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 rather than Game Over in an unwinnable scenario. The episode also covers the nearly 20,000 cabinets sold, appearances in Terminator 2 and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Rob Fulop’s Atari 2600 port rewarded with a Safeway turkey coupon, Jody Bowles’s 30-hour marathon on one quarter in 1981, and the Twin Galaxies disputes over trackball sensitivity.

• Theurer’s Law and why no programmer was expected to ship a first original game
• Scrubbing San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego into anonymous skylines
• How a passive defender role stripped away the arcade power fantasy
• The field-tested indicator light panel that was cut for distracting players
• Why Fulop quit Atari over a turkey coupon and co-founded Imagic