Missile Command

Missile Command is a 1980 arcade game by Atari.

Description

The plot of Missile Command is simple: the player's planet is being attacked by an endless hail of interplanetary ballistic missiles (IPBMs), some of them even splitting like multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). As a regional commander of three anti-missile batteries, the player must defend six cities in their zone from being destroyed. The game is played by moving a crosshair across the sky background via a trackball and pressing one of three buttons to launch a counter-missile from the appropriate battery. The game only ends when all six cities have inevitably been wiped out. Like most early arcade games, there is no way to "win" the game; it theoretically goes on forever with ever faster and more prolific incoming missiles, until it becomes humanly impossible to stop them all. The game, then, is just a contest in seeing how long the player can survive.

The game featured an interesting bug: once 810,000 points had been reached a large number (176) of cities were awarded and it was possible to carry on playing for several hours. At some later stage the speed of missiles would increase greatly for a few screens. On the 255th and 256th yellow screens, known as the 0x stages, the scoring increases by 256 times the base value. For good players these two 0x stages could earn over a million points, this enabled them to reach a score of approximately 2,800,000 (although only 6 digit scores were shown i.e. 800,000) and at this point the accelerated rate would suddenly cease and the game would restart at its original (slow) speed and return to the first stage, but with the score and any saved cities retained. In this way it was possible to play this game for hours on end. The world record, set in 1983 is 80,000,000 points.

Effect

Missile Command was an immensely popular money-maker for Atari, with many units around the world still outperforming contemporary machines' revenue as late as the mid-1990s.

Missile Command is considered one of the great classic video games from the Golden Age of Arcade Games. The game is also interesting in its manifestation of the Cold War's effects on popular culture, in that the game features an implementation of National Missile Defense and parallels real life nuclear war which is also impossible to win due to the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine. In some sense, the game is rather demoralizing, since it does not matter if you block 10 missiles or 10,000; the 10,001st one obliterates your home town just as easily as the 11th.

Ports

Like most top-grossing arcade hits, Missile Command was ported to the Atari 2600. In later years, it was ported to several other systems, such as the Lynx and Game Boy.

On the Atari Jaguar, there was also Missile Command 3D. It contains three versions of the game - the classic one, 3D, and Virtual. The last version is the only game that works with the virtual reality helmet from Virtuality (only 2 pieces are known to exist).

Having just acquired the Atari label, Hasbro Interactive released Microsoft Windows and Sony PlayStation versions in 1999, but they didn't sell well. Hasbro Interactive released a series of Atari classic remakes around the time, most of which quickly found their way to the discount bin.

Atari 5200 (1982)

Legacy

In 1982, a multi-player sequel was planned but never released. This game would have been identical to the first except with twice as many cities and batteries and the players cooperating to save each other's cities from the onslaught.

In 1984, Atari released a game called Liberator, which was seen by some as being a variation of Missile Command with the situation essentially reversed; in Liberator, the player is the one attacking the planetary bases.

In 1992, Atari developed a prototype of an arcade game called Arcade Classics for their 20th anniversary. The game included Missile Command 2 and Super Centipede (an updated version of the original Centipede).

There is an open source/SDL version of Missile Command called Penguin Command, and an Amiga clone.

Trivia

Missile Command was referenced in a 1981 episode of the TV sitcom Barney Miller, which featured a young detective who was hooked on the game.
In Judgment Day, John Connor is seen playing the game in a video arcade where the T-1000 shows up. The game was also part of the film's theme: a nuclear holocaust.
On 9 March 2006, Tony Temple (AKA "TT"), a UK based gamer & banker, broke the world record for Missile Command in Tournament mode. His score of 1,967,830 points beat the record previously held by Roy Schildt and has been recognised by the Official Video Game & Pinball Book Of World Records.^*

External links

Missile Command | ミサイルコマンド | Missile Command