Missile Command is a 1980 shoot ’em up video game developed and published by Atari for arcades. Sega released the game outside North America. It was designed by Dave Theurer, who also designed Atari’s vector graphics game Tempest from the same year. The game was released during the Cold War, and the player uses a trackball to defend six cities from intercontinental ballistic missiles by launching anti-ballistic missiles from three bases.
Atari brought the game to its home systems beginning with the 1981 Atari VCS conversion by Rob Fulop. Numerous contemporaneous clones and modern remakes followed. Atari’s 1981 port to the Atari 8-bit computers was reused for the Atari 5200 (1982) and built into the Atari XEGS (1987). It is considered to be one of the greatest video games of all time.
