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Game Over? The more observant of you will be aware that this is the 5th instalment in my series, documenting my life and times with the seminal arcade title Missile Command. We’ve been through a lot together dear reader; surviving puberty, old men with bad teeth, psychotic Americans, malfunctioning arcade titles, chip pan fires and Rastafarians. But I’m pleased to report its all been worth it.In short, we’ve arrived. For the last two years, I’ve been practicing hard to beat the 22 year old world record on tournament settings on the arcade title Missile Command. For those not familiar with the game, tournament settings means the player is given 6 cities to defend as usual, but no bonus cities are awarded at any stage. Under normal settings, a bonus city is allocated every 10,000 points, meaning the game is all about getting to the next 10,000 multiple to guarantee further advancement of one’s score. Under tournament settings, the game is different. Very different. One wrong move, and the game is over. No second chances.
Imagine if you will the mental anguish of being less than 10 minutes away from the highest score in history, only to slip up and have your game dashed. No saved game to reload. No starting where you left off. You are thrown back down the mountain, to start again from the very beginning. This isn’t just a case of pressing start again; the whole process has to be documented on tape for verification purposes. Stop the camera, rewind the tape and readjust your tripod. Switch the machine back on, wait for the warm up sequence to complete, ensure the tape is running and then press start. And start again from the very beginning. Welcome to my world, Rodents. Motivation has been a rare commodity. With the record standing at 1.69 million, I got close about a year ago, with a score of 1.4 million points taped at home. This was increased at the Croydon Classic Gaming Event to just over 1.5 million. The good thing about this was that it was done live, in front of about 30 smelly nerds, but more importantly in front of the elite players and referees of Twin Galaxies, the official scorekeepers of arcade world records. This gave me a certain amount of credibility and of course made my challenge more believable in their eyes. Bear in mind no-one had got close to the score in over 22 years - the nearest was something like 400,000 points up to that point, less than a quarter of the world record, so it was quite something for these people to see some bloke from England posting a monster score on an ageing arcade title in front of their very eyes. From that point (August 2005) it was all about one final push over the top to nail the score. So what did I do? Fuck all for two months. I’d like to say it was a deliberate tactic, but it was slightly more than that. I was scared of getting the world record.
Scared of what, you ask? Well, I was fearful of what would happen after I was the world champ. Having invested so much in getting to that position, what was I going to do with Missile Command after being the best in the world? Would I stop playing altogether? What would the next challenge be? There was and still is no other player to help push the score higher, it was down to me to not only beat the record, but then to find a way forward after that – and I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep playing, but not to beat the score, because then this great journey, where I’ve travelled around the country and overseas and met some really interesting people, would be all over. And I’d have a big lump of colourful wood in my lounge, which would undoubtedly be the subject of some heated discussion with the missus. The inspiration I needed came from an unexpected source. A certain Roy Schildt started emailing me again. Roy Schildt was the man with the 22 year old world record on Missile Command, and he was on a mission to throw me off course. His emails would range from denouncing Twin Galaxies and all who sail in her, to questioning my abilities at the game and making all sorts of weird and wonderful challenges. At one stage, he wanted to wager $10,000 to fly to the UK, and play me in front of referees from The Guinness Book Of Records (who’d been ignoring his emails for the best part of 5 years up to that point). Make no mistake, this score was the most important thing in Schildt’s life. I’m deadly serious. After fruitlessly trying to reason with the steam train that is Roy Schildt on a mission, I came to realise that the only way to shut this guy up was to trounce his score. And that’s exactly what I did. At 1.30 am on the 9th March 2006, I posted a score of 1,967,830. Chief referee Walter Day of Twin Galaxies made a typically understated announcement: "Breaking the record on Missile Command is more than just achieving a high score on a videogame. The game is so difficult that it’s like storming the beaches of Normandy and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Tony’s score deserves to be remembered by future generations of gamers" Comparisons with the Normandy landings are perhaps a little overstated, and if I’m honest I’m struggling with the image of my great grandchildren stopping for a moment from their game of FIFA 2092 on their Playstation 7s and thinking about my achievement. But hey, Walter’s proclamation looked good in print.
So job done then. Well not quite. This is only the beginning: there’s so much more to do. I need to crack 2 million for my own sanity, as well as get past wave 256 where it is speculated another bug may occur (I’m the only person at the moment in a position to see it). In addition there is another title, Super Missile Attack, released as an add on to Missile Command, which has a relatively low World Record Score. I have my eyes on that too. And as for Missile Command on Marathon settings (bonus cities every 10,000 points), well... 80 million points is a pretty big score. Playing a game of Missile Command for 60 plus hours straight? Well I could get the score without a problem, it’s the staying awake bit that would be the challenge. But you never know. I could be persuaded. And what of Roy Schildt? He’s still around and still emailing me. He made his presence felt when I attended the Funspot Annual Classic Videogame Tournament in America last month. Roy "Mr Awesome" Schildt pushed his psychosis to new levels by sending a private investigator to trail me and hand me yet another challenge. He then bombarded the hotel I was staying at with phone calls demanding I return his call. I never did and he never showed up.
So it seems I have a stalker. Which is something I suppose. Thank god for the Atlantic Ocean. Will Roy and I ever play? I hope so; but the guy needs to calm down a bit (actually, make that a lot). Whatever the result of any head to head, he would find a way of declaring himself the “true” champion, and his whole demeanour is something I could do without. To see what I mean click here So you see, the whole "Bug" thing for me has morphed from a curious programming oversight back in 1980, into a whole journey culminating in a place in the Guinness Book Of Records some twenty six years later. It’s been a pleasure to share the story with you. But this appears to be only the start; when part 6 is ready to be written, you’ll be the first to know... August 2006 Need to catch up on the series so far?
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