Missile Command facts for kids

Missile Command is a classic arcade game made by Atari in 1981. In this exciting game, your job is to protect six of your cities from a rain of falling missiles. You do this by launching your own counter-missiles to blow up the enemy attacks before they hit your cities.

To play, you move a special target, called a crosshair, around the screen. When you launch a missile, it flies towards your crosshair. If it hits, it creates a big fireball that lasts for a few seconds. Any enemy missiles that fly into this fireball are destroyed! You start with three missile batteries, and each one has ten missiles. If a battery runs out of missiles or gets destroyed by an enemy attack, you can't use it anymore.

The game is played in a series of levels, and each new level gets a bit harder. A level ends in one of two ways: either all your cities are destroyed, or you manage to destroy all the incoming enemy missiles. If you run out of your own missiles, you can't do anything else in that level. At the end of each level, you get bonus points for any cities you saved and for any missiles you didn't use.

This popular game has been released on many home video game consoles over the years. You could play it on systems like the Atari 2600, the Game Boy, and even the Xbox 360.

Images for kids

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  Atari 5200 version

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  Missile Command for the Xbox 360

See also

In Spanish: Missile Command para niños