Missile Command is one of my favourite old school games. It was first released in the arcades by Atari in 1980, but I’ve never seen it in the arcades. The version I grew up playing was 1981’s Missile Command on the Atari 2600. Replaying it again today after all those years is still a lot of fun.

The goal of Missile Command is to defend six cities from incoming missiles. The enemy missiles come from the top of the screen, and at the bottom of the screen are the six cities you are defending. Your offense is your own supply of missiles that are fire from a base at the center bottom of the screen. You can aim your missiles by moving the flashing cursor around the screen. Since your missile will take a second or two to reach it’s target, you’ll be aiming to where the enemy missiles are headed rather than where they currently are. Once your missile reaches it’s destination, it’ll exploded, and any enemy missiles in the blast radius will be destroyed. Defeating a wave of enemies will send you to the next level, and eventually the enemies will move faster, and you’ll score more points for destroying them. If all six of your cities are destroyed, then it’s game over. You can earn an additional city, if needed, for every 10,000 points you score. Also you have a limited supply of ammo per wave. Usually you’ll have enough ammo for each wave, but if enemies hit your base, then you’ll lose ammo very quickly, and then you’re screwed.

The original arcade version of Missile Command had a trackball instead of a joystick, and it also had three bases that could fire independently. Atari did a great job in converting the game to control with a joystick on the Atari 2600, and for the longest time I never even knew the arcade machine had a trackball. The game starts off pretty slow, but it’ll quickly increase to a frantic pace. The graphics in Missile Command are pretty plain, but the colours look great. Whenever the colour scheme changes, that is your cue to watch out, because that means the difficulty has increased. The explosions also sound pretty good, and you’ll be hearing a lot of them. Missile Command is one of the best Atari 2600 games that you can get. The difficulty curve is perfect, the game play is exciting, and it never ever gets boring. Missile Command is one of the reasons that I still play my Atari 2600.

Rating – 9 / 10