In 1980, Atari coin-op president Gene Lipkin tore a photo of a radar screen out of a magazine and told his team to build a game that looked like it. The assignment landed on junior programmer Dave Theurer, fresh off Atari Soccer, with six months and almost no help. This episode follows those six months, from the original brief to defend six real California cities from Soviet missiles to the recurring nightmares of nuclear annihilation that haunted Theurer through crunch.

We examine the two ultimatums he issued to Atari: no real-world geography, and strictly defensive gameplay with no offensive nuclear strikes. We explain why talent shortages meant management had to compromise, how the trackball replaced the joystick to translate physical panic into cursor speed, why this became Atari's first color game, and why the screen reads The End rath ...