Top 10 Games of 1980 | Number 5: Missile Command #shorts

Missile Command is a 1980 shoot 'em up arcade video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. and licensed to Sega for Japanese and European releases. It was designed by Dave Theurer, who also designed Atari's vector graphics game Tempest from the same year. Released during the Cold War, 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 port by Rob Fulop which sold over 2.5 million copies. Numerous contemporaneous clones and modern remakes followed. Missile Command is built into the Atari XEGS released in 1987, an Atari 8-bit family computer repackaged as a game console.