Missile Command

Missile Command is a 1980 arcade game by Atari. more...

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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.

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).

Read more at Wikipedia.org