Game 7: Missile Defense (1986)

United States
Released 1986
Genre: Arcade
Developer: Glen Merriman
Date Started: 22 June 2025
Date Ended: 22 June 2025
Total Hours: 0.5
Difficulty: Hard (4.5/5)
Final Rating: 20

This will be a short one, as Missile Defense by Glenn Merriman (also appearing in TOSEC as Missile Command) is just a simple clone of the classic Missile Command arcade game, which was originally released in 1980 by Atari. I’m not into arcaded games and never played the original (I don’t think I ever played any version of it), so I can’t say too much about it. Noteworthy is it’s written in Assembler and thanks to just taking up 80K of space, it loads amazingly fast compared to the other games I’ve played so far. Gameplay also seems to be very responsive, but it tends to slow down when too much is happening on the screen.

Programming:
Feels adequate for an early arcade port written on a fresh platform, super fast loading time, but gets a bit slow when too much stuff is happening. 5/10

Controls:
Very responsive and intuitive mouse control (until it lags). 7/10

Vibe:
None. 0/10

Graphics:
Adequate but unremarkable. 3/10

Story:
None. 0/10

Audio:
Sound is disabled by default, but you can load a set of IFF audio files. These sound... well, adequate but somewhat annoying. For example, new games stages are accompanied by a loud and brutal scream (one of those IFF samples any Amiga user will recognize). 2/10

Fun:
Guess I would have enjoyed it more if I was into arcade games but it’s fun for a quick session. Hard as nails though. 3/10

Final Rating: 20

Overall:
Not much to say about this than I already have. One point I find interesting is that even after a few games we’re seeing a couple of different programming languages being used: While David Addison used ABasiC for Tunnel Vision and Monopoly, Klaus Kramer used AmigaBASIC for Junior Boulderdash, Sheldon Leemon used C for YachtC, and now we’re encountering an Assembler game. I’m curious to see what other languages will be come up in the future or if there will be a trend towards one or two languages dominating the community.

Glenn Merriman distributed Missile Defense for free but offered the source code for a small fee of $5 together with an machine language monitor/disassembler and the accompanying source code.