How to play Missile Command
| Keys | Action |
|---|---|
| Click / Tap | Detonate |
| P | Pause |
On phones and tablets, use the on-screen tactile D-pad under the viewport.
About Missile Command
Missile Command is a defense game. Six cities stand along the bottom of the screen while waves of missiles fall toward them. You click or tap a point in the sky and a defensive blast opens there, destroying any missile that flies into it. A missile that reaches the ground wipes out any city near the impact, and the run ends when all six cities are gone.
The first wave has six missiles and each level adds two more, a little faster. Every missile in a wave is launched toward the leftmost city still standing, and smart missiles bend toward the nearest city as they fall. Clearing a wave raises the level and the next wave follows about a second later.
Scoring, levels and tips
- Intercepting a heavy nuclear warhead scores 200 points. Lighter missiles score 100.
- You start with 10 blasts. Clearing a wave adds 5, up to a maximum of 20. With no ammo left, clicks do nothing.
- A blast stays live for about 1.2 seconds. An intercepted missile explodes too, so one shot can start a chain.
- Your best score is saved in your browser.
- Tip: place blasts in a missile's path rather than on the missile. The blast lingers and the missile flies into it.
- Tip: waves grow by two missiles per level but only 5 blasts come back, so wait for missiles to bunch up and let chains do the work.
- Tip: the leftmost surviving city draws the most fire, so cover that side of the skyline first.
How it's built
The game is written from scratch in TypeScript on an HTML canvas, with no game framework. A small shared engine runs a fixed-timestep loop at 60 updates per second on requestAnimationFrame, scales the canvas to the screen and its pixel ratio, and pauses the game when you switch tabs. Hits are distance checks between each missile and every active explosion. Sound effects are synthesized with the Web Audio API rather than loaded from audio files.
This is an unofficial tribute written from scratch for the browser. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the owners of the original game.