and 2012.
In “Chuck versus Tom Sawyer” an evil crime syndicate discovers that nuclear launch codes are hidden in the kill screen of Missile Command, and will stop at nothing to get them. The CIA needs Chuck to stop them as they kill everyone in their path to unlocking the codes. Chuck can’t do much—he isn’t good enough to accomplish this—but his deadbeat coworker Jeff is. In the 1980s, Jeff was an arcade legend known for his extraordinary abilities. He’s targeted by the crime syndicate, which wants to capture him to use him to break the world record for them, triggering the kill screen and unlocking the military satellites that contain the nuclear launch codes. While trying to stop them, Chuck discovers that the pattern of Missile Command is actually set to the beat of the song “Tom Sawyer” by the band Rush. He plays along to the song, using it to reach the kill screen and destroy the military satellite before it can be put to use by the crime syndicate. It’s a doozy of an episode.
THE “CHUCK VERSUS Tom Sawyer” episode takes full advantage of the culture that Missile Command represents, harking back to the glory days of the golden age of arcade gaming. It perfectly captures the feel of arcades, the emotional connection that many players formed with games they were able to play expertly, and the fears that surrounded nuclear war at the time. These were all hallmarks of Missile Command that were so directly relatable that they formed the basis of a plot for a major television show—they were universally relatable, even if you never really thought too much about it back in the day. Despite the heavy nature of the plot, the show is a comedy, and the episode followed this comedic tone, injecting humor into something so potentially devastating and dark as nuclear war, just as Theurer had injected fun into Missile Command decades earlier.
It’s almost perfect, the way it lines up with Theurer’s message from twenty-eight years earlier. With impending nuclear doom, you must save the world and stop its destruction. There’s only one major difference: Chuck saves the world; the Missile Command player can’t. If it sounds a bit too on the nose, that’s because it is—intentionally so, according to Phil Klemmer, the episode’s writer.
Klemmer was a child of the 1980s and thinks fondly of his experiences growing up in that generation, consciously trying to take the lessons he learned in how he shapes his work and sees the world today. “The episode puts us in the advent of the arcade era, early to mid-eighties,” explains Klemmer, noting how this also coincided with this own coming of age with gaming. “Harkening back to my childhood with the ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system and WarGames, I think all kids in the eighties grew up with this dark fascination around the idea that we could all be annihilated at any moment.” He wasn’t alone, either. Potential nuclear attacks were on the mind of everyone at the time, not just kids. Even President Ronald Reagan instituted the Strategic Defense Initiative, which he affectionately referred to as the Star Wars missile defense system. It was an attempt to show that the United States was developing defensive systems in outer space to protect us in the case of a nuclear attack.
“As far as video games go, [it was] pretty dark and unprecedented that you’re fighting to protect the world from being annihilated by nuclear weapons,” Klemmer notes. But more important than the fact that you were, was that you couldn’t—the idea that no matter how well you played, you could never win really stuck with him. Missile Command perfectly captured this possibility and gave it real-world consequences, showing just how little would be left to care about if something like nuclear apocalypse actually happened.
The ideology fit perfectly with what they were attempting to portray in this episode of Chuck. Klemmer wanted to take this core belief and extend it to the plot of the show itself, furthering Theurer’s intended purpose with the game. Sure, it centered around pop culture, but there were real-world consequences attached for Chuck. One little thing could go wrong, and life as he knew it would be over.
They wanted everything to match the culture that real players were experiencing in the 1980s. This is exactly why they chose Jeff, Chuck’s burnout coworker, whose character as a perpetual failure and lifelong stoner made him the perfect target for the show’s comedic take on a competitive arcade gamer. Flashback to 1983; Jeff is the Missile Command world champion. He’s the exact caricature you’d expect: a flashy, neon-dressed man with women on each arm, living the life of a champion. He’s essentially what everyone thought Billy Mitchell was one step away from becoming. Fast-forward to present day, and you get a very different story. Jeff’s a bum, barely functioning and definitely not the best in the world at anything. Yet because of his 1983 title, the crime syndicate comes to the Buy More, trying to capture Jeff to force him to reach the kill screen for them and unlock to nuclear missile codes. Little do they know he’s not exactly who he used to be, and he’s certainly not who you would want as the last hope for saving (or ending) the world, but this is by design.
With avid watchers of the show having already formed their opinions of Jeff, Klemmer knew they could tell a great redemption tale. Pinning Jeff as a celebrity in the 1980s was important: he had been at the peak of intellectual performance, mastering something so well that he became an idol to many. But that was much, much different from the Jeff that everyone, including Chuck, now knew. As Klemmer points out, “the character of Jeff wasn’t really good at anything. We played him as a bit of a doofus, the guy who huffed paint and took too many drugs to have more than two brain cells left in his head.”
As Jeff struggles with the enormous responsibilities put upon him, he is unable to regain the skills required to accomplish this enormous feat, and it falls on Chuck’s shoulders. In an attempt to figure out how to reach the kill screen, Chuck and his CIA handler Casey (portrayed by Adam Baldwin) infiltrate Atari headquarters disguised as the Nerd Herd, hoping to enlist the help of the mysterious (and fictional) creator of Missile Command, Mr. Morimoto. When they arrive, they find Mr. Morimoto playing the game and listening to Rush, which he claims is “the music of the universe.” They soon realize it’s too late, as the crime syndicate has escaped with the codes and placed a bomb on Morimoto’s arcade cabinet that will explode the second he loses.
They manage to escape, but have run out of options. With no solution in sight, Chuck has to rely on his skills to get to the kill screen, but he’s nowhere near skilled enough to make it happen. As he fails time and time again to perform at a competitive level, he sees a Rush shirt that triggers the information from the CIA database inside his head, finally understanding what Morimoto meant by “the music of the universe.” He matches the underlying beat of the Rush song “Tom Sawyer” perfectly with the incoming rockets in Missile Command, finally having the solution. He throws on the song and gets to work, hitting the 2,000,000-point mark and reaching the kill screen, where he’s given the code to disarm the satellite just in time, saving the real world from all-out nuclear war.
It’s a fun episode that perfectly encapsulates everything that Missile Command is about. It meshes high-level competitive play with the fun and excitement of 1980s culture, while simultaneously addressing the urban legends of government involvement and the deeper themes of the game’s narrative, all without mucking it up or making a mockery of it.
Even still, Klemmer found it to be a miracle it was ever made. Since they were a broadcast television show, they were beholden to Standards and Practices (S&P), the department at every major network that is responsible for the moral, ethical, and legal implications of anything the network airs—essentially, they’re the fun police who have to worry about how things are presented, ensuring that anything broadcast won’t get them in trouble. Normally, one major topic they take issue with is false information about a company that’s still operational, even for fictionalized content. Yet, for some reason, they let it slide, much to Klemmer’s surprise.
Nearly everything in the episode about Atari and Missile Command was made up for the show—not the least of which is Mr. Morimoto, who was meant more to play as a caricature of a traditional Japanese game developer rather than be accurate to Dave Theurer or Rich Adam, both of whom are white men. As a part of this, the episode also insinuates that an American company was working with the US government to hide the country’s defenses within arcade games—an outlandish thought, but one that was meant to play off of the urban legends that surrounded the game at the time of its release. Due to the timely narrative of the game, many thought that Atari and the US government were working together, using Missile Command for a variety of secret collaborations that ranged from collecting scores for NORAD to creating a militarized version of the game for training purposes in case anything ever did happen like this and we needed to call on the best to defend us from an incoming attack.
Yet because of the widespread knowledge of these theories, S&P didn’t have an issue with it. In fact, it’s very likely that the ubiquity of these claims helped S&P to allow them to keep the story line in the episode. “It’s obviously a total fabrication that the creators had anything to do with some sort of secret weapons project,” explains Klemmer.
As shocked as Klemmer was that S&P didn’t seem to have any issues with it, they were encouraged to proceed as long as they could get Atari to sign off on the story, which Klemmer feared would be an issue considering all of the false information they created to fit the show’s plot. Yet, even more surprising, Atari was fine with it, only offering a few stipulations and asking for a mere thousand-dollar licensing fee.
These stipulations were, however, a tad confusing to the writing staff. First, they said that no one person could be portrayed as designing the game, so they couldn’t say Mr. Morimoto was the sole designer. They could, however, say that he was one part of a larger team and embedded these codes without their knowledge. Oddly enough, though, Atari said that they could say all other designers were dead and that Mr. Morimoto was the only one left alive, effectively achieving the same purpose, but with a much darker tone.
Their second stipulation was that the writers could not name any other company as the creator of Missile Command—they didn’t have to say it was Atari, but if they did mention a company by name, it had to be Atari. At the time the show was released, Atari was but a shell of its former self, existing almost exclusively to license off the brands it had created over the last few decades, so it made sense that the company didn’t care too much and saw it as a good marketing opportunity. Their aim wasn’t to make money off of the deal itself—the thousand-dollar fee was more than likely a formality to cover the costs of having to draw up the licensing agreement to hold the TV producers to their few stipulations. Even if the plot wasn’t entirely accurate, it would introduce Atari and Missile Command to a new generation of gamers in a way that Atari never could have afforded to do at the time.
The episode’s live broadcast garnered around 6.7 million viewers, and has since been made available on online streaming services, leading to the potential for millions of additional viewers.
This entire episode is a testament to the impact of Dave Theurer’s work. Klemmer could have written this however he wanted, choosing not to focus on the deeper impact of Theurer’s message, but instead he took the impact that he had felt from the game and turned it into a similar message for the new generation, putting his own comedic spin on it. He was able to take the feelings that he experienced and replicate them for those who maybe didn’t find the same message in Theurer’s work when they had played the game decades earlier. He was able to take these common lessons and transform them to conform to modern story lines, even though the basis was still the same. That people may not be in the same mind-set as they were when Missile Command was released in 1980 doesn’t mean that the themes can’t affect them. In this transformation, Klemmer created the perfect embodiment of Theurer’s message and what he wanted people to understand, even if Klemmer never knew that prior to writing the episode. What he felt back in 1980 aligned perfectly with the message that Theurer wanted to share. Theurer had said that he would be content if just one person pulled this message from his work and enacted change because of it. Klemmer was this person; all these years later, the message of Missile Command stuck with him so profoundly that he felt compelled to share it, creating a legacy that cannot be forgotten and honoring Theurer’s mission in the process.
This was all Theurer ever wanted—and Chuck isn’t the only place the game’s legacy can be found. Missile Command Easter eggs have been found on platforms like YouTube, in games like Bethesda’s Fallout 4, and in television series like FX’s The Americans.
An Easter egg is a hidden message in a work of art. For most games and movies, these come in the form of jokes or hidden references to other related content and are often hunted out by fans who meticulously scour all corners of content looking for these hidden messages. The first recorded Easter egg came from another Atari game released just before Missile Command, called Adventure. At the time of Adventure’s release in 1979, Atari was just beginning to find success. It had found programmers and taught them how to make games, but knew that competition was always just around the corner. Fearing that its competitors might try to steal its talent if they knew who worked on a project, Atari forbid any game from displaying credits so that the development team would remain nameless. This didn’t sit too well with Warren Robinett, who wanted to be credited for his work on Adventure. He figured that if he couldn’t outwardly put his name in there, he might as well hide it for later.
He created a panel that read, “Created by Warren Robinett.” This panel would only be activated if the player brought a mysterious pixel (that fans affectionately referred to as “the dot”) to a very specific room without any guidance or direction. He figured that he had hidden it well enough and that no one would ever find it, but he was wrong. Soon after the game’s release, a fan wrote in explaining how he had encountered the hidden credit to Robinett and how to re-create it. Atari management was furious, and wanted affected copies recalled from consumers and replaced with noncontaminated versions. They ultimately deemed this recall to be too costly and decided to pull a 180-degree turnaround, instead encouraging their programmers to hide messages in games for their fans to find.
Since then, Easter eggs have become a ubiquitous part of gaming culture, and encountering them is often the highlight of a gaming experience for some players. These moments are unique, and really help the player feel a connection to the person behind the game.
In 2013, YouTube added an Easter egg that allowed viewers to play Missile Command on their web browsers, defending their video from destruction, as a part of their Geek Week celebration. During Geek Week, “geek-related content” was highlighted all across YouTube in an attempt to rally around the importance of this content to modern popular culture. To enable this, the player would type “1980” (referencing the year Missile Command was released) while watching a video, and the four-base clone would appear over the video player, which continued to run as you played. As the video played, missiles would rain down from above. With each hit, the video player quickly began to fill with cracks before finally breaking under the destructive power of the incoming attack. This created an interesting parallel to the original arcade release: defending what you love.
In the arcade release, this was cities and the people contained within them. In YouTube’s version, it was about the content you were watching and the need to protect it, tying a direct connection back to Theurer’s original purpose behind the game. This was a relatively short-lived feature, but one that many found to be a nice reminder of a game that carried with it so many fond memories of entertainment past. Where people had traditionally gone to arcades for their entertainment, they now turned to the internet.
In Fallout 4, players can enjoy Atomic Command, another Missile Command clone, via the interface of their in-game display named the Pip-Boy. In the game, you’re surviving amid the fallout of nuclear war, which makes the inclusion a bit tongue-in-cheek, but shows the relevance of the game’s message nonetheless.
In the opening of FX’s The Americans, there’s a brief shot of Missile Command graphics, setting the tone for the show about two Soviet KGB agents living in 1980s America. Despite there being only a brief glimpse of the game, this inclusion does much to signify the importance of the game in American culture at the time. In an era consumed with Cold War hysteria, the game’s strong thematic alignment with what people were going through gave it an easy cultural touchpoint, something that most games didn’t have. For most, it’s associated with the Cold War, or at least the feelings of the nation at the time, so its inclusion was carefully chosen, knowing the emotions it would invoke.
These Easter eggs may be small, but they show the relevance and sense of community that remain around Missile Command nearly forty years later. Their relevance is a clear demonstration of just how strongly a game that’s been outpaced, both technically and graphically, can still remain a popular mainstay of culture simply for being one thing: fun.