Atari's Missile Command

Atari's Missile Command was an arcade game that was released in 1980. The objective of the game is to defend  your six cities from an endless assault of ballistic air to ground missiles. You accomplish this by shooting off defense missiles of your own, to intercept the on coming enemy barrage, from 3 different bunkers.

As you can see there are your 3 cities, and 3 bunkers.

The objective of this game is simple enough, but as you proceed through out the levels, you find that the addition of enemies that drop bombs and smart bombs, along with an increase in the speed of the waves make the game a lot more challenging. You fire your missiles by moving the cross-hair on the screen and placing it where you want a missile to go. After you fire the missile, it will explode on the location of the cross-hair when the missile was fired. Now, the explosion of the missile is what you use to intercept the oncoming enemy missiles. After the completion of the round, each city along with each left over friendly missile and the difficulty of the wave make up the points you score. Though, if an enemy missile hits one of your cities it becomes destroyed and you will not gain its point at the end of the wave. Also, at the beginning of a new wave, your lost cities will not spawn back. You must also defend you missile bases as well, each base contains 10 friendly missiles, and if you run out of missiles you become defenseless. You will re spawn the missiles at the  beginning of each new wave, but not during a wave. This makes you think a lot more towards the secret of this game, chain explosions!


Chain explosions help amplify the strategies that can be used in the game. If you take the risk of waiting for the enemy missiles to get closer to your bunkers and cities, you can predict locations where their paths will intercept. Also, if you time a missile just right, you can use the explosion from the enemy missiles to detonate other enemy missiles! This leaves you with 2 risks, either wait for the chance and risk the points, or fire on location and risk leaving everything defenseless.


After doing a bit of research on the game, I came to find out that the game was made to represent the anxieties of the cold war. Which makes sense when looking at the time when the Cold War had its span that reached into 1991.


Even if the game was to represent our fear of the worlds super power's going to war... it is still a fun game and holds quite a challenge. Born in the "Golden Age of Arcade Games" it is still a game played today. It even recently had a 30th anniversary! 


References:
http://www.missilecommand.com/
http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war