See, Atari did not have a Trackball until a few years later with the CX-80. So of course the only interface that made sense was the Joystick, because everyone had one, and they would not need to upcharge for extra hardware (yeah, back in a time when it seems corporations, for all their folley, had a lot more sense about their customer base). Missile Command is another one of those ubiqutous Atari space titles everyone ends up with in their collection at some point or another, usually packed in between Defender, Berzerk, Space Invaders, and Asteroids.

Okay, enough P-Model. So I obtained this early lowercase-text copy of Missile Command when I was 15 and bought a Sunnyvale Heavy Sixer at an Opelika Flea Store for $25.00 with a pile of early release 1977-era games, and needless to say, I quite well like this game. I'ts not my favorite, but it's fun, I'm not good at it, but it's fun. Basically, all you do is shoot down missles and ICBMs to protect your....city? IT looks more like we are in a valley in the west to be completley honest, or somewhere in Illinois if the raises in the landscape are really the base buildings.

Oddly enough the Atari CX-80 trackball had a Joystick mode changeable by flipping a switch, but all it does is sends repeated joystick requests to the controller port, which makes it a bit too sluggish for this game. Someone on Atari age rewrote the code to work with the Trackball in TB mode but I don't feel like shelling out money just for a controller change, at least not just yet, as the joystick works just fine for the job.