Theurer's internalization throughout all this stemmed from spending every waking minute of his life on Missile Command for nearly six months, he says. "When I make a game, that game is what I think about almost exclusively for the entire development period of that game."

"For each section of the game, I imagine it in many different scenarios; I design and program the more promising scenarios and in the end, choose the one that feels the best," he says. "I imagined missiles streaking in, imagined the explosions, both with the sounds and the visuals, over and over, day after day until it felt just right."

For him, this wasn't just obsessing over every line of code, but doing so for days at a time without sleeping. "It's hard to get into that state of mind and once you get there, I hate to leave," he says.

To combat the need of constantly starting and stopping his workflow, Theurer chose to forgo the typical eight-hour workday to work on Missile Command until he couldn't stay awake any longer.

When he finally reached the point of exhaustion and sleep deprivation, he would go home and sleep for a while before returning to Atari to do it all over again.

This was only amplified during field test periods.

During this time at Atari, each game had to be field tested before it was greenlit for general arcade audiences. This meant that a build had to be up and running so that a machine could quietly be placed in an unsuspecting bar or arcade.

At the time, this was a great deal for arcade owners. They were able to keep all quarters from the machine — which, at the time, were normally split between the owner and cabinet operator — and, in return, all the arcade owner had to do was keep a tally of the players that used the machine during a certain period of time, and do so quietly. As soon as word got around that a machine was being field tested, competitors would attempt to come in and research the machine to create and distribute a clone prior to full release.

This field test allowed the team to silently track how players were reacting to not only the base game, but also changes made to the gameplay in between field tests conducted over the course of development.

One of the biggest changes made because of reactions gathered during a standard field test was the removal of a light-filled panel on the Missile Command cabinet above the player's head. This panel displayed flashing lights that served as status indicators for each of the in-game bases, but during the field test, Theurer found that it distracted players too much. "They kept looking up to check the status lights and stuff, so we just chopped off the whole top of the cabinet and saved ourselves a whole lot of money and it didn't hurt the gameplay any," says Theurer.

As evidenced by this major cabinet redesign, this was a vital phase in testing how the game would be received by the average arcade player, but often left Theurer working for days on end without any sleep, almost ceasing to function at one point. "I remember one time where I had a field test and I had been up for four days in a row. I actually got the game ready to go, I was tired and I couldn't work the machine that burned the ROMs anymore, because I couldn't remember how to punch the buttons on the keyboard."

Instead of sleeping and coming back another day, Theurer continued to work at it, opting to call in a favor to finish the job on time. "I had to invite one of my buddies in to work the keys. I explained and he worked the buttons for me," he says.

Theurer's constant strides for perfection left him working his body to the point that Missile Command's premise started to manifest itself in his subconscious, sneaking into his dreams and turning them to nightmares.