👾 Arcade1980AtariEASYMissile Command rebuild deck
EASY
Lines falling down a screen and circles that grow and shrink — the only thing here that takes any thought is that your explosions have to detonate other explosions, and chain reactions are ten lines of overlap checks.
You will get essentially the whole thing.
An evening, and one of the best-value evenings on this list. The game logic is trivial and every hour after the first goes into feel: explosion easing, bloom, shake, the sound of a city going. That ratio — 20% mechanics, 80% juice — is unusual and it makes this a very good project for practising the second part deliberately, since nothing in the first part will distract you.
- Difficulty
- EASY · 1 of 5
- First playable
- An evening
- The original
- 1 team-years
- Released
- 1980 · Arcade
- Genre
- Arcade
Build Missile Command as a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, no build step, no dependencies. Requirements: - Six cities and three missile batteries along the bottom, each battery with limited ammo that refills between waves. Enemy missiles fall from the top toward cities and batteries, splitting into MIRVs at higher levels. - Click to fire at a point. Your missile travels there at a fixed speed, then detonates into a circle that grows to a maximum radius and shrinks away. Anything the circle touches dies — including other enemy missiles, which is the chain reaction the whole game is built on. - Score chains explicitly: a kill caused by another explosion is worth more, and the multiplier climbs with chain depth. Show the multiplier floating at the kill point. - Wave structure: more missiles, faster, more splits each wave. End-of-wave bonus for unused ammo and surviving cities. Game over when all six cities are gone. - Additive blending on explosions, screen shake on city loss, and a low rumble that gets more frequent as the wave escalates. - Mouse aim with a crosshair that is drawn, not the system cursor, so it can lag slightly and feel like a trackball. Definition of done: I place one missile that takes out five incoming, and the multiplier makes it obvious that I meant to.
- The trackball, which is the entire reason the original feels the way it does — a mouse is close, touch is not
- The CRT phosphor glow that made the explosions look like that; you will need additive blending and a bloom pass to get near it
- The escalating dread of the original's difficulty curve, which was tuned over months to take your quarters
Chain reactions as the scoring system, not a bonus
Most arcade games reward accuracy, so the optimal play is to react fast. Score chains instead and the optimal play becomes waiting — you hold fire, place one explosion where the cluster will be in a second, and let it cascade. Same inputs, same physics, completely different game, and the skill ceiling arrives on its own without a single extra mechanic.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Build a chain-reaction scoring toy as a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, no dependencies. - A field of drifting particles. Click anywhere to spawn one explosion — you get exactly one per round. - Any particle touched by an explosion dies and becomes an explosion itself, one generation later, with a slightly smaller radius. - Score is chain length, and each generation is worth more than the last. Show the generation count climbing live while the cascade runs. - Explosions ease out over 600ms with additive blending, staggered so a big cascade reads as a wave crossing the screen rather than a single flash. - After the round, replay the cascade at quarter speed with the generation number rendered on each explosion. Definition of done: I find myself not clicking for several seconds while I wait for the particles to drift into a better shape.
Not a clone — Missile Command re-themed and cut down to something you can finish. The angle is the important reel: it is what turns a project into a weekend. 5,880 ways to land.
Olympian From Above
Missile Command, but a management sim of the same world, set in Greek myth. Rendered in risograph two-colour print.
Build a browser game called "Olympian From Above". The pitch in one line: a arcade in the spirit of Missile Command, but a management sim of the same world, set in Greek myth. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Missile Command — its core loop, and whatever makes that loop good — and rebuild it as your own game in a different world at a smaller scope. Use your own names, art and audio, which you want anyway: a reskin of somebody else's game is less interesting than a new one that works the same way. THE ANGLE — this is the important constraint, honour it above everything else A management sim of the same world. The player never controls a character — they set policy and watch agents with visible needs succeed or fail at it. This is what makes the project finishable. If a decision would push the scope back towards the original's, take the smaller option every time. THE THEME Greek myth. Gods, hubris and monsters that are each a design problem. Bronze, marble and wine-dark colour. The theme is not a coat of paint. Let it change what the mechanics mean — a reload, a health pack and a locked door should all be things that make sense in this world and nowhere else. LOOK Risograph two-colour print. Two spot inks with visible misregistration, halftone dot shading, and paper texture showing through every fill. REQUIREMENTS - Runs in a browser with no build step. Canvas 2D unless the angle genuinely requires 3D, in which case three.js. - Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so it behaves the same at 60Hz and 144Hz. - Every tuning constant in one CONFIG object at the top, exposed as live sliders in a debug panel. You will find the feel by dragging those, not by prompting. - All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic. - Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files. - Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax. BUILD ORDER 1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles, at the reduced scope the angle demands. No theme, no art, no audio. Make it fun as rectangles first. 2. The angle's consequences. Cutting to bots, or to turn-based, or to one level changes the design rather than just shrinking it — find out how and rewrite step 1. 3. The theme, as content and data. 4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works. Start by writing a one-page plan: the core loop, what the angle removes and what that frees you to do properly, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.
One count per game. No account — it is tied to a salted hash of your IP, which is not stored in a form anyone can reverse. Every build adds 1 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Missile Command to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Missile Command is EASY (1 of 5). You will get essentially the whole thing. Lines falling down a screen and circles that grow and shrink — the only thing here that takes any thought is that your explosions have to detonate other explosions, and chain reactions are ten lines of overlap checks. Reckon on an evening to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 1 team-years Atari spent.
What makes Missile Command hard to rebuild?
Lines falling down a screen and circles that grow and shrink — the only thing here that takes any thought is that your explosions have to detonate other explosions, and chain reactions are ten lines of overlap checks. That is why it sits at EASY rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is chain reactions as the scoring system, not a bonus — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a Missile Command clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Missile Command — the original took Atari on the order of 1 team-years, released in 1980 on Arcade. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about an evening, and then keep going for as long as it stays interesting. Any figure that claims otherwise is measuring a prototype and calling it a game.
What do I lose by building my own Missile Command?
The trackball, which is the entire reason the original feels the way it does — a mouse is close, touch is not. The CRT phosphor glow that made the explosions look like that; you will need additive blending and a bloom pass to get near it. The escalating dread of the original's difficulty curve, which was tuned over months to take your quarters. Those are the parts a prompt will not hand you.
Which AI coding agent should I use to build it?
Any of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will handle this prompt. Paste it as your first message, let the agent scaffold the project, then iterate on feel — the second, third and tenth prompts are where a game actually gets good. Work in an empty folder or a fresh git branch so you can throw it away cheaply.
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