MISSILE COMMAND IS JUST ONE OF THOSE GAMES. THE GAMES that you may have never played, but could describe perfectly because of how often you’ve seen it. The games that stick out as something so unique and different, there’s been very little that could ever compare. The games that, in spite of all odds, you can’t shake from your memory, even decades after your last play.
The game is many different things to many different people, but for me, it’s always been one of the few games that have been able to stand the test of time and transcend generations. It doesn’t matter if you’re five or fifty, you can play Missile Command and find enjoyment in it.
I still remember my time with the game fondly, asking for quarters and sneaking in a few games every time my family went for pizza. The pizza wasn’t very good, but it was our spot, and it had games; that trade-off was always worth it. I was terrible at the game, failing to grasp how the trackball worked at such a young age, but that didn’t stop me from trying. Besides, all the other games were lame, especially to play by yourself.
There wasn’t anything like Missile Command. It was fast and exciting, pushing me to improve not only as my understanding of the game developed but also as my body became more attuned to the fine motor skills required to play the game at a high level. It required the utmost precision, and that wasn’t something I was really able to handle at such a young age. I wasn’t in it for the top score. I just wanted to have fun, and Missile Command was perfect for that. It was beautiful and captivating, in a package that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else.
As I grew up, so did my pizza parlor’s arcade. New games were welcomed in and old games were quietly shuffled out, like Andy’s toys in the movie Toy Story, either because they were perpetually down for maintenance or they just weren’t drawing the quarters they once were. Whatever the cause, the arcade became more of a money-grabbing pit to pull kids away from their quarters than an experience centering on fun and exploration. Then, just like that, Missile Command was gone, never to be enjoyed by pizza-awaiting kids again.
At the same time, I, along with many others, began to make the transition away from arcades and toward home consoles. I had my Nintendo Entertainment System and Nintendo 64, and I could play games whenever I wanted; I didn’t need to wait for it to be pizza night. As I continued down this path, arcades became a thing of the past. We would venture out for friends’ birthday parties, or a fun family outing, but going to the arcade wasn’t a regular occurrence anymore. Missile Command came and went from my thoughts, fading into the background as new and more modern games took hold of my attention. And yet, even as time passed, the game never fully left. Its place as a staple of pop culture, bolstered by nostalgia for the Atari age, was a constant reminder of something that had captivated me so long ago.
Then, in 2012, I stumbled on a story that would bring the game back to the forefront of my thoughts, quickly consuming my every action as I set off to discover more about the story of one man who had brought joy—and dread—to so many gamers decades earlier.
WE SAT AT the bar of the Marriott in downtown San Francisco, across the street from Moscone Center, where the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) was happening. I was in town for the conference, but my main goal was an interview I was conducting for my debut story on IGN.com, gaming’s biggest news outlet. A few weeks earlier I had attended the premiere of the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit The Art of Video Games at MoPOP, the Museum of Pop Culture, in Seattle, where I was living at the time, and needed to grab an interview to tie the whole thing together.
It was an amazing exhibit that really captured the spirit of gaming and what made it so special, collecting games from the last few decades and bringing them together for players to learn about their histories and experience them with friends. Chris Melissinos, the exhibit’s curator, had received the GDC Ambassador Award earlier in the week for his work on the exhibit, and he agreed to meet with me for the story.
Chris had an energy unlike anyone I had ever interviewed before. It was filled with such deep passion and appreciation for the art of gaming, you couldn’t help but become inspired speaking to him. Plenty of other interview subjects had been passionate about the projects they were working on, but you could tell that Chris had this infectious, all-consuming love for gaming that pervaded every word that he spoke.
He wasn’t a museum curator by trade. Chris had started working at Sun Microsystems in the mid-1990s as a sales manager, but his love for gaming was uncontrollable. He quickly earned the title of Chief Gaming Officer (however one does that) and became the face of what the company was attempting to do in the industry. His job was essentially to become an evangelist for gaming and convince people they would be regretting it for the rest of their lives if they missed out. After learning this, it’s clear where his passion for sharing what makes a game so special came from. But he left that behind, and eventually went to work for Verizon, developing corporate growth strategies—quite a shift from gaming. But he was too passionate not to share the impact of video games with those who he felt needed it most—hence The Art of Video Games.
As we sat there, sharing stories back and forth, Chris blew me away with story after story of passionate game development that made the art form so special to him. One of these stories was about Dave Theurer and the creation of Missile Command. I was immediately captivated by the story of a man driven by such strong passion for his creation that he pushed too far, becoming consumed by his work and facing haunting visions of the very project he had dedicated himself to. Even the quick, told-at-the-bar version of the story was nothing short of extraordinary.
We had a great talk—one that I truly never wanted to end, because I couldn’t believe so many of these stories existed. I wanted to hear them all. As I left, I couldn’t get the story of Dave Theurer out of my head, shocked that I’d never heard anything about it in all my years in the industry. I pulled out my smartphone, trying to do some cursory digging, but had trouble finding anything even somewhat related to the topic. There were murmurs here and there, and people had discussed it at one point or another, but for there to be that powerful a story behind such a momentous game as Missile Command, I thought it would be a little more publicized. Then I realized why it wasn’t: Dave Theurer himself.
There were discussions of this, but never any interviews. He hadn’t spoken about it; it was almost as if he had disappeared following the game’s release, despite its massive impact on the industry. Without a story, you can’t have much of a history. As I investigated further, I found that following his work on Missile Command, Theurer had worked on a few other projects before leaving the gaming industry altogether, opting for a more traditional programming job at a major software development company.
For Theurer, this was a much more comfortable environment. Games were too intense, too personal. He devoted too much of himself to them, personalizing the context and making it feel as though he was sharing a bit of what he felt directly with the players, regardless of who they were or how they played the game. It was a tough thing to work through for months on end, especially with the deeply creative subject matter they were exploring at the time. It was the height of the Cold War, and tensions were high. Working at Atari was an escape for most, but filling his every waking hour with nuclear war and monsters didn’t really fit with Theurer’s definition of fulfilling. He wanted something a bit more comfortable and sustainable, and he didn’t want to have to worry about something so haunting, so he left the games industry.
That’s when my obsession began to take form. How powerful could these nightmares surrounding one of gaming’s most notable titles have been that the creator wanted nothing to do with gaming anymore? And what had caused them? Now, that’s a story worth telling.
The only problem was that Atari was now a shell of its former self. It had collapsed nearly two decades earlier as it was sold off for names and licenses alone for less than $5 million, despite its billion-dollar revenues as the fastest growing company in the history of the United States just years earlier.
Theurer’s story had happened way back in 1980, and there was no way that anyone who worked at Atari then was still working there now. I had to get creative if I wanted to hear more. Most of the documentation around these projects was thrown out when it was deemed no longer necessary, so looking into that wouldn’t be a possibility.
Yet the more bleak it looked, the more determined I was to find out more. With a little searching, I was able to find contact info for those tangentially connected to Theurer, hoping they might be able to steer me in the right direction. I contacted Rob Fulop, who ported Missile Command to the Atari 2600, but he didn’t have any updated contact information for Theurer. He did, however, reveal to me that Theurer hadn’t been the only programmer working on the project, despite that usually being the case at the time. He had a junior programmer assigned to the project with him, Rich Adam, who Fulop could put me in touch with.
Adam told me all about their work on the project, what it was like to work at Atari during that time, and—most important—what it was like to work with Dave Theurer. Adam hadn’t encountered any of the same struggles that Theurer had, but he understood why Theurer might have. To Adam, Theurer was an idol, and Adam saw how something as powerful as Missile Command could really affect someone, especially in the culture they found themselves in at Atari in the 1980s. Unfortunately, he couldn’t help me get in touch with Theurer either—it had been years since they had last spoken, and Adam left Atari long before Theurer, so he didn’t have any insight on where he went post-Atari.
Dejected, I tried to find out as much info on Theurer as I could, hoping an opportunity would jump out from the little information available online. Just a year earlier, he had actually been presented with the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Conference. The award was presented to those “who developed a breakthrough technology, game concept, or gameplay design” and had been given to industry legends like Gabe Newell, founder of Valve Corporation, and Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris. This only added to the mystery of Theurer’s story. How could someone who very few have ever heard of be up there with such industry innovators?
I contacted a friend who was able to connect me with the general manager of the GDC to see if there was potential for reaching Theurer. Minutes later, I had a response. As it turned out, they had faced the same difficulties I was facing. Theurer was like a ghost; he wanted nothing to do with the industry and had worked hard to remove himself from it, shifting the focus of his work to a more modest profession.
With much better sleuthing skills than I, they were able to track down his current employer through a patent filing and, in a last-ditch attempt, fired off an email to the generic info@company.com address listed on their website. And they got a response. I followed the same path, hoping to get a similar response and finally be one step closer to hearing about the story that had captivated my every thought for months.
It felt like things were finally starting to come together. I had the email address; who knew if they’d reply, but I was at least on the right track for figuring out how to reach him. I drafted an email, sweating over every detail, hoping they would understand the nature of the request and take pity enough to pass it along to Theurer. I couldn’t afford any mistakes; this was my shot.
Finally comfortable with my pitch, I hit Send, immediately getting an eerie feeling that I had just encountered yet another dead end. That night I lay awake in my bed, unable to sleep. Every possible permutation of what Theurer might say swirled around in my head, like a cartoon bowl of alphabet soup.
With the sun rising outside my window, I gave up on my foolish endeavor to sleep and went to get a cup of coffee. When I returned, I sat down at my desk and opened my email to find something new waiting for me: a response from Dave Theurer. My heart raced as I sat frozen, unable to click the mouse hovering over the email subject. My mind couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing: he had actually responded.
I opened the email and was treated to the thirteen most disappointing words of my life:
Hello Alex,
I don’t do interviews anymore due to time constraints.
Thanks,
Dave
Straight to the point: it was a no. He wasn’t interested in talking to me—and that meant there would be no story. Theurer’s legacy would remain a secret kept between him and the game, never to be heard from again. Disappointed, I thanked him and moved on. As a writer, I knew I couldn’t spend any more time on this. Deadlines were short, and editors didn’t have patience for writers chasing down stories that people weren’t interested in telling. I went on to tell other stories—stories that, had I not heard the premise of Theurer’s, would have been exceptionally compelling. But since I had, they felt like nothing more than second-class amalgams of the same narrative that had been told time and time again.
I had to give it another shot, even if it meant speaking to everyone in the world but Dave Theurer. I followed up on every other lead I could possibly chase, talking to anyone who had anything to do with Atari or Missile Command during his tenure. I was getting good stuff and learning a lot about the eventual outcome, but it was missing the why. It was a beautiful picture, but was lacking the journey of how they had gotten there. It didn’t feel complete. It needed Theurer.
In a last-ditch effort before abandoning the project forever, I sent one final email.
Hi Dave,
I wanted to get in touch with you one last time to let you know that I spoke with other members of the Missile Command dev[elopment] team on the experience of developing the game and they brought up some things that I would love your opinion on.
If you can find the time to speak with me for even twenty minutes, I would really appreciate it.
Alex
Days passed, and my already low expectations began to fall to unforeseen depths. Just as I thought it was time to give it up, as if he could sense my defeated desperation through the email, Theurer responded. Anticipating another rejection, I let the email sit unopened for a whole day. I’d become so dedicated to the project that I was worried I’d let the rejection determine the project’s significance, and I didn’t want that. Eventually coming to terms with what was likely contained inside, I opened the email.
Much to my surprise, Theurer agreed to an interview.
I couldn’t believe it: he was willing to talk to me, and I was going to be able to tell the impossible story. Over the course of the next few months, Theurer and I exchanged emails and spent hours on the phone discussing his time at Atari, his work on both Missile Command and Tempest, and—most important—his fears with participating in such a story for the industry that had brought him so much sorrow decades earlier.
What follows is the unbelievable journey through the tumultuous creation of one of gaming’s most iconic arcade classics as recounted by those who lived through it.
This is the story of Missile Command and the heroic man who made it a reality.