This Week in Retro: Missile Command [1980] (Patreon)

June 1980: Sky Rockets in Flight, Arcade's Delight.

by Diamond Feit

One of the funnier contradictions in world history is the rise of computer technology during the Cold War. For decades American kids (and Soviet kids as well, perhaps?) were born and raised being told that one day The Enemy might launch their nuclear weapons, which meant we would have no choice but to launch our nukes, and that would be that. Yet despite this absolute nightmare proposition, we were also being promised that the future was now, because we could see computers being integrated into every facet of our lives… and this was before the Internet came along and was literally embedded in our appliances, doorbells, and digital watches.

The advancement of computers also made commercial video games possible, and outside of sports, the next-biggest genre in the days of gaming's youth was shooters. Most of these shooting games were set in outer space (an arena of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union every bit as heated as sports, and these were the days of mutual Olympic boycotts). The fact that a simple black background could easily represent the emptiness of the universe made the decision to set a game in space, divorced from all reality, extremely sensible. Primitive graphics likewise made it hard to represent realistic objects, let alone people—another advantage for abstraction. Those Space Invaders weren't even human, making it A-OK to shoot them without remorse.

Missile Command was different when it arrived in arcades 40 years ago this month. Missile Command contains no heroes, no villains, and no lore dumps; nothing in the game itself suggests a larger narrative is at play. There's a vague futurism to the cabinet artwork, with fonts that would not look out of place at Disney's EPCOT Center (which would open two years later), but there's nothing alien about it. There are no monsters, flying saucers, or rogue seafood in Missile Command; only airplanes and satellites. In other words, with an absence of otherness and an array of contemporary objects in view, it wouldn't take any imagination at all to view the game as taking place on Earth—if not in the present, then in the not-too-distant future.

It is reductive to call Missile Command a "shooter", even if that is the primary verb used by players as they operate the game. Players command three turrets defending six cities. "Missiles" fall from the sky, represented by nothing more than a line and a glowing dot at the business end of the light trail as it heads for the ground. Using a trackball, the player aims an on-screen cursor and fires their own missiles to intercept the attacks. The player's shots automatically explode when they reach the point the cursor occupied at launch, creating a bright round bloom that destroys anything caught inside. This makes Missile Command a game of strategy more than reflexes, as players must look ahead to anticipate and detonate their missiles in advance of the enemy at just the right moment.

Also strategic is the player's limited arsenal: Each turret is controlled by its own button and can only launch so many shots per round. Choosing which turret to launch from is just as important as targeting and timing the strikes. The turrets are also equally as vulnerable to enemy missiles as the cities are, and losing a turret means substantially reduced ammunition until the next stage when it is restored.

Missile Command, like nearly all arcade games of the era, has no quests or goals to achieve beyond chasing a high score: Players defend the world until all six cities are lost. In a bit of dramatic flair, the end of the game is punctuated with a screen-filling blast and giant words which read "THE END." Combine this with the sense that this game takes place in a rudimentary version of our world and Missile Command feels like the first Cold War simulator—and a grim one at that—three years before WarGames the movie and WarGames the game would implicitly offer such a thing.

If this sounds like a stretch or a projection of politics onto "just a game," note that a 2013 feature on Missile Command states that the association was deliberate. "Missile Command embodied the Cold War nightmare the world lived in," creator Dave Theurer told Polygon, pointing out that the six nameless cities were initially labeled as Eureka, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego, all in California and home to Atari offices. "We were so egocentric that we had the missiles coming across the Pacific aimed at us," programmer Rich Adam said. The names were deliberately dropped in order to, according to Theurer, "leave it up to the player to internalize it, to subconsciously think of the cities as local to them."

Being an arcade hit, Missile Command made the leap to the Atari 2600 home console later that same year, but the port was a little different than the original. The core play experience went unchanged, but the controls were necessarily simplified: There was no trackball controller at the time and the standard joystick only had one button, so the multi-turret aspect was dropped. However, there was also a science-fiction layer added to Missile Command that wasn't present in the arcade, as the artwork featured a man wearing a Buck Rogers-style helmet and the manual depicted the conflict as distinctly alien. The player is defending the planet "Zardon" from the planet "Krytol."

As a kid who played the home version more than the original, the obfuscation of a tacked-on interplanetary storyline was enough to hide Missile Command's Cold War allegory from my point of view. I never picked up on those implications until the arcade cabinet made a conspicuous cameo in Terminator 2: Judgement Day as an unlikely game of choice for young John Connor in 1991. Combined with the other themes of the film, Missile Command's message about mutual destruction was clear. And even if the threat of nuclear annihilation looms less large today, Missile Command holds up as a challenging experience and an allegory, even if the graphics and aesthetics now render it retro instead of futuristic.

Missile Command's cultural impact has ensured it a long life compared to most 1980 video games. It was ported via arcade compilations many years later to the Sega Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, and Nintendo Game Boy. The Master System port gives the game graphics a distinct outer space vibe, but the Game Boy uses backgrounds and specific names to set the game on modern-day Earth—but not exclusively inside the United States. The arcade original and the Atari 2600 version of Missile Command were included in the recent Atari Vault compilation, and the game got an even more recent reimagining in the form of Missile Command Recharged. This latest version is an abstraction a la Space Invaders Extreme or Pac-Man Championship Edition, presenting the game as a relic from the 1980s (which is fair) only with a new "vaporwave" aesthetic which is more evocative of how people today imagine the 1980s than how things actually looked or sounded in the 1980s... at least, the early 1980s. There was a lot more brown back then; the neon came later.

My Missile Command memories are strong. First and foremost, it was a fun game to play, one of the few that I remember taking turns at with my father to see who could rack up more points. It was also a game that had a lot to say about the era in which it was created, even if that message was undercut by many of the subsequent adaptations. Without the necessary hardware, it is a difficult game to replicate at home, but even if you own a trackball or find a working cabinet (as I did last year in the Seattle Pinball Museum), Missile Command is tied to a specific instance in time that will always feel distant. As a raw video game experience the entertainment value is still there, but the game simply carries less weight 40 years after the fact. Turns out "winning" a Cold War didn't bring us any closer to world peace, it just rewrote our doomsday scenarios to involve fewer missiles. C'est la vie.