Look at the controls at the bottom of the game
What is Missile Command?
Missile Command is one of the most iconic arcade games ever made, developed by Atari and originally released in June 1980 during the height of the Cold War. The game was designed by Dave Theurer and was directly inspired by the growing fear of nuclear war at the time, placing you in control of a planetary defense system tasked with protecting six cities from an endless and escalating barrage of incoming ballistic missiles, smart bombs, bombers, and satellites. You control three missile silos named Alpha, Delta, and Omega, each stocked with ten missiles at the start of every wave, and your job is to shoot down every incoming threat before it reaches the ground and destroys one of your cities. The game has no true ending — it simply gets faster, more chaotic, and more overwhelming with every wave, cycling through up to 256 levels for the most skilled players in the world. It sold nearly 20,000 arcade cabinets on release, became one of Atari’s top earners, and is still widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made, having been ported to virtually every platform since its debut and spawning multiple remakes including Missile Command: Recharged in 2020.
Controls
The original arcade version of Missile Command used a trackball to move a crosshair cursor around the screen and three separate fire buttons to launch missiles from the left, center, or right silo respectively. In modern browser versions the trackball is replaced by the mouse, which you use to position your cursor anywhere on the screen, and you click to fire a missile toward that exact location. The most important thing to understand about the controls is that your missiles take time to travel to the spot where you clicked, meaning you must lead your shots and aim at where an incoming missile will be when your counter-missile arrives rather than clicking directly on the threat as it currently appears. The center silo fires significantly faster than the two side silos, making it the most reliable launcher for close-range emergencies, while the side silos require more anticipation and forward planning due to their slower missile speed. Getting a high score in Missile Command is about conservation, anticipation, and learning to read the screen as a whole rather than reacting to individual threats one at a time. The single most important habit to develop is leading your shots properly — always click slightly ahead of where an incoming missile is currently traveling rather than clicking directly on it, since your counter-missile needs travel time and clicking on the current position of a fast-moving threat will almost always result in a clean miss. Never fire at the tail of an incoming missile since only hitting the very tip counts as a kill — a well-placed explosion at the head of one missile can chain into nearby missiles simultaneously, and learning to cluster your shots for multi-kill explosions is the most efficient way to stretch your limited ammunition across an increasingly crowded screen.
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<-Tips to Dominate
Protect your center silo above everything else, since it fires the fastest and losing it mid-wave leaves you scrambling with only the two slower side silos for the rest of the round. When smart bombs appear, use your missiles extremely sparingly against them since they actively dodge your explosions, and prioritize eliminating the satellites and bombers that spawn them first to reduce the total number of smart bombs entering the screen at once. Save your nuclear bombs for the moments when the screen is absolutely overwhelmed with simultaneous threats rather than using them the second they become available, since their screen-clearing power is most valuable when the situation feels completely unmanageable. Focus your defensive effort on the cities that are under the most immediate threat rather than trying to protect every city equally, since losing one city in a controlled way is far better than losing two trying to save both.
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