Missile Command is an arcade video game released by Atari in 1981. In this game, the player has to defend six cities from falling missiles. The player does so by hitting the missiles with their own counter-missiles. The player moves a crosshair to launch missiles. When a missile hits the crosshair, it creates a fireball that stays for a few seconds and destroys any missiles that hit it. The player has three batteries with ten missiles each. When a battery has no more missiles left or it is destroyed, the player can no longer use it. The game is played as a series of levels, each having a higher difficulty. A level ends if all of the player's cities are destroyed, or all of the falling missiles are destroyed. If a player runs out of missiles, they no longer have control in the level they are playing on. At the end of a level, the player gets extra points for cities that have not been destroyed and missiles they did not use.