Atari Is Bringing This Classic Game to iOS with a New Twist

Gaming has come an incredibly long way in the 40 years since Atari released its first Video Console System, the Atari 2600, but the venerable gaming company is ready to revive at least one of its old legendary classics with a new and reimagined iOS version.

In celebration of the title’s 40th anniversary, Atari has announced the release of Missile Command: Recharged, which is described as a “modern take” on the original 1980 version. According to Polygon, the new game will maintain the same perspective and spirit of the original, which had players launching missiles from three silos to intercept a swath of incoming ICBMs, while getting a neon-coloured visual redesign similar to other reboots like Pac Man Championship Edition and Space Invaders Extreme.

The gameplay has also been “remixed” with new power-ups and an upgrade system that gives it a more campaign-like feel rather than the standard one-play model of the original. There’s even reportedly going to be an augmented reality mode that will project the gameplay onto a “virtual arcade cabinet.”

The original Missile Command was actually an interesting period piece, released at the height of the Cold War when the reality of actual nuclear missile strikes formed part of the public consciousness. It was originally released as an arcade cabinet game—one of the first to feature a trackball controller rather than the traditional set of buttons or joysticks—and came to Atari’s 2600 VCS not long after that. Missile Command quickly became popular on home computers and other game consoles as well, and there was even a monochrome version of it available for the original Macintosh when it debuted in 1984.

In fact, this isn’t even the first time that Missile Command has come to iOS. Atari Interactive released a short-lived $5 iPhone version of it for the fledgling App Store back in 2008, developed by Griptonite Games, but it never received more than a couple of updates and was quickly lost in the sea of more modern apps and rendered incompatible with later iOS versions.

The gameplay of this first iPhone version mirrored the classic Missile Command almost identically, so it was more of a port than a reimagined version, although Atari did introduce an “Ultra” mode that added some good background music with 2D missile launching special effects and cool backgrounds. Further, with absolutely no game controllers available in those early iPhone days, however, players had to rely completely on touchscreen interactions to launch missiles, which also changed the experience slightly.

By contrast, Missile Command: Recharged is expected to be released as a free-to-play title with ads, although there won’t be any of the usual “freemium” nonsense—Atari is promising that players who want to remove the ads will be able to do so with a simple one-time in-app purchase. It’s expected to be released sometime in the spring for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch (no word on an Apple TV version).

Some of us are old enough to remember playing the original Missile Command — in addition to playing in arcades, it was one of the first three cartridges I received with my original Atari 2600 back in 1981, along with Combat and Asteroids — so Atari’s decision to revisit the title for its 40th anniversary is going to be an interesting look at how far gaming has come in the past four decades.