With 18 color photographs

BEFORE CALL OF DUTY, before World of Warcraft, before even Super Mario Bros., the video game industry exploded in the late 1970s with the advent of the video arcade. Leading the charge was Atari Inc., the creator of the iconic game Missile Command. The first game to double as a commentary on culture, it put players’ fingers on “the button,” making them responsible for the fate of civilization in a no-win scenario. The game was marvel of modern culture, helping usher in both the age of the video game and the gamer lifestyle.

In 8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari’s Missile Command, tech insider and writer Alex Rubens interviews numerous major figures from this time: Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari; David Theurer, the creator of Missile Command; and Phil Klemmer, writer for the NBC series Chuck who wrote an entire episode for the show about Missile Command and its mythical “kill screen.”

Rubens delves into electronic history to tell of an era before massive development teams and worship of tech giants like Steve Jobs, when arcade games were designed, written, and coded by individual designers. As earnings entered the millions, these creators were celebrated as geniuses in their time; once dismissed as nerds and fanatics, they were now being interviewed for major publications and partied like Wall Street traders. However, the toll on these programmers was high: developers worked 120-hour weeks, often opting to stay in the office for days on end while under a deadline.

Taking readers back to the days of TaB cola, dot matrix printers, and digging through the couch for just one more quarter, 8-Bit Apocalypse combines Rubens’s knowledge of the tech industry and experience as a gaming journalist to conjure the wild silicon frontier of the ‘80s.