Missile Command is up there as one of Atari’s most recognizable franchises alongside the likes of Asteroids or Pong. Its simple missile defense gameplay still holds up today and is still a great deal of fun. There’s also a lot of different ways for those interested to still play it. That’s why Atari made it very clear to The Big Con’s Mighty Yell and Runbow’s 13 AM Games that they needed to think outside the box when reimagining this classic for them as Missile Command Delta.
“There was a list of amazing games from the last 50 years to choose from, and Atari said that if you want to do some of those games, you have to think of something a little bit more outside of the box,” Dave Proctor, executive producer from Mighty Yell told Tech Reader at this year’s Game Developers Conference. “I thought ‘What if Missile Command was like a tactics game?’ and that just broke my brain and I knew we had to do this.”
Missile Command Delta is the latest in a line of Atari reimaginings that includes titles such as Lunar Lander Beyond and Yars Rising. The storied retro game has been reinterpreted for a new adventure that blends first-person exploration and puzzle solving like The Witness with turn-based tactical battles that blend elements from games like Slay the Spire and Into the Breach. I went hands-on with Missile Command Delta at GDC 2025 and found that this concoction of influences creates Atari’s boldest retro reimagining yet.
What’s going on down there?
Mighty Yell, 13 AM Games, and Atari are tight-lipped about the details of Missile Command’s story, which sees the player solving puzzles and defending bases from missile strikes at terminals within a bunker. “I’m not going to say exactly when its set, but I will say it’s about a group of people that are not part of this bunker,” Proctor teased. Stories like WarGames, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Ender’s Game were cited as influences by Proctor, so Missile Command Delta certainly adds a lot of intrigue to a game that historically had minimal story.
One half of the game is exploring a bunker in first person. I didn’t get to do too much of that during my demo, but Proctor says that there will be dedicated puzzles to solve while exploring. There aren’t too many examples of games that blend first-person puzzle solving with other genres; the closest hybrid game I can think of is the highly underrated American Arcadia. Instead, each half of the gameplay has clear influences.
When exploring the bunker in first-person, Proctor cites The Witness as a major inspiration. For the turn-based battles, Slay the Spire and Into the Breach were the primary points of comparison. When I walked up to a terminal in Missile Command Delta, I had to defend bases in bite-sized tactical battles. Missiles rain down from the top of a hexagonal grid, and if even one hits my bases at the bottom it’s game over.
There are different missiles at my disposal, represented by cards, which I can launch across a certain number of tiles before exploding. If an enemy missile enters an explosion’s area-of-effect, it also blows up. The key to acing Missile Command’s tactical battles is doing this with the fewest number of cards possible by always keeping an eye on the path enemy missiles are taking.
Like Slay the Spire and Into the Breach, this is a pretty tactical gameplay system where information is clearly laid out to the player so they can quickly react accordingly. And if players “Ace” a terminal, they can learn even more about Missile Command Delta’s mysterious world and lore. This hybrid first-person and turn-based tactics game is a bold swing, which has been the MO for a lot of Atari’s recent retro reimaginings. Still, something about this adventure in particular resonates with me a bit more than those other titles did. Maybe that’s because this reinvention is actually not too far from the core of what makes Missile Command great.
“With Missile Command, the player should always be reacting,” Proctor said when describing how Delta retains the essence of the series. “The player should never be on the offensive; they should always be reacting to information. What is the emotion of that? How does that feel? I think there’s a lot of similarities that came very naturally into the game through the development process.”
Missile Command Delta is in development for PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch.
