Missile Command Cheat Codes & Secrets
Complete collection of cheat codes, passwords, unlockables, and hidden secrets for Missile Command (1980).
Game Variations and Mode Selection
Missile Command on the Atari 2600 (1981 release, programmed by Rob Fulop) does not use button-combo cheat codes in the way later NES or SNES games do — the hardware simply didn’t support that input model. Instead, Atari 2600 cartridges encoded difficulty and variant selection into the console’s physical Game Select switch, the Game Reset switch, and the two Difficulty switches (left and right) on the rear panel of the console. Mastering these controls is the closest equivalent to a “code menu” on this platform, and competitive players in the early 1980s treated variant selection as essential knowledge.
The Atari 2600 version ships with 12 selectable game variations, cycled through by pressing the Game Select switch before starting a round. Each press advances the variant number displayed on screen (shown as a single digit or Roman numeral depending on your cartridge revision). The variants alter missile speed, the presence of smart bombs, the number of attacking waves before the game accelerates, and whether bonus cities are awarded on schedule or withheld:
| Variant | Effect | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Standard beginner speed, no smart bombs, bonus cities at 10,000 pts | Atari 2600 |
| 2 | Slightly faster missiles, no smart bombs | Atari 2600 |
| 3 | Smart bombs introduced, standard speed | Atari 2600 |
| 4 | Smart bombs + increased missile count per wave | Atari 2600 |
| 5 | Faster enemy missiles, smart bombs active | Atari 2600 |
| 6 | High-speed mode, smart bombs, bonus city threshold raised | Atari 2600 |
| 7–12 | Further escalating combinations of the above, approximating later arcade waves | Atari 2600 |
Variants 7 through 12 are the closest thing this version offers to a stage skip or level warp: by selecting a high variant number before pressing Game Reset to start play, you launch directly into a late-game difficulty state without grinding through the early waves. Serious score chasers in the early 1980s used Variant 12 specifically to train against the hardest missile patterns the cartridge could generate.
Difficulty Switch Effects
The two physical Difficulty switches on the Atari 2600 console — labeled A (hard) and B (easy) for both left and right positions — have specific effects in Missile Command that most players never discovered because the manual buried the explanation:
| Switch | Position | Effect | Platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| Left Difficulty | B (down) | Missile battery fires with a wider, more forgiving blast radius | Atari 2600 |
| Left Difficulty | A (up) | Blast radius is tighter, requiring more precise cursor placement | Atari 2600 |
| Right Difficulty | B (down) | Standard enemy missile speed for the selected variant | Atari 2600 |
| Right Difficulty | A (up) | Enemy missiles accelerate faster within each wave | Atari 2600 |
The community-discovered “training setup” uses Left Difficulty B and Right Difficulty B to learn cursor placement patterns, then graduates to Left A / Right A to simulate arcade-accurate difficulty. Switching the left difficulty to A mid-game is sometimes used as a self-imposed challenge by players who have maxed out their scores on the easier setting.
Bonus City Thresholds and Score Milestones
Neither the arcade nor the Atari 2600 version awards bonus cities through a code — they’re earned through accumulated score. However, knowing the exact thresholds is operationally equivalent to knowing a power-up unlock:
| Score Threshold | Reward | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| 10,000 points | +1 bonus city | Arcade / Atari 2600 |
| 20,000 points | +1 bonus city | Arcade / Atari 2600 |
| Every 10,000 thereafter | +1 bonus city (up to 6 cities max) | Arcade |
| 8,000 points | +1 bonus city (adjusted threshold) | Atari 2600 |
On the Atari 2600, Rob Fulop adjusted the bonus city threshold downward from the arcade’s 10,000 to approximately 8,000 points to compensate for the inherently lower scores produced by joystick play versus the arcade’s trackball. This means Atari 2600 players accumulate replacement cities more readily than arcade players, which is a meaningful mechanical advantage if you know to exploit it by deliberately targeting high-value satellite and bomber passes rather than individual missiles.
Score Rollover Exploit
The Atari 2600 version stores the score in a limited number of digits. When the score counter reaches 99,999 points, it rolls back to 00,000 and continues — the game does not end, crash, or glitch. Players in the early 1980s who discovered this behavior used it strategically: rather than chasing a single high-score milestone, they would deliberately let waves pass partially (sacrificing low-value cities while protecting higher-value positions) to manipulate incoming wave difficulty relative to their post-rollover score display. The rollover itself carries no in-game penalty and grants no reward, but it was treated as a mark of mastery among Atari 2600 competitive players.
The arcade version uses a 6-digit counter rolling at 999,999 points. Achieving this rollover in the arcade was extremely rare and typically required hours of sustained play exploiting the point-pressing technique described in the next section.
Point-Pressing: The Core Exploit
The single most impactful exploit in Missile Command — across all platforms — is point-pressing, which arcade players discovered within weeks of the game’s 1980 release. The technique works as follows:
Enemy bombers and satellites crossing the screen horizontally award a flat point bonus when destroyed. Because these bonuses are fixed regardless of game difficulty or wave number, and because the player’s anti-missile batteries have a finite but large ammunition supply per base, the optimal strategy is to ignore standard incoming ICBMs momentarily and dedicate fire to horizontal craft. Each bomber destroyed mid-flight awards significantly more points than destroying the missiles it spawns afterward.
On the Atari 2600 specifically, point-pressing is modified by the joystick’s limited cursor speed. Because the cursor cannot sweep the screen as quickly as an arcade trackball, Atari 2600 players developed a variant technique: pre-position the cursor at the horizontal entry point of the bomber’s flight path and fire preemptively, placing explosions in the bomber’s projected trajectory rather than tracking it in real time. This pre-aim technique was documented in the 1982 Atari Age newsletter and is considered the foundational mechanical skill for high-score play on the home version.
Arcade Easter Eggs and Developer Secrets
The original arcade cabinet version of Missile Command contains one of the most emotionally resonant Easter eggs in early video game history. Designer Dave Theurer reported that he suffered recurring nightmares about nuclear war during the game’s development — nightmares in which his hometown of Marin County was the target of the attacks he was simulating on screen. This psychological context drove him to implement a specific end-game message.
When the final city is destroyed and the player’s game ends after the late waves, the arcade display shows the words “THE END” before the attract mode cycles. This was not a standard “Game Over” message — it was an intentional design choice by Theurer to communicate the finality of nuclear annihilation. In a 1982 interview with Electronic Games magazine, Theurer confirmed this was deliberate authorial intent, making it one of the earliest examples of a developer using game mechanics to communicate a thematic message to the player.
The Atari 2600 port does not replicate the “THE END” message — it simply returns to the title screen — which means players who only know the home version miss this piece of game history entirely.
Atari 5200 Version Differences
The Atari 5200 port (1982) is worth noting for players comparing versions, as it introduced analog joystick control that more closely approximated the arcade trackball. The 5200 version:
- Supports smoother cursor movement, enabling more accurate pre-aim techniques
- Has a slightly different set of game variants accessible via the keypad (buttons 1–9 on the 5200 controller select variants directly, rather than cycling through them with a switch)
- Awards bonus cities on the same approximate threshold as the Atari 2600 version
The 5200 keypad variant selection is the closest thing to a “stage select code” in any home version of Missile Command: pressing 7 on the 5200 keypad before starting launches you into a high-difficulty variant equivalent to the upper range of the Atari 2600’s Variant 10–12 range.
Beneficial Glitches
Wave counter overflow (arcade): In the original arcade version, the wave/attack counter is stored in a single byte. If a player theoretically survived past wave 255, the counter would overflow to 0 and the difficulty would briefly reset to an early-game state before rapidly re-escalating. This has been documented in emulated play and tool-assisted speedrun contexts, though surviving to wave 255 under legitimate conditions requires sustained play exceeding several hours.
Missile bank exhaustion stall (Atari 2600): When one of the three missile batteries is completely exhausted of ammunition, the game briefly stutters before redistributing targeting control to the remaining batteries. Experienced players exploit this stall window — which lasts approximately one to two frames — as a micro-pause to re-orient the cursor. This is not an intentional mechanic but a processing artifact of how the Atari 2600 handles battery state transitions.
City preservation scoring (all versions): At the end of each wave, surviving cities are awarded bonus points. Players who understand the exact per-city bonus value (100 points per city on the Atari 2600) can make deliberate decisions about whether to expend missiles defending a marginal city or conserve ammunition for the next wave’s opening sequence — a calculated sacrifice that maximizes total score over time rather than maximizing cities surviving at any single wave end.
Historical Context: Why There Are No Traditional Cheat Codes
It’s worth understanding why Missile Command lacks the kind of button-sequence cheat codes that became common in later years. Games like Konami titles in 1986–1988 popularized developer-input cheat codes because those games were designed with complex progression systems that benefited from skip codes during testing. Missile Command, designed in 1980, was an arcade score-attack game built for a 30-second to 5-minute play session with no progression to skip. The difficulty system was physical (switches, variant dials) rather than software-gated, reflecting Atari’s hardware design philosophy. This means that for Missile Command, the “cheats” are entirely about mechanical knowledge: knowing your variants, knowing your bonus city thresholds, knowing point-pressing, and knowing the difficulty switches. This knowledge was passed between players through arcade-side conversation, Atari Age newsletters, and the early gaming press — the analogue of a cheat code community before cheat codes existed as a concept.