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

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/15/4528228/missile-command-dave-theurer

by cyang08 • 13 years ago

134 66 13 years ago

erickhill• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

There's an extension for that. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-it-per...

lostlogin• 13 years ago

It's unusual to say this, but reading it on an iPhone is nice...

nether• 13 years ago

Or Instapaper, Readibility etc.

jnbiche• 13 years 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_cx2• 13 years ago

That page is as terrible to look at as it is totally appropriate to the article. Gotta respect that at least.

colmvp• 13 years ago

Hardly.

atsaloli• 13 years ago

Try Readability - http://www.readability.com/

I press a hotkey and my browser loads a page with just the relevant text, no distractions.

Houshalter3• 13 years 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.

gaius2• 13 years ago

I played it just a couple of days ago - on original Atari 800 hardware :-)

gsands• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

joezydeco• 13 years 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/AAAAAAAAAK...

More available here: http://metacab.blogspot.com/2006/03/atari-concept-art.html

205guy• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Really liking the look of that page.

ashmud• 13 years ago

Sarcasm? I turned off images to read it.

shanelja• 13 years ago

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

jdpage• 13 years 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_cx2• 13 years ago

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

limejuice• 13 years 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• 13 years 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/

The 30-year old record for Missile Command was just broken recently:

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.

tzs3• 13 years 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.

foobarbazqux• 13 years ago

This is an awesome writeup, thanks for sharing!

tzs3• 13 years ago

Let me add a few more things I just remembered.

1. The 810 bug is interesting in that there is no obvious reason for it. There's nothing interesting about that number that would lead one to expect to find bugs occurring there. It's not at any interesting boundary in decimal or binary, for instance, where it might hit some special case that is easy to botch.

I've never heard any explanation for what the devil was happening.

2. Speaking of botched special cases, Defender also had a bug that gave you a lot of bonus ships, although the Defender bug actually made sense.

Defender wrapped at 1 million. If the bonus was 10k, as soon as you hit 990k it started giving you a bonus ship every time you did anything that scored points. This lasted until you wrapped. You then stopped getting bonus ships until you scored enough points to earn all those bonus ships you had gotten from the bug between 990k and wrap.

I've read that the reason for this bug was pretty simple. Every time you scored, the game did something like this:

   if new_score > next_bonus
      award_bonus_ship()
      next_bonus += 10k

So consider when next_bonus == 990k. You hit or cross 990k, get a bonus ship, and next_bonus gets bumped up to 1 million...but that's the wrap point, so next_bonus actually gets set to 0. Now you earn some more points, but are still between 990k and 1 million. Your score is greater then next_bonus (which is 0), so you get a bonus, and next_bonus goes to 10k. Repeat until new_score finally wraps.

3. The most spectacular bug I've seen in an arcade game was in Battlezone, the vector graphics tank battle game, the one where you fought another tank on a plane littered with cubes and pyramids, with jagged mountains in the distance.

After a while, if you evaded the shots from the enemy long enough but failed to kill him, the enemy tank would go away and a missile would come for you, which was much harder to kill than a tank.

Some clever people figured out that if you timed it right, you could get it to send the missile while the last shot from the enemy tank was still in transit. If you then died on that shot, when the next round started, the damn missile would still be there. This was pretty anoying, until someone got the bright idea of doing this ON THEIR LAST TANK.

The game then gives the GAME OVER screen, and then it goes into attract mode where it runs a demo script showing game play. That leftover missile ends up in the demo, where it kills the demo tank, and the demo round ends. Apparently, whoever wrote the demo script did not expect the demo tank to ever die, so the demo ending at this point was unexpected, and according to the story we heard, the machine crashed and needed a hard reboot.

We knew someone who owned a Battlezone, and told him about this. He put some free games on and let our best Battlezone player try to set this up. It did indeed work, and the left over missile did indeed kill the demo tank.

And then we smelled burning electronics and the monitor burned out. Apparently, the software was responsible for the monitor timing, and could put it in states that were very very bad.

Of course, this one example doesn't prove that our experiment actually killed the hardware--it could have just been a coincidence. The owner was a Caltech student, and so understood what it took to do a proper experiment, but for some reason refused to let us do the experiment again once he replaced the monitor.

foenix• 13 years ago

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

teamonkey• 13 years ago

IIRC you literally could go real time if you wanted to, with missiles taking hours to reach their destinations.

girvo• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

justin662• 13 years 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.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

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

I think you're falling victim to the post hoc fallacy to some degree. Remember that the Cold War ended up only lasting about 4 decades or so, which limited the amount of time for incidents to occur that could have led to WWIII. Also remember that the process of succession of the leadership of the USSR was a very convoluted one. Most Soviet leaders remained in office until they died, which meant that a succession could occur at any moment, possibly even during a period where unusual things were happening with the party which might get sorted out quickly but could result in someone seizing power who might otherwise not had the chance. Also remember that dirty politics and coups were rampant in the communist sphere of influence and there is little reason to assume those tactics would not be used at home (as indeed they were). Especially considering the unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev. Given these things it's safe to say that there was absolutely no significant guarantee that the leader of the Soviet Union could be expected to be reasonable in any way. As indeed the example of Stalin plainly shows.

It's immanently possible both that the Cold War could have extended several years if not decades longer and an aggressive political figure akin to Stalin could have taken control of the Soviet Union almost at any point during its history.

Given these facts the idea that a pre-emptive nuclear strike from the Soviets could have occurred at any time during the Cold War was not as far fetched as we in the present, having avoided such a calamity, should assume. All it would have taken was the death of the General Secretary at an inopportune time and some sort of fight for supremacy within the party married with some sort of geopolitical state of high tension and a firebrand Soviet leader who ends up in control of a sufficient part of the armed forces (or perhaps all of them).

egypturnash• 13 years ago

Here's two times we came close. They're both stories of Russians deciding not to pull the trigger based on faulty data, but I would not be surprised if there's a couple stories floating around of Americans making the same decision. It didn't need aggressive heads of state to happen at all.

http://militaryhistorynow.com/2013/07/15/the-men-who-saved-t...

steven20123• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.)

steven20123• 13 years 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.

cousin_it• 13 years ago

Yeah, Russians thought better of Americans and also of themselves. (Nuclear war is suicidal for everyone, no matter who attacks first.)

jerf• 13 years ago

"It's funny when you look back how suckered in Americans were vs Russians."

Were they, though? There's a difference between "the bad thing didn't happen" and "the bad thing couldn't happen". Perhaps we were too concerned about it back then, but I sometimes fear we're too casual about it today. History strongly suggests the "total extinction" scenarios are overblown ("nuclear winter" is likely not a viable threat, though things could be cooled for a while, we know because other big particulate events didn't result in anywhere near the scary predictions, the dangers of fallout are generally grossly overstated), but they can still end civilization as we know it in mere minutes. They may "only" be able to wipe out all major cities on Earth rather than actually kill every human, but... that's still a bit of a problem.

caf• 13 years ago

Indeed. The Dead Hand is recommended reading (http://thedeadhandbook.com/)

cafard• 13 years ago

Might I suggest that your sample was a bit narrow? I can remember being pretty troubled at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (yes, I'm that old), seeing that our city was thought to be in range of said missiles by the chart on the front page of the paper.

But from then on, most of the scare stuff seemed to be from the disarmament advocates--think of Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth and the nuclear winter it envisioned. Yes, there were the survivalist nuts, but there weren't that many.

steve19• 13 years ago

The Russians came close to initiating accidental nuclear war [0] Sure, nobody wanted a nuclear war (MAD [1]) but a mistake or oversight could easily have triggered an accidental war.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

"Intentional nuclear war based on false indications" would be more accurate than "Accidental nuclear war".

For that incident, at least.

Houshalter3• 13 years ago

Was the fear really overblown though? I mean it didn't happen, but several incidents came disturbingly close. And if we were destroyed, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Not being destroyed is the only observable result, so that observation tells you nothing about what the probabilities actually were.

rdtsc4• 13 years ago

He said that everyone in Russia just laughed it off, and they knew that nothing would ever happen.

That is in large true. There was no constantl stream of news on dangers of evil empires and scare us with total annihilation. At least in the 80s it wasn't happening as far as I remember. "American imperialists" was still used in propaganda and news but it wasn't serious. Or rather few took propaganda seriously. Heck by 80's the hottest thing in Soviet Union were American jeans, music, products, movies. All that was underground, the forbidden fruit if you wish.

Now what you should be worried about it that you have been brainwashed. There was no equivalent real life credible threat to the extent it was dramatized and inflated in American propaganda. You should be worried perhaps that in a country with supposedly a free press and open criticism people were mislead in a much large and degree than in a totalitarian communism country. CIA and other intelligence agencies chronically overestimated and inflated figures and threat models in order to get more funding. That should worry you. That is happening today as well when it comes to war on terror.

Another point is a joke I like to tell people and (I've mentioned this before, so I apologize to those) -- when the Soviet Union fell we found out "everything they told us about Communism was a lie and everything they told us about the American style Capitalism was true". I'll leave it at that joke.

tptacek4• 13 years ago

Could you be a little more specific about exactly how Americans were misled about the threat of war with the Soviet Union?

tzs3• 13 years ago

It's funny when you look back how suckered in Americans were vs Russians.

Another possible interpretation of your data would be that Americans were better informed of the risks, and so were afraid. Russians, on the other hand, lived in a society with very tight control on all media, and so anything that might cause unrest was censored.

There's more evidence for this interpretation than for yours. In particular, note that in the US we had access to numerous non-government sources of information and analysis, most of which agreed that nuclear war was a real risk.

tokenadult• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Missiles could be in the air right now...

maqr• 13 years ago

I first heard this this story on "Extra Credits": 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

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

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