"Before
Call of Duty, before World of Warcraft, before even Super
Mario Bros., the video game industry exploded in the late 1970s with the
advent of the video arcade. Leading the charge was Atari Inc., the creator of,
among others, the iconic game Missile
Command. The first game to double as a commentary on culture, Missile Command put the players' fingers
on ""the button,"" making them responsible for the fate of civilization in a
no-win scenario, all for the price of a quarter. The game was marvel of modern
culture, helping usher in both the age of the video game and the video game
lifestyle. Its groundbreaking implications inspired a fanatical culture that
persists to this day.
As fascinating as the cultural reaction to Missile Command were the programmers
behind it. Before the era of massive development teams and worship of figures
like Steve Jobs, Atari was manufacturing arcade machines designed, written, and
coded by individual designers. As earnings from their games entered the
millions, these creators were celebrated as geniuses in their time; once dismissed
as nerds and fanatics, they were now being interviewed for major publications,
and partied like Wall Street traders. However, the toll on these programmers
was high: developers worked 120-hour weeks, often opting to stay in the office
for days on end while under a deadline. Missile
Command creator David Theurer threw himself particularly fervently into his
work, prompting not only declining health and a suffering relationship with his
family, but frequent nightmares about nuclear annihilation. To truly tell the story from the inside, tech insider and
writer Alex Rubens has interviewed numerous major figures from this time: Nolan
Bushnell, founder of Atari; David Theurer, the creator of Missile Command; and Phil Klemmer, writer for the NBC series Chuck, who wrote an entire episode for
the show about Missile Command and
its mythical ""kill screen."" Taking readers back to the days of TaB cola, dot
matrix printers, and digging through the couch for just one more quarter, Alex
Rubens combines his knowledge of the tech industry and experience as a gaming
journalist to conjure the wild silicon frontier of the 8-bit '80s. 8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari's Missile Command offers the first in-depth, personal history of an era
for which fans have a lot of nostalgia."