26 ms·

The creation of Missile Command and the haunting of its creator, Dave Theurer

134 points by cyang08 13y ago

losethos 13y ago
C:\TAD\Text\PILGRIM.TXT such things is most profitable; for by so doing, a man may get knowledge of many things; as of the vanity of earthly things, and the benefit of things above. Thus, in general, but more particularly by this, a man may learn the necessity of the new birth, the insufficiency of our works, the need of Christ's righteousness, &c. Besides, by this a man may learn, by talk, what it is to repent, to believe, to pray, to suffer, or the like; by this also a man may learn what are the great promises and cons
erickhill 13y ago
Great read. But I honestly had to read it while awkwardly covering up parts of my browser window. Some of those large animated GIFs are super distracting.
- UnFleshedOne 13y ago
  Get a browser with "show images" toggle of some sort and disable it (opera before 15 has one, and I'm sure others can get something similar as an extension). Your only problems would then be videos and super large fonts on headers.
- ANTSANTS 13y ago
  The New Web Experience — Firing up your web inspector and adding "visibility: hidden" to half a dozen things before you can read the damn article.
  - sp332 13y ago
    There's an extension for that. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-it-permanently/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-it-per...
- lostlogin 13y ago
  It's unusual to say this, but reading it on an iPhone is nice...
  - nether 13y ago
    Or Instapaper, Readibility etc.
- jnbiche 13y ago
  If you have AdBlock, it's fairly simple to block the distracting images by clicking on them. Otherwise, you can inject a little CSS into the page using JavaScript on the console. I agree that the GIFs were very distracting. Static GIFs probably could have captured the feel of the game era just as well.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  That page is as terrible to look at as it is totally appropriate to the article. Gotta respect that at least.
  - colmvp 13y ago
    Hardly.
- atsaloli 13y ago
  Try Readability - http://www.readability.com/ http://www.readability.com/ I press a hotkey and my browser loads a page with just the relevant text, no distractions.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Am I the only one who liked them? I've never played the game so it's nice to see what it looks like and not just a static screenshot.
  - gaius 13y ago
    I played it just a couple of days ago - on original Atari 800 hardware :-)
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      Apparently it's on Youtube now. Pause a video, click outside of it, and type 1980.
- gsands 13y ago
  Quick fix to hide images- paste this into your console: for(var i = 0; i < document.querySelectorAll('img').length;i++) { document.querySelectorAll('img')[i].style.display='none'; }
hyperventilator 13y ago
>Missile Command embodied the Cold War nightmare the world lived in The reality that at any moment, without warning, we could all be incinerated in a fireball made for some serious "live for the moment" scenarios. Playing Missile Command at that time was quite surreal. No matter how well you do you lose all you cities.
- Zimahl 13y ago
  A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
- joezydeco 13y ago
  The original title for Missile Command was "Armageddon". Here's a cool piece of concept art for the Armageddon cabinet from the Atari artwork archive that recently surfaced: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fWR8DhqQ9lw/R72zO6Q2oEI/AAAAAAAAAK8/YsNJPu1PTvk/s1600/atariart32_small.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fWR8DhqQ9lw/R72zO6Q2oEI/AAAAAAAAAK... More available here: http://metacab.blogspot.com/2006/03/atari-concept-art.html http://metacab.blogspot.com/2006/03/atari-concept-art.html
  - 205guy 13y ago
    So cool, and thanks for the link. I love it when comments connect to related but little-known content that actually expands the scope and understanding of the original story. That drawing of the Armageddon cabinet clearly shows the secondary info displays and even shows the two head positions of the player. Maybe it's hindsight, but that seems like such a distraction, especially on a game like Missile Command, I'm surprised they even considered it in the first place. It would make a compelling feature in the right game, though I think the displays would have to be placed around the screen.
SteveGerencser 13y ago
There were only 2 games growing up that really made me sweat, and this one was the first. As a kid I didn't understand the psychology of game development, only that I had a single mission to save these cities some how. I actually learned how to prioritize rapid tasks and make split decisions on when to sacrifice something and when to work to save it. I know, sort of strange for a game. But as a high schooler back then I simply couldn't stop trying to save every city every time and until I learned to let some die for the great er good I sucked at that game. Now I feel the need to find an old cabinet and get it in my basement.
zerooneinfinity 13y ago
Really liking the look of that page.
- ashmud 13y ago
  Sarcasm? I turned off images to read it.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
shanelja 13y ago
Just a warning, flickering light near the bottom. No idea how epilepsy works but best to be safe...
- jdpage 13y ago
  That would definitely be an epilepsy trigger. Hell, I don't even have epilepsy and I had to cover the image with my hand just to be able to finish reading the article.
alan_cx 13y ago
What I adore about Missile Command is that some thing so, so simple can convey such profound concepts.
limejuice 13y ago
Nice article. Missile command was very unique not just because of the game design but the rollerball control (rather than joystick). I remember feverishly whipping that ball around while trying to blast all the missiles.
kqr2 13y ago
There was a documentary about a guy who tries to break the high score for Missile Command. Unlike a lot of modern games, there is no ending so you can keep playing the game until you inevitably lose One quarter. Two days. No pause button. http://www.highscoremovie.com/ http://www.highscoremovie.com/ The 30-year old record for Missile Command was just broken recently: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/55-hours-81m-points-and-the-fall-of-missile-commands-30-year-old-record/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/55-hours-81m-points-an... It's theoretically possible to build up so many extra cities that you can actually take a 30 minute break in the game.
- tzs 13y ago
  > It's theoretically possible to build up so many extra cities that you can actually take a 30 minute break in the game It's not only possible, it is fairly routine for good players. This is because of an interesting bug in the game which has a big effect on the skill progression of developing players. The bug is commonly called the "810" bug, because on most machines it occurs when you get 810k points. It actually occurs at 800k + B, where B is the score that gives a bonus city, but 10k was by far the most common setting for B [1]. Hence, "810" bug. What the "810" bug does is give you a huge number of bonus cities--something in the neighborhood of 170. Even if you just barely made to 810, with 170 cities you've got around 20 minutes of play even if you never save another city. The typical progression of a developing player went something like this. Your first few games are overwhelming, and you die quickly. After a while, you are reaching the 6x stage (Missile Command has 6 levels of difficulty. It starts with, if I recall correctly, 2 stages of 1x, then 2 of 2x, then 2 of 3x, and so on, until you reach 6x, which is the top difficulty). Once your games start regular reaching 6x, you go through a long stage of steady improvement, as you get better at 6x play. Things are still going pretty fast for you, and you have to rely on some probabilitic play. For instance, at this stage you probably heavily rely on using one of your slow side bases to lay out a line of missiles after you see the first incoming wave. You aren't really aiming at specific targets--you are trying to lay down a fence basically that will catch much of that incoming wave. Then you use the fast center base to deal with any smart bombs or any missiles that got through the fence that you don't think you can take with a side base. Then, if you haven't panicked yet and thrown away the missiles from the other side base, you do another fence to try to catch the second incoming wave. When you are down enough on cities that you only have 2 or 3 at the start of stage, you probably switch to concentrating on saving those cities, so you depend less on making a missile fence, and more on trying to pick off specific targets that are coming to the cities. In particular, you are probably trying to make sure to save a city next to the center base, to make sure you stay alive. You get better and better, so that you keep six cities on the ground, and even build up some in resevere, for longer and longer, and you start to put more thought into your missile fences--you start being able to recognize as soon as you see an incoming wave where there will be convergence points, and your fence starts to become not a solid line, but a few well placed obstacles. Then the day comes when you manage to hold on long enough to reach 810. Your reward is at least 20 minutes in which you get to play 6x and cannot die. You can practice precise targeting, or practice making perfect fences, or practice using your side bases for things you would normally use the center for. This practice is very fruitful. Next time you play, you will find you are noticeably better. You might not get to 810 on the next game, but you will in the next few games. And then after that practice, you'll find the gap to the next 810 even lower. Sometime in here, you'll find that you can regularly reach 810. Now you start to get really good. All those immortal practice sections let you get to where you can pick off anything with any base, and you never need to use a missile fence because you can quickly see where to place the minimum number of shots to kill everything on the screen. You will soon reach the point where you regularly get to 810 with 6 cities on screen and 70+ cities in reserve, so when you hit 810 and get the bug's bonus, you have around 250 cities. Congratulations, you are now at the "walk away and the machine plays itself for half an hour" milestone. I don't recall for sure, but I think when you wrap the machine you hit another bug that gives you a bunch more cities. There's also some point in there, maybe on the second wrap, where the machine gives you two waves labeled 0x, where everything comes down real fast and you don't have any control, and then the machine starts over at 1x, but you still have whatever bonus cities you had left. When you've reached this stage, the only limit to how long you can play Missile Command is your endurance and any bugs farther along in the game. Many players at this stage would just play to 810 (just to maintain their skill) and then walk away to go play some other game. I had a kid follow me around all day once picking up my Missile Command leftovers [2]. If you were lucky, an arcade in your area had a Super Missile Attack. That was a third party hack that modified Missile Command to go to 10x, and added an orbital laser platform. We had one in my area for a short time, and none of the Missile Command players (who all could 810 with essentially no cities lost on the way to 810) got past 100k on Super Missile Attack. It was wonderful. Unfortunately, it was also very very rare. The company that made it was sued by Atari and stopped making them. (It worked out for them, though...Atari was impressed enough to hire them to write a couple new games). [1] I think I only encountered a non-10k machine once. There was an arcade in Pasadena, California on Colorado Blvd named Pak Mann Arcade. It was a pretty good arcade. I went their one night a day or two before the Rose Parade, when Colorado Blvd is already full of people camping out for the parade. Pak Mann cranked all the games up to their hardest settings, so they had the Missile Command at 20k bonus. Even more brutal was Defender. Not only was it 20k bonus, and a couple less starting ships than normal, as soon as the first wave spawned, they went straight for the humans at high speed, and in about 10 seconds your planet was gone and you were in a space wave. Me and my friends were all "can play forever" Defender players at the time, and none of us got past 30k that night. [2] Senior Ditch Day, Caltech, 1982. As a senior, I had to stay off campus all day. I went to an arcade and started playing Missile Command. Some kid, maybe 11 or 12, was watching. I hit 810 and immediately walked away to go play Defender. The kid happily jumped on the Missile Command to get some 6x practice. A little later, I left to go to another arcade. I noticed the kid was following me, at a respectful distance, trying not to look like he was following me. At the next arcade, I went to Missile Command, and the kid took up a position where he could watch. I 810'ed and walked away to play something else. The kid again took over. Long story short (too late, I know!), that kid followed me all day, to benefit from my Missile Comamnd leftovers.
foenix 13y ago
For anybody looking for another nuclear-apocalypse-based low-graphics game, DEFCON (http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/ http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/) did a really good job of expanding into an RTS.
- teamonkey 13y ago
  IIRC you literally could go real time if you wanted to, with missiles taking hours to reach their destinations.
- girvo 13y ago
  Man I loved DEFCON. I played it for hours and hours and hours. The cool "5 million killed" text popups really gave you chills.
OldSchool 13y ago
Growing up during the cold war, it was dogma that a Soviet "bolt from the blue" could occur at any moment and end everything, everywhere. That gave the game deep relevance. That threat was far less contrived than our current "war on terror" (two superpowers really did have a gazillion mega weapons) but history tells us that the most likely trigger for it happening would've been human or machine error, not some attempt at empire expansion. Quite possibly the fall of the Soviet Union was a surprise to the powers that be, since it took ten years to develop a replacement war. Ten years during which we enjoyed one of the most prosperous and fiscally positive eras in modern US history.
- mikeyouse 13y ago
  Ten years during which we enjoyed one of the most prosperous and fiscally positive eras in modern US history. Somewhat ironically, brought about in significant part due to the massive spending on R&D in communications and technology during the Cold War.
  - justin66 13y ago
    It's not obvious that the same or greater government spending on R&D would not have happened without the cold war. In an alternate history where government spent the same percentage of GDP without a cold war (not a huge stretch, I think, since no cold war means no red scare and presumably some higher level of survival for the political left) the amount spent on research would presumably be a lot larger. People love to look on the bright side of military spending but it's often a case of the broken glass fallacy. You spend a lot of money either destroying property or, at best, building stuff you hope very much will sit around unused. The economic activity that looks great often has an opportunity cost.
    - Zigurd 13y ago
      That's true, but at least it didn't ALL go to waste. "Star Wars" provided some engineers with interesting experience. Homeland Security and hundreds of thousands of Blackwater contractors is like taking all that money and shoveling into a bonfire. The only "spinoff" I can think of is militarized policing. Ugh. I suppose the lesson is that bad things can always be done even worse.
steven2012 13y ago
I asked a coworker who was from Russia about what their experience was during the Cold War, and whether or not people were afraid of nuclear war. He said that everyone in Russia just laughed it off, and they knew that nothing would ever happen. This is in stark contrast to everyone in the US that I knew. We were bombarded with propaganda about how nuclear war could occur at any second. Movies like "The Day After" (which I was too scared to watch), "Red Dawn", etc, just made things worse. It's funny when you look back how suckered in Americans were vs Russians. It was basically like the 1950s Red-Scare all over again, or as some would say, today's war against terrorism.
- ars 13y ago
  Doesn't this say more about the morals of America vs Russia than anything else? Russians knew Americans would never do that to them, but Americans did not. (It doesn't matter if Russians would or would not, that's how they were viewed.)
  - steven2012 13y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "morals". If you're implying that Russian knew that the US would never attack, but the Americans couldn't trust that the Russians would never attack, then that would still be propaganda at work. If some Americans actually believed that the Russians were so maniacal that they would attack, even in spite of Mutual Assured Destruction, then those Americans were foolishly suckered in by propaganda.
    - Helianthus 13y ago
      ... It's not like we have any clear examples where the world was moments away from nuclear war or anything. Now you might say that this was a result of American paranoia and that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But thinking that Russian expectations on the matter weren't naive is somewhat naive.
  - cousin_it 13y ago
    Yeah, Russians thought better of Americans and also of themselves. (Nuclear war is suicidal for everyone, no matter who attacks first.)
tokenadult 13y ago
Several of the comments here relate to the Cold War uncertainty in the West about Warsaw Pact strategic intentions. Stalin's prompting North Korea's invasion of South Korea during the period of occupation following World War II (not to mention what happened to some of the countries of eastern Europe a while beforehand) is an adequate explanation for why the United States wasn't completely sure of Soviet intentions. The war in Korea made no sense, but Stalin started it for his own crazy reasons.
conover 13y ago
Missiles could be in the air right now...
maqr 13y ago
I first heard this this story on "Extra Credits": http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/narrative-mechanics http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/narrative-mechanics No affiliation, but if you like this kind of game analysis, be sure to check out their series. It's bite-sized and pretty good.
networked 13y ago
I wonder what, if anything, a similarly nightmare-inducing game for the 2010s could look like. Are we at a point where our fears aren't as easy to visualize? Sounds like a good theme for a game-making competition, actually.
rsheridan6 13y ago
This was my favorite game at the time (I was 6-7 years old). I had no idea that it had anything to do with the cold war until today - I thought the missiles were coming from aliens or something.

134 points by cyang08 13y ago

C:\TAD\Text\PILGRIM.TXT such things is most profitable; for by so doing, a man may get knowledge of many things; as of the vanity of earthly things, and the benefit of things above. Thus, in general, but more particularly by this, a man may learn the necessity of the new birth, the insufficiency of our works, the need of Christ's righteousness, &c. Besides, by this a man may learn, by talk, what it is to repent, to believe, to pray, to suffer, or the like; by this also a man may learn what are the great promises and cons

erickhill 13y ago

Great read. But I honestly had to read it while awkwardly covering up parts of my browser window. Some of those large animated GIFs are super distracting.

UnFleshedOne 13y ago
Get a browser with "show images" toggle of some sort and disable it (opera before 15 has one, and I'm sure others can get something similar as an extension). Your only problems would then be videos and super large fonts on headers.
ANTSANTS 13y ago
The New Web Experience — Firing up your web inspector and adding "visibility: hidden" to half a dozen things before you can read the damn article.
- sp332 13y ago
  There's an extension for that. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-it-permanently/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-it-per...
lostlogin 13y ago
It's unusual to say this, but reading it on an iPhone is nice...
- nether 13y ago
  Or Instapaper, Readibility etc.
jnbiche 13y ago
If you have AdBlock, it's fairly simple to block the distracting images by clicking on them. Otherwise, you can inject a little CSS into the page using JavaScript on the console. I agree that the GIFs were very distracting. Static GIFs probably could have captured the feel of the game era just as well.
alan_cx 13y ago
That page is as terrible to look at as it is totally appropriate to the article. Gotta respect that at least.
- colmvp 13y ago
  Hardly.
atsaloli 13y ago
Try Readability - http://www.readability.com/ http://www.readability.com/ I press a hotkey and my browser loads a page with just the relevant text, no distractions.
Houshalter 13y ago
Am I the only one who liked them? I've never played the game so it's nice to see what it looks like and not just a static screenshot.
- gaius 13y ago
  I played it just a couple of days ago - on original Atari 800 hardware :-)
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Apparently it's on Youtube now. Pause a video, click outside of it, and type 1980.
gsands 13y ago
Quick fix to hide images- paste this into your console: for(var i = 0; i < document.querySelectorAll('img').length;i++) { document.querySelectorAll('img')[i].style.display='none'; }

hyperventilator 13y ago

>Missile Command embodied the Cold War nightmare the world lived in The reality that at any moment, without warning, we could all be incinerated in a fireball made for some serious "live for the moment" scenarios. Playing Missile Command at that time was quite surreal. No matter how well you do you lose all you cities.

Zimahl 13y ago
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
joezydeco 13y ago
The original title for Missile Command was "Armageddon". Here's a cool piece of concept art for the Armageddon cabinet from the Atari artwork archive that recently surfaced: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fWR8DhqQ9lw/R72zO6Q2oEI/AAAAAAAAAK8/YsNJPu1PTvk/s1600/atariart32_small.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fWR8DhqQ9lw/R72zO6Q2oEI/AAAAAAAAAK... More available here: http://metacab.blogspot.com/2006/03/atari-concept-art.html http://metacab.blogspot.com/2006/03/atari-concept-art.html
- 205guy 13y ago
  So cool, and thanks for the link. I love it when comments connect to related but little-known content that actually expands the scope and understanding of the original story. That drawing of the Armageddon cabinet clearly shows the secondary info displays and even shows the two head positions of the player. Maybe it's hindsight, but that seems like such a distraction, especially on a game like Missile Command, I'm surprised they even considered it in the first place. It would make a compelling feature in the right game, though I think the displays would have to be placed around the screen.

SteveGerencser 13y ago

There were only 2 games growing up that really made me sweat, and this one was the first. As a kid I didn't understand the psychology of game development, only that I had a single mission to save these cities some how. I actually learned how to prioritize rapid tasks and make split decisions on when to sacrifice something and when to work to save it. I know, sort of strange for a game. But as a high schooler back then I simply couldn't stop trying to save every city every time and until I learned to let some die for the great er good I sucked at that game. Now I feel the need to find an old cabinet and get it in my basement.

zerooneinfinity 13y ago

Really liking the look of that page.

ashmud 13y ago
Sarcasm? I turned off images to read it.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

shanelja 13y ago

Just a warning, flickering light near the bottom. No idea how epilepsy works but best to be safe...

jdpage 13y ago
That would definitely be an epilepsy trigger. Hell, I don't even have epilepsy and I had to cover the image with my hand just to be able to finish reading the article.

alan_cx 13y ago

What I adore about Missile Command is that some thing so, so simple can convey such profound concepts.

limejuice 13y ago

Nice article. Missile command was very unique not just because of the game design but the rollerball control (rather than joystick). I remember feverishly whipping that ball around while trying to blast all the missiles.

kqr2 13y ago

There was a documentary about a guy who tries to break the high score for Missile Command. Unlike a lot of modern games, there is no ending so you can keep playing the game until you inevitably lose One quarter. Two days. No pause button. http://www.highscoremovie.com/ http://www.highscoremovie.com/ The 30-year old record for Missile Command was just broken recently: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/55-hours-81m-points-and-the-fall-of-missile-commands-30-year-old-record/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/55-hours-81m-points-an... It's theoretically possible to build up so many extra cities that you can actually take a 30 minute break in the game.

tzs 13y ago
> It's theoretically possible to build up so many extra cities that you can actually take a 30 minute break in the game It's not only possible, it is fairly routine for good players. This is because of an interesting bug in the game which has a big effect on the skill progression of developing players. The bug is commonly called the "810" bug, because on most machines it occurs when you get 810k points. It actually occurs at 800k + B, where B is the score that gives a bonus city, but 10k was by far the most common setting for B [1]. Hence, "810" bug. What the "810" bug does is give you a huge number of bonus cities--something in the neighborhood of 170. Even if you just barely made to 810, with 170 cities you've got around 20 minutes of play even if you never save another city. The typical progression of a developing player went something like this. Your first few games are overwhelming, and you die quickly. After a while, you are reaching the 6x stage (Missile Command has 6 levels of difficulty. It starts with, if I recall correctly, 2 stages of 1x, then 2 of 2x, then 2 of 3x, and so on, until you reach 6x, which is the top difficulty). Once your games start regular reaching 6x, you go through a long stage of steady improvement, as you get better at 6x play. Things are still going pretty fast for you, and you have to rely on some probabilitic play. For instance, at this stage you probably heavily rely on using one of your slow side bases to lay out a line of missiles after you see the first incoming wave. You aren't really aiming at specific targets--you are trying to lay down a fence basically that will catch much of that incoming wave. Then you use the fast center base to deal with any smart bombs or any missiles that got through the fence that you don't think you can take with a side base. Then, if you haven't panicked yet and thrown away the missiles from the other side base, you do another fence to try to catch the second incoming wave. When you are down enough on cities that you only have 2 or 3 at the start of stage, you probably switch to concentrating on saving those cities, so you depend less on making a missile fence, and more on trying to pick off specific targets that are coming to the cities. In particular, you are probably trying to make sure to save a city next to the center base, to make sure you stay alive. You get better and better, so that you keep six cities on the ground, and even build up some in resevere, for longer and longer, and you start to put more thought into your missile fences--you start being able to recognize as soon as you see an incoming wave where there will be convergence points, and your fence starts to become not a solid line, but a few well placed obstacles. Then the day comes when you manage to hold on long enough to reach 810. Your reward is at least 20 minutes in which you get to play 6x and cannot die. You can practice precise targeting, or practice making perfect fences, or practice using your side bases for things you would normally use the center for. This practice is very fruitful. Next time you play, you will find you are noticeably better. You might not get to 810 on the next game, but you will in the next few games. And then after that practice, you'll find the gap to the next 810 even lower. Sometime in here, you'll find that you can regularly reach 810. Now you start to get really good. All those immortal practice sections let you get to where you can pick off anything with any base, and you never need to use a missile fence because you can quickly see where to place the minimum number of shots to kill everything on the screen. You will soon reach the point where you regularly get to 810 with 6 cities on screen and 70+ cities in reserve, so when you hit 810 and get the bug's bonus, you have around 250 cities. Congratulations, you are now at the "walk away and the machine plays itself for half an hour" milestone. I don't recall for sure, but I think when you wrap the machine you hit another bug that gives you a bunch more cities. There's also some point in there, maybe on the second wrap, where the machine gives you two waves labeled 0x, where everything comes down real fast and you don't have any control, and then the machine starts over at 1x, but you still have whatever bonus cities you had left. When you've reached this stage, the only limit to how long you can play Missile Command is your endurance and any bugs farther along in the game. Many players at this stage would just play to 810 (just to maintain their skill) and then walk away to go play some other game. I had a kid follow me around all day once picking up my Missile Command leftovers [2]. If you were lucky, an arcade in your area had a Super Missile Attack. That was a third party hack that modified Missile Command to go to 10x, and added an orbital laser platform. We had one in my area for a short time, and none of the Missile Command players (who all could 810 with essentially no cities lost on the way to 810) got past 100k on Super Missile Attack. It was wonderful. Unfortunately, it was also very very rare. The company that made it was sued by Atari and stopped making them. (It worked out for them, though...Atari was impressed enough to hire them to write a couple new games). [1] I think I only encountered a non-10k machine once. There was an arcade in Pasadena, California on Colorado Blvd named Pak Mann Arcade. It was a pretty good arcade. I went their one night a day or two before the Rose Parade, when Colorado Blvd is already full of people camping out for the parade. Pak Mann cranked all the games up to their hardest settings, so they had the Missile Command at 20k bonus. Even more brutal was Defender. Not only was it 20k bonus, and a couple less starting ships than normal, as soon as the first wave spawned, they went straight for the humans at high speed, and in about 10 seconds your planet was gone and you were in a space wave. Me and my friends were all "can play forever" Defender players at the time, and none of us got past 30k that night. [2] Senior Ditch Day, Caltech, 1982. As a senior, I had to stay off campus all day. I went to an arcade and started playing Missile Command. Some kid, maybe 11 or 12, was watching. I hit 810 and immediately walked away to go play Defender. The kid happily jumped on the Missile Command to get some 6x practice. A little later, I left to go to another arcade. I noticed the kid was following me, at a respectful distance, trying not to look like he was following me. At the next arcade, I went to Missile Command, and the kid took up a position where he could watch. I 810'ed and walked away to play something else. The kid again took over. Long story short (too late, I know!), that kid followed me all day, to benefit from my Missile Comamnd leftovers.

foenix 13y ago

For anybody looking for another nuclear-apocalypse-based low-graphics game, DEFCON (http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/ http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/) did a really good job of expanding into an RTS.

teamonkey 13y ago
IIRC you literally could go real time if you wanted to, with missiles taking hours to reach their destinations.
girvo 13y ago
Man I loved DEFCON. I played it for hours and hours and hours. The cool "5 million killed" text popups really gave you chills.

OldSchool 13y ago

Growing up during the cold war, it was dogma that a Soviet "bolt from the blue" could occur at any moment and end everything, everywhere. That gave the game deep relevance. That threat was far less contrived than our current "war on terror" (two superpowers really did have a gazillion mega weapons) but history tells us that the most likely trigger for it happening would've been human or machine error, not some attempt at empire expansion. Quite possibly the fall of the Soviet Union was a surprise to the powers that be, since it took ten years to develop a replacement war. Ten years during which we enjoyed one of the most prosperous and fiscally positive eras in modern US history.

mikeyouse 13y ago
Ten years during which we enjoyed one of the most prosperous and fiscally positive eras in modern US history. Somewhat ironically, brought about in significant part due to the massive spending on R&D in communications and technology during the Cold War.
- justin66 13y ago
  It's not obvious that the same or greater government spending on R&D would not have happened without the cold war. In an alternate history where government spent the same percentage of GDP without a cold war (not a huge stretch, I think, since no cold war means no red scare and presumably some higher level of survival for the political left) the amount spent on research would presumably be a lot larger. People love to look on the bright side of military spending but it's often a case of the broken glass fallacy. You spend a lot of money either destroying property or, at best, building stuff you hope very much will sit around unused. The economic activity that looks great often has an opportunity cost.
  - Zigurd 13y ago
    That's true, but at least it didn't ALL go to waste. "Star Wars" provided some engineers with interesting experience. Homeland Security and hundreds of thousands of Blackwater contractors is like taking all that money and shoveling into a bonfire. The only "spinoff" I can think of is militarized policing. Ugh. I suppose the lesson is that bad things can always be done even worse.

steven2012 13y ago

I asked a coworker who was from Russia about what their experience was during the Cold War, and whether or not people were afraid of nuclear war. He said that everyone in Russia just laughed it off, and they knew that nothing would ever happen. This is in stark contrast to everyone in the US that I knew. We were bombarded with propaganda about how nuclear war could occur at any second. Movies like "The Day After" (which I was too scared to watch), "Red Dawn", etc, just made things worse. It's funny when you look back how suckered in Americans were vs Russians. It was basically like the 1950s Red-Scare all over again, or as some would say, today's war against terrorism.

ars 13y ago
Doesn't this say more about the morals of America vs Russia than anything else? Russians knew Americans would never do that to them, but Americans did not. (It doesn't matter if Russians would or would not, that's how they were viewed.)
- steven2012 13y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "morals". If you're implying that Russian knew that the US would never attack, but the Americans couldn't trust that the Russians would never attack, then that would still be propaganda at work. If some Americans actually believed that the Russians were so maniacal that they would attack, even in spite of Mutual Assured Destruction, then those Americans were foolishly suckered in by propaganda.
  - Helianthus 13y ago
    ... It's not like we have any clear examples where the world was moments away from nuclear war or anything. Now you might say that this was a result of American paranoia and that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But thinking that Russian expectations on the matter weren't naive is somewhat naive.
- cousin_it 13y ago
  Yeah, Russians thought better of Americans and also of themselves. (Nuclear war is suicidal for everyone, no matter who attacks first.)

tokenadult 13y ago

Several of the comments here relate to the Cold War uncertainty in the West about Warsaw Pact strategic intentions. Stalin's prompting North Korea's invasion of South Korea during the period of occupation following World War II (not to mention what happened to some of the countries of eastern Europe a while beforehand) is an adequate explanation for why the United States wasn't completely sure of Soviet intentions. The war in Korea made no sense, but Stalin started it for his own crazy reasons.

conover 13y ago

Missiles could be in the air right now...

maqr 13y ago

I first heard this this story on "Extra Credits": http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/narrative-mechanics http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/narrative-mechanics No affiliation, but if you like this kind of game analysis, be sure to check out their series. It's bite-sized and pretty good.

networked 13y ago

I wonder what, if anything, a similarly nightmare-inducing game for the 2010s could look like. Are we at a point where our fears aren't as easy to visualize? Sounds like a good theme for a game-making competition, actually.

rsheridan6 13y ago

This was my favorite game at the time (I was 6-7 years old). I had no idea that it had anything to do with the cold war until today - I thought the missiles were coming from aliens or something.