Missile Command review: the game you were never meant to win

Lines crawl down from the top of the screen toward the cities at the bottom. You roll a trackball to put a crosshair in the sky, hit a button, and a burst blooms where you aimed. Anything that flies into that burst is gone. It sounds like a shooting game. It plays like triage.

You cannot save everything

The genius of the design is that you run out. Each of the three bases holds a limited stock of missiles, and the attack keeps splitting and speeding up. So every shot is a decision about what matters most. Do you protect the city on the far left or the base in the middle? Do you fire early and trust the blast to catch what flies into it, or wait and risk it?

The center battery fires much faster than the two on the sides, and good players learned to save it for the dangerous stuff. That kind of small, practical knowledge is what separated a quick game from a long one.

The trackball made you feel like an operator. The ending reminded you what the job was.

Leading the target

Your counter missile does not arrive instantly, so you aim where the enemy will be, not where it is. A well placed fireball lingers and swallows several warheads at once. The game is really about placing those bursts on the paths of things still falling, and the trackball makes that feel smooth and immediate in a way a joystick never could.

What it meant back then

Kids in the United States grew up hearing about the Soviet Union on the news, practicing drills at school, and wondering what a real attack would look like. Then here was a machine at the mall arcade, glowing in the corner by the change booth, that let you stand in the middle of one. There is no way to win. Eventually every city falls, and instead of Game Over, the screen says The End. We fed it quarters anyway, which says something about us. It was a strange thing to find next to the bowling alley snack bar, and there was usually someone standing at it.

Playing it today

Without a trackball it loses some of its feel, so find one if you can. The game itself holds up remarkably well: it is fast, readable, and every wave asks a new question about priorities. You will lose. That is the point, and it is still the most honest game ending there is.