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

Dave Theurer didn't come up with the idea for Missile Command. It came from a magazine story about satellites showcasing a radar screen that caught the eye of then-president of coin-op and VP of sales at Atari, Gene Lipkin. Lipkin passed the magazine clippings to Theurer's boss, Steve Calfee, who put Theurer in charge of the project.

"Make me a game that looks like this," said Calfee, as Theurer recalls. "Here's the idea: you've got these missile trails coming in from the top and you've got these bases at the bottom. The trails are missiles coming in and you shoot missiles from your bases to intercept them. You try to save your bases."

"That's about the depth of description given for the game," recalls Rich Adam, Theurer's junior programmer on Missile Command, who was in Calfee's office during the pitch.

When Atari commissioned the game, it was simple: a game where there are nuclear missiles fired from the USSR attacking the California coast and the player has to defend the coast. But as Theurer finished working on his previous project, a game called Four Player Soccer, and got to thinking about what Missile Command could become, his excitement grew exponentially.

"I walked out of [Calfee's] office and my spine was tingling because I just had this feeling that this was going to be fun and it was going to be hot," says Theurer.

Theurer made it clear when agreeing to the concept that Missile Command would only be a defensive game, never offensive. "Realizing that the bombs would kill all of the people in the targeted city, I did not want to put the player in the position of being a genocidal maniac," says Theurer.

He refused to do anything that had players firing missiles at other countries, especially the USSR, which was a hot issue at the time, landing right in the midst of the Cold War. To him, this made it moral. You're defending your country against attack, and "defending against such an attack would be a noble effort." The idea of defense was one that players could take pride in, while slowly realizing what the game was forcing them to do: choose between the death of the few or survival of the many.

This was one of the earliest instances of presenting a player-created narrative almost entirely through gameplay. It was up to the player to decide how they wanted to go about things and whether they would save one city in order to ensure the temporary survival of another.

Missile Command was never supposed to be a complicated game, but under Theurer's original design, it turned out to be. Partway into development, Adam and Theurer realized that some of the game's features took away from the game's impact, so they removed them to make the experience a tighter series of choices and decisions.

During initial development, for instance, the cities were listed as Eureka, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego. Six major cities in California, where the Atari offices were located.

"We were so egocentric that we had the missiles coming across the Pacific aimed at us," says Adam.

Once he realized that changes needed to be made, one of the first things Theurer did was to drop the identification of the geographical location and leave it up to the player to internalize it, to subconsciously think of the cities as local to them.

Instantly, with just this one small change, Thuerer believes game became more universally applicable and real to players. The cities changed from player to player.

In the original design document, Theurer had also implemented railroads that players had to protect, which carried missiles from factories to the military bases. This was the original design for ammunition control, which later just became a matter of timing — one that Theurer used to curb rampant abuse of endless missiles. If a railroad was destroyed, the base could no longer receive missiles, essentially putting it out of commission.

In the end, Theurer says, "it was too complicated."

Theurer and Adam got rid of all the unnecessary components — including a radar idea, which had an arm sweeping across the screen, only revealing a portion of it at a time — and started putting that manpower and time into polishing the other areas of the game.

"To make it simple, we got rid of everything except for the cities and the bases," Theurer says. "Turns out, that was the right way to do it." Missile Command went on to become one of the most successful arcade machines of all time, cementing its place in pop culture for decades to come.

Dreams and nightmares are often cited as inspiration for creative works, but aren't often shared as a consequence of them.

For Theurer, nightmares were both an inspiration for and a direct consequence of the creation of Missile Command.

"Missile Command embodied the Cold War nightmare the world lived in," says Theurer.

Working on the game for six months, he had done exactly what the team had hoped players would do: he had internalized the events. "I had nightmares about nuclear attacks," he says. "During that time, I lived near Moffett Field, where the Air Force would randomly launch spy planes, which made a tremendous roar when taking off. I'd wake up, and while half asleep, hear the launch sounds and for a moment wonder if it was an atomic blast.

"I would dream that I was hiking in the mountains above the Bay Area, with the fabulous views of the San Francisco Bay. In the dream, I'd see the missile streaks coming in and know that the blast would hit me while hiking there on the mountain.

"These nightmares were common occurrences during the development of Missile Command and continued after development was finished. "It tapered off after the game, but still, I had them for a couple years afterward, maybe one every two or three months.

"It was a sobering experience."