There are three batteries, each with ten missiles a battery becomes useless when all its missiles have been launched or if it is destroyed by enemy fire, whichever occurs first. Counter-missiles explode upon reaching the crosshair, leaving a fireball that persists for several seconds and destroys any enemy missiles that enter it. The game is played by moving a crosshair across the sky background via a trackball and pressing one of three buttons to launch a counter-missile from the appropriate battery. As a regional commander of three anti-missile batteries, the player must defend six cities in their zone from being destroyed. New weapons are introduced in later levels: smart bombs that can evade a less-than-perfectly targeted missile, and bomber planes and satellites that fly across the screen launching missiles of their own. The player's six cities are being attacked by an endless hail of ballistic missiles, some of which split like multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles. Missile Command is built into the Atari XEGS released in 1987, an Atari 8-bit family computer repackaged as a game console. Numerous contemporaneous clones and modern remakes followed. The game was released during the Cold War, and the player uses a trackball to defend six cities from intercontinental ballistic missiles by launching anti-ballistic missiles from three bases.Ītari brought the game to its home systems beginning with the 1981 Atari VCS port by Rob Fulop. It was designed by Dave Theurer, who also designed Atari's vector graphics game Tempest from the same year. and licensed to Sega for Japanese and European releases. Missile Command is a 1980 shoot 'em up arcade video game developed and published by Atari, Inc.

Arcade game command