A brief history of missile rides

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How we learned to stop worrying and love gaming's most impossibly extreme sport

Missile riding has a history that predates videogames, though. While most credit the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove and its notorious bomb ride with pioneering the concept, many historians estimate the very first missile ride actually took place sometime around 1800 BCE, when Egyptian sky-god Horus joy-rode through the streets of Thebes to impress his friends.


Above: Thoth, pictured at right, is widely credited with inventing the word ‘BADASS’ to describe the incident

Since then, the concept was largely restricted to comic books, with indestructible superheroes riding missiles for the sake of splashy cover images.


Above: Images fromComic Coverage

Still, only two forms of media can really imbue the irrational act of missile-riding with the speed and dynamism it deserves, and of those two, only videogames have really bothered. What follows is a quick recounting of the (surprisingly) large handful of times this absurd pastime has lit up our screens over the years.

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Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.