Missile Command, 1980

In 1980 Atari released Missile Command, designed by Dave Theurer. It came out at the height of the Cold War, when two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at each other and were playing chicken with the planet. A generation grew up rehearsing the attack.

The game made you rehearse it too. You guard six cities from missiles falling out of the sky, and you can't win. Every game ends the same way: the cities go dark and the screen says THE END. Theurer said building it gave him nightmares about nuclear war.

It was a hit in every arcade, and it was political art: a toy that let millions of people practise the thing everyone was afraid of, and lose, a quarter at a time.

Now

Forty-odd years on, we are here again. The fear of attack from the sky is back, but the weapons changed. Today's wars are fought with drones: cheap ones, launched by the thousand at cities and soldiers, and more drones sent up to stop them. Defense is automated. The people on the ground decide where the launchers stand, then watch.

Drone Command is Missile Command for that world. You don't aim most of the shots. You choose where the machines go and what they're good at, and the machines do the rest. Like the original, it doesn't end well. The only question is how long you hold.