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Missile Command

A pixel-faithful web version of the 1980 arcade classic – six cities, three bases and a high-score table with initials. The idea lives on in Golden Dome.

Lives on in Golden Dome on EverydayGames.

Play the original

Opens at everydaygames.se/missile-command/

A black night sky in chunky pixel art, with turquoise missile trails falling towards an explosion above green hills and yellow cities along the ground.

Maturity

  1. Idea(completed)
  2. Prototype(completed)
  3. Alpha(completed)
  4. Beta(current stage)
  5. Promoted

Archived No longer developed. Kept as history, and for the curious.

About the project

Missile Command is the 1980 arcade classic in your browser: point at the sky, let the counter-missile detonate in the enemy’s path and try to keep the cities alive for one more wave. Everything is built to look like the original – the same resolution, the same colours and the same high-score table with three initials.

The game is a single page of vanilla JavaScript with no build step, which made it quick to get pixel-perfect but left nothing to build on. When the idea of a modern missile defence game took shape, it became a new game from the ground up instead: Golden Dome.

Current state

What the project got to be

  • Six cities and three missile bases with limited ammunition, wave after wave
  • A bonus between waves for surviving cities and missiles
  • The top ten scores are saved locally, signed with three initials
  • The canvas is 256×231 pixels like the original, scaled up without smoothing
  • Mouse, touch and keyboard; installable and playable offline

What never got finished

  • No campaign or upgrades – just the original's endless waves
  • The name and the game concept belong to Atari, so the page shouldn't compete in search results
  • No automated tests in the codebase

Why is this project on BSite?

  • Replaced by a newer project

Missile Command was an exercise in recreating the original pixel for pixel, and as such it works. But the name belongs to Atari, and the idea has taken a bigger form of its own in Golden Dome on EverydayGames – with a campaign, five threat types, upgrades and 374 tests. The remake stays here as what it is.

Screenshots

  • A retro title screen – a red logo against black, missile trails on their way down and six cities on yellow ground.
  • The bonus round tallies points for remaining missiles and cities between two waves.
  • The high-score screen, where three initials are picked from an alphabet grid after a game of 850 points.

Development log

  1. Archived and moved to BSite. The game stays at the same address, everydaygames.se/missile-command/.

  2. The oscillator sounds replaced with generated sound effects.

  3. Built as a pixel-faithful remake in vanilla JavaScript, with no build step and no dependencies.