Space Invaders is the one video game that almost everyone knows about. First published by the Japanese Taito corporation in 1978, it was a phenomenal success and continues to be successful even today, more than thirty years later. Now that Warner Bros. has announced plans to make a feature film based on the game, it’s a good time to recap its origins.
The only parent of Space Invaders is veteran game developer Tomohiro Nishikado. He got the original idea for the game from Atari. Escape, where there are layers of bricks on top of a horizontally moving platform controlled by the player. Space Invaders can be seen as a design improvement. Instead of bricks, Space Invaders has enemy layers marching down, which the player shoots by moving a laser cannon in and out of protective bunkers, while the enemies keep dropping their own bombs and moving faster all the time.
Originally, Nishikado envisioned this as a simple war game, involving shooting down planes, but Taito scrapped this proposal as too militaristic. At the time,Star Wars had just come out, so Nishikado thought of a space-themed game. He replaced the planes with a set of aliens reminiscent of crabs and other marine life. According to another story, the motivation behind the invaders was just a matter of convenience. At the time, the realistic movement of the planes was beyond the processing power of the Intel 8080 video game chip, while the blocky movement of the aliens posed no difficulty.
For the first few months after its release, the game went relatively under the radar. Then all of a sudden his popularity started to skyrocket. People were lining up to play Space Invaders, and there were arcades with nothing but Space Invaders. One legend has it that at the height of the craze, the Bank of Japan had to triple production of 100 yen coins, as many disappeared into the slots of Space Invaders cabinets.
It was soon America’s turn to succumb to the invaders, when Midway licensed the game in 1979. The game spawned fan clubs, hats, T-shirts, and other merchandise, as well as attracting the attention of concerned parents: the game? excessive could cause wrist injury? ? Also, considering Atari’s role in the game’s formation, it’s only fitting that Atari acquired exclusive rights to the console version of the game in 1980, thus doubling sales of the Atari 2600 unit.
It’s hard to overestimate the impact of this first video game superstar. Not only was it the first video game to break into the cultural consciousness, it was also a never-before-seen commercial success, it was also the first Japanese game to hit the US, thus paving the way for Nintendo’s success. Space Invaders also inspired a new generation of video game developers, whose eyes were suddenly opened to the limitless possibilities inherent in the video game genre.
