Missile Command - Can You Save Us?

Missile Command, the 80’s classic, was immensely popular and profitable for Atari, and still out-performs many contemporary games today. Missile Command remains a reminder of the threat of Nuclear War when the United States and Russia were locked in a fierce “Cold War.”

The original idea for Missile Command began with a story about satellites that captured the attention of Atari’s president who passed the idea to Lyle Rains. Rains in turn asked Dave Theurer to lead the project.

In the first proposal for the game, originally called Armageddon, there were missiles attacking the California coastline. According to Theurer, "Part of creating a great game is knowing what to strip away. Some of the first baggage the developers dropped was geographic identifications because of the frightful scenario of the game. And then they stripped away more. The original suggestion also included scanning radar, but I immediately said, no way! It would be just too hard for the player because he wouldn't be able to see what was going on. We chucked that idea. And when we first developed the game, we added railroads to transport missiles from the cities to the missile bases. That got to be too complicated and people got confused... if you get too complicated, people won't play. We also had submarines for a while but that didn't work out so we ripped them out, too.”





Missile Command has made its way into popular culture and appeared in a 1981 episode of the TV Sitcom Barney Miller. The game was also featured in Terminator 2: Judgment Day when John Connor is seen playing the game in an arcade just before the T-1000 shows up.

The world record was set as recently as March 9, 2006, when Tony Temple (AKA TT), a UK based gamer and banker, set a new world record in Tournament mode on new tournament settings. His score of 1,967,830 points beat the record previously held by Roy Shildt, who set his record on the factory default settings. Temple's new record has been recognized by the Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records.