Alex Rubens for Polygon wrote about how Missile Command, the popular arcade game from Atari, came to be. He opens:

Sweat dripping down your forehead, soaking your entire body. Waking up, relieved the horror you just experienced wasn't real. Seeing nuclear missiles drop from the sky, streaking to the ground, toward the city you live in, impacting as the nuclear wave sweeps toward your Northern California home and brutally kills you and everyone you love.

Dedication to creating one of history's most popular video games caused horrific and graphic visions for its creator.

Dreams such as this haunted Dave Theurer for years, both during and after production of Missile Command, a game he worked on at Atari in the early 1980s; a game that tasks players with defending six unnamed cities from incoming nuclear missiles fired by an unnamed enemy.

It's a fantastic look at the game and its design process with a great human element as well.

via The Loop