Missile Command
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Controls
Mouse = move / Up = Delta shoot / Down = delta shoot / Left = Alpha shoot /
right = Omega shoot / Space Bar = change base
right = Omega shoot / Space Bar = change base
History
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Missile Command is a 1980 arcade game by Atari, Inc. that was also licensed to Sega for European release. It is considered one of the most notable games from the Golden Age of Video Arcade Games
The player's six cities are being attacked by an endless hail of ballistic missiles, some of them even splitting like multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). New weapons are introduced in later levels: smart bombs that can evade a less than perfectly targeted missile, and bomber planes and satellites that fly across the screen and launch missiles of their own. 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. Counter-missiles explode upon reaching the crosshair, leaving a fireball that persists for several seconds and destroys any enemy missiles that enter it. There are three batteries, each with ten missiles; a missile battery becomes useless when all its missiles are fired, or if the battery is destroyed by enemy fire. The missiles of the central battery fly to their targets at much greater speed; only these missiles can effectively kill a smart bomb at a distance. The game is staged as a series of levels of increasing difficulty; each level contains a set number of incoming enemy weapons. The weapons attack the six cities, as well as the missile batteries; being struck by an enemy weapon results in destruction of the city or missile battery. Enemy weapons are only able to destroy three cities during one level. A level ends when all enemy weaponry is destroyed or reaches its target. A player who runs out of missiles no longer has control over the remainder of the level. At the conclusion of a level, the player receives bonus points for any remaining cities or unused missiles. Between levels missile batteries are rebuilt and replenished; destroyed cities are rebuilt only at set point levels (usually every 10,000 or 12,000 points). The game inevitably ends when all six cities are destroyed, unless the player manages to score enough points to earn a bonus city before the end of the level. Like most early arcade games, there is no way to "win" the game; the game just keeps going with ever faster and more prolific incoming missiles. The game, then, is just a contest in seeing how long the player can survive. On conclusion of the game, the screen displays "The End", perhaps a poke at oncoming Nuclear Holocaust rather than the standard "Game Over" text. This conclusion is skipped, however, if the player makes the high score list and the game prompts the player to enter his/her initials. The game features an interesting bug: once a score of 810,000 is reached, a large number of cities are awarded (176 cities plus the continuing accrual of bonus cities) and it is possible to carry on playing for several hours. At some later stage the speed of missiles increases 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, so it would display 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. + On March 9, 2006, Tony Temple, a UK based gamer, set a new world record for Missile Command in Tournament mode on tournament settings confirmed by Twin Galaxies. Because tournament settings give the player no bonus cities, it is considered to be one of the most difficult video games of the Golden Era. His score of 1,967,830 points beat the record previously held by US gamer Roy Shildt for more than 20 years. Shildt maintains that he played using slightly different settings to Temple, even though the particular setting he refers to would not have been monitored at the time he set his record; this according to the official Guinness manuals from that era. Temple's record was recognized by the Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records and was listed in the 2007 Guinness Book of Records, as well as the Guinness Gamers Edition Book 2008. Tony Temple has subsequently increased his world record on two occasions, culminating in a score of 4,472,570 verified on 9 September 2010. This score took 2 hours 57 minutes, and represents the first officially verified time that a player has passed the highest level at wave 256 on Missile Command under tournament settings, the game difficulty starts over at level 1 again. So there is no killscreen on Missile Command: the game continues until the player loses their last city. His nearest rival, Jeffrey Blair, posted a score of 1,874,925 also in 2010. Shildt now sits in third place. Temple, Shildt and Blair remain the three most prominent Missile Command players using tournament settings, and a live match-up is eagerly anticipated by the classic arcade community |
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