
The creation of Missile Command and the haunting of its creator, Dave Theurer - cyang08
http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/15/4528228/missile-command-dave-theurer
======
OldSchool
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

        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
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.

~~~
gaius
Well, yes and no. There are some things you can _only_ do with a sense of
desperate urgency driving you (this is the means by which startups beat
entrenched players). Hence the code-breaking machines that give us computers,
hence rader, satellites, jet engines, etc etc etc. Would these things have
come about "naturally"? Maybe, maybe not. Why would you develop computers when
you had clerks and a typing pool and that worked perfectly well?

~~~
justin66
> There are some things you can only do with a sense of desperate urgency
> driving you

I don't know how to prove or disprove this sentiment so I'm not going to say
much about it other than to observe that some people manage to be pretty
driven without a war threatening them, and a lot of the resources we
desperately throw into a war are thrown into solving problems which are
fundamentally uninteresting outside the context of that war.

The whole "war is great for the economy!" thing, in the context of something
massive like WWII especially, is fundamentally arguing for the efficiency of a
directed economy over a free market, which is pretty iffy.

> Hence the code-breaking machines that give us computers, hence rader,
> satellites, jet engines, etc etc etc.

The world had computers well before the war. Radar too, interestingly, and jet
turbines. I'm not trying to be disingenuous: obviously getting radar up and
running is less of a priority without WWII, and so on.

> Why would you develop computers when you had clerks and a typing pool and
> that worked perfectly well?

That particular conundrum took longer than the end of WWII to answer, though.

The interesting questions to me are whether something like a Manhattan Project
are more of a distraction or a spur to people like Alan Turing and Johnny Von
Neumann, and what would have happened to them and their field without the war
and its spending. Maybe once the economy bounced back from the depression a
computer industry would have begun quite a bit before it did on our timeline.

An awful lot of the visionary computer work was conducted with DARPA money
over the years, but when you look at the career of someone like Robert Taylor,
for example, you have to wonder if - in alternate history terms, I guess - you
don't get Xerox PARC earlier or just in another context if you have less of
the defense spending and more spending of our GDP on pure research.

------
steven2012
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
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
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
... 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.

------
kqr2
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-
an...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/55-hours-81m-points-and-the-fall-
of-missile-commands-30-year-old-record/)

It's theoretically possible to build up so many extra cities that you can
actually take a 30 minute break in the game.

~~~
tzs
> 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.

~~~
tzs
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.

~~~
tptacek
O.O

------
erickhill
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.

~~~
ANTSANTS
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
There's an extension for that. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/remove-it-per...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/remove-it-permanently/)

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

~~~
jdpage
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.

------
foenix
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.

~~~
girvo
Man I loved DEFCON. I played it for hours and hours and hours.

The cool "5 million killed" text popups really gave you chills.

------
SteveGerencser
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.

------
maqr
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.

------
limejuice
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.

------
tokenadult
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.

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

------
zerooneinfinity
Really liking the look of that page.

~~~
ashmud
Sarcasm? I turned off images to read it.

------
rsheridan6
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.

------
networked
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.

------
conover
Missiles could be in the air right now...

------
hyperventilator
>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.

~~~
joezydeco
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...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fWR8DhqQ9lw/R72zO6Q2oEI/AAAAAAAAAK8/YsNJPu1PTvk/s1600/atariart32_small.jpg)

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

~~~
205guy
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.

