The first history of Atari’s Missile Command, and its own unforeseen effects on its creators and the culture

Before Contact of Duty, before Wow, before even Super Mario Bros., the video game sector exploded in the past due 1970s using the arrival of the video arcade. Leading the charge was Atari Inc., the inventor of, among others, the iconic game Missile Command. The first video game to double being a commentary on lifestyle, Missile Command put the players’ fingertips on “the switch,” producing them about 8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari’s Missile Order in charge of the destiny of civilization inside a no-win situation, all for the price tag on a quarter. The game was marvel of contemporary lifestyle, helping usher in both the age group of the video game and the video game life style. Its groundbreaking implications influenced a fanatical culture that persists to this day.

As fascinating simply because the cultural reaction to Missile Command were the programmers behind it. Prior to the era of massive advancement groups and worship of numbers like Steve Careers, Atari was manufacturing arcade machines designed, created, and coded by individual designers. As earnings from their video games entered the thousands, these creators had been celebrated as geniuses within their time; once dismissed as nerds and fans, they were now getting interviewed for major magazines, and partied like Wall Street traders. However, the toll on these developers was high: programmers worked well 120-hour weeks, frequently opting to stay in the office for days on end while under a deadline. Missile Control creator David Theurer threw himself especially fervently into his work, prompting not only declining health and a struggling relationship with his family, but regular nightmares about nuclear annihilation.

To truly inform the storyplot from the within, technology insider and writer Alex Rubens has interviewed numerous main figures out of this period: Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari; David Theurer, the inventor of Missile Control; and Phil Klemmer, article writer for the NBC series Chuck, who wrote a whole event for the display about Missile Control and its mythical “kill display screen.” Taking readers back again to the times of TaB cola, dot matrix printers, and digging through the sofa first more one fourth, Alex Rubens combines his understanding of the tech industry and experience as a gaming journalist to conjure the crazy silicon frontier from the 8-bit ’80s. 8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Tale of Atari’s Missile Order offers the initial in-depth, personal history of an era for which followers have a lot of nostalgia.