Missile Command is one of the best games of the era, hands down.
Missile Command puts you in the command of missile stations, with the duty to save the town from a raid of bombs. Maybe they’re aliens, I don’t know. Maybe they’re reds. Commies. Soviets. Regardless, you have to protect them. You shoot missiles at the incoming bombs to protect your town, occasionally shooting at other things for extra points. That’s it. You get points for shooting bombs, and you get points for keeping your buildings alive. That is it. But it’s so fun; it’s one of those formulas that just don’t get old. Missile Command is, for me, the highlight of the era aside from perhaps Pong. It’s just one of those timeless classics, man. As with most arcade games, the difficulty increases as you go along, this really serves as both a consistent learning curve and a school of hard knocks. You’ll suck at the harder levels for quite awhile, subtly getting better until you’re the Missile Master. (You’re the Insult Master!) In the end, Missile Command’s gameplay is probably one of the earliest games one could call addicting. It’s level of fun and simple, unexplained story dip the game in simplistic bliss.
The graphics were probably breathtaking for their day, but it’s hard for me to judge them. The missile stations look like missile stations and the buildings look like buildings, so maybe that sets Missile Command ahead of most Atari games. Eh?
Sound? What sound? You can hear the missiles hit bombs. You can hear the bombs hit buildings. They may not necessarily sound like missiles hitting bombs or bombs hitting buildings, but its better than nothing, isn’t it?
The replay value is, and this shouldn’t be predictable if you’ve read my earlier paragraph on gameplay, astounding. It’s virtually endless. You fight and claw and scratch your way to the top of the points system, and master the hardest levels of them all, and you still keep playing! You don’t stop on that account. You go back and play the easy levels, because now that you can do them all, you can do them all perfectly, right? Maybe that’s just an excuse for just how fun the game is. I don’t know.
At the end of the day, for me, Missile Command is the highlight for the Atari era. Its simple arcade fun never got boring, and was always challenging. It was one of those early examples of a just plain fun formula.