Space Invaders

Space Invaders is an arcade video game designed by Toshihiro Nishikado in 1978. It was originally manufactured by Taito and licensed for production in the U.S. by the Midway division of Bally. Released (at first in its native Japan) in 1978, it ranks as one of the most influential video games ever created. Though simplistic by today's standards, it (along with other contemporary games such as Pac-Man and Breakout) was one of the forerunners of modern video gaming.

Description

The game itself was an adaptation of the popular shooting gallery games that were a mainstay of carnivals. In this electronic version of the game, the player controlled the motions of a movable laser cannon that moved back and forth across the bottom of the video screen. Rows and rows of video aliens marched back and forth across the screen, slowly advancing down from the top to the bottom of the screen. If any of the aliens successfully landed on the bottom of the screen the game would end. The player's laser cannon had an unlimited supply of ammunition to shoot at the aliens and destroy them before they hit the bottom of the screen.

Meanwhile, the aliens would shoot back at the player, raining a hail of deadly rays and bombs that the player would have to dodge lest his cannon be destroyed. The player's cannon could be destroyed three times (the player had three lives), and the game would end after the player's last life was lost. Occasionally a bonus spaceship would fly across the top of the screen which the player could shoot for extra points.

As the player destroyed an increasing number of aliens, the aliens began marching faster and faster, with the lone remaining alien zooming rapidly across the screen. Shooting the last alien in the formation rewarded the player with a new screen of aliens, which began their march one row lower than the previous round.

Video games had existed prior to Space Invaders, and the game Pong by Atari was already a few years old when this game was released. But Space Invaders captured the attention and imagination of the public in a manner paralleled by few games before or since. Its science fiction based action and futuristic setting appealed to a public in the midst of Star Wars mania. The game's design included a touch of horror, as it gave players the illusion that they were in a desperate battle to save the world from alien invaders... a battle that they would eventually lose, as endless waves of electronic aliens would sweep down until they were overwhelmed. The simple background soundtrack to the game, which gave the impression of a beating heart, increased the tension and kept players coming back for more.

Implementation

One key feature of Space Invaders was the fact that as more and more of the aliens were shot, the remaining aliens would move faster and faster. The change in speed was minor at the beginning of a wave, but dramatic near the end. This action was originally an unintentional result of the way the game was written - as the program had to move fewer and fewer aliens, it could update the display faster - but the development team decided to retain this feature rather than implementing busy waiting when there were few invaders on the screen.

Space Invaders used an Intel 8080 as its processor, running at 2 MHz. Graphics were implemented through a 1 bpp framebuffer mapped from the main CPU address space. All sound effects were implemented individually with discrete electronics.

In the upright version the actual output of the game was displayed mirror-image on a black and white monitor which sat recessed in the game's cabinet. The image was projected (automatically) to a plastic panel which the player saw. Behind the reflective panel was a lunar landscape which gave the game an impressive background setting. It is interesting to note that there were two major uprights. There was the original Taito upright which utilized joystick control, but most people in America are familiar with the Midway licensed version which used directional buttons and arguably had inferior artwork on its bezel, sideart, and moon backgrounds.

Since the actual video game console itself had a monochrome video image, Taito added color by coating the reflective screen with colored bands. It should be noted however, that the very first version of the game in Japan ("T.T.", or "Table Top" Space Invaders) was a cocktail table with purely black and white graphics (i.e., no color overlay). There was also a version of the game in which the graphics were converted to actual RGB color.

Space Invaders had no hardware for the generation of random numbers, so the seemingly random point values awarded by the UFO actually utilized a hash function based on the number of shots that the player had fired in the current invasion wave. It did not take long for experimenters to determine that the maximum 300-point value could be achieved every time if the player shot the wave's first UFO on the 23rd shot, and subsequent UFOs at 15-shot intervals thereafter. ^*

Another important tactical element of the arcade game is that it is impossible for the players' spaceship to be harmed by an invader dropping an attack from the lowest line on the screen before the invader invades.

Graphics design

In October 2005, Nishikado commented in an interview with British video games magazine Edge that the look of the aliens had been based on the description of the alien invaders in H. G. Wells' classic science fiction story, The War of the Worlds: "In the story, the alien looked like an octopus. I drew a bitmap image based on the idea. Then I created several other aliens that look like sea creatures such as squid or crab." Nishikado also noted that his original intention in designing a shooting game had been to make the enemies airplanes, but that this had been too technically difficult to render. He was opposed to depicting the enemies as human beings (which would have been technically easier) as he believed the idea of depicting the shooting of humans to be "morally wrong".

Legacy

Popular response

The enormous blockbuster success of Space Invaders made the entertainment industry sit up and take notice. Within the first year of its release, the game had generated revenue ranging in the hundreds of millions of dollars—with the majority coming from teenagers and school children, who pumped millions of coins into the game at a frenzied pace. Video game mania among the youths in the United States was so pervasive that for a time, some children and teenagers were panhandling and begging strangers for quarters so that they could continue playing the game.

This phenomenon led to the first outcries against video games by groups of concerned adults, who felt that the content of video games was a corrupting influence on children. In the case of Space Invaders, the issue was not usually the highly abstract and stylized violence, but with the fact that the game could not be "won" in any familiar sense. As framed by the critics, the player is powerless to do more than to delay an inevitable defeat. They suggested that the game taught an unwholesome life lesson, inculcated defeatism, and possibly was intended to put the United States at a disadvantage in its economic rivalry with Japan by undermining the competitive spirit of American youth. In Japan, Space Invaders caused a coin shortage until the Yen supply was quadrupled^*.

Space Invaders became very popular in part due to its new style of gameplay. Up until its release, video games were timed to a clock, and once a player's time was up (plus possible bonus time), the game ended. With Space Invaders, the game ended only when the player had exhausted the three allotted "lives" or when the invaders landed on the bottom of the screen: a person could therefore play for as long as their skill level allowed.

Highest Score

From the book Stratford Video Gaming Records, 1980 Premiere Edition

pg. 79 Space... (Canadian National Exhibition (CNE), AUGUST 29th - SEPTEMBER 2nd NATIONAL CIRCUIT)

SPACE INVADERS / MIDWAY LICENSEE, USA / TAITO MFR., JAPAN

Entry Fee: $ 25.00 Contestants: 23 Median Score: 7,810

1st Place (NEW RECORD)
Set: ERIC FURRER, MALE, AGE 12, TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
Score: 1,114,020
Play Time: 38 Hours, 30 Minutes
Particulars: TOTAL OF 4 BASES, 111 SCORE ROLLS (0000 - 9990)
Pauses: (7) 15min., excluded from play time
Prize: 500.00 DOLLARS & STRATFORD T-SHIRT AND VIDEO GAMING TROPHY

2nd Place (NEW RECORD)
Set: CORY GRAHAM, MALE, AGE 17, GREEN BAY, WISCONSON, UNITED STATES
Score: 98,390
Play Time: 3 Hours, 12 Minutes
Particulars: TOTAL OF 4 BASES, 9 SCORE ROLLS (0000 - 9990)
Pauses: None
Prize: 100.00 DOLLARS & STRATFORD T-SHIRT AND VIDEO GAMING TROPHY

3rd Place (1980 RECORD)
Set: GAIL HENSHAW, FEMALE, AGE 15, BUFFALO, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
Score: 23,710
Play Time: 59 Minutes
Particulars: TOTAL OF 4 BASES, 2 SCORE ROLLS (0000 - 9990)
Pauses: None
Prize: 50.00 DOLLARS & STRATFORD T-SHIRT

Later releases

The home version of Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 was a huge success. Not only did it capture the feel (if not the exact look or sound) of the original arcade version, but it also offered 112 different versions of the game. Variations included invisible invaders, invisible missiles and other subtle alterations. It was not the first video arcade adaptation for the Atari 2600 system (most of the early games for the 2600 were adaptations of early Atari video arcade games such as Breakout, Pong, Night Driver, etc.), but it was the first officially licensed arcade game for home conversion from one company to another (in this case, Taito to Atari.) Other home console companies would make their own conversions of Space Invaders, but only Atari owned the legal rights to entitle their game Space Invaders. The console had been released in 1977, but sales of the 2600 skyrocketed during the 1980 holiday shopping season, as millions of families bought the Atari system just so that they could play Space Invaders. This marked the beginning of home video adaptations of popular arcade games (some of which were less than successful).

Space Invaders spawned a large number of imitators, as other video game manufacturers sought to cash in on its successful formula, and released many arcade games featuring variations of the same theme: attacking aliens from outer space. One such example was a game called Pepsi Invaders, made by Atari at the request of Coca-Cola for their Atlanta employees. Taito released several sequels to Space Invaders in the arcades over the years:

Space Invaders Part II ("Space Invaders Deluxe") (1979)
Return of the Invaders (1985)
The Space Invaders Part IV ("Super Space Invaders '91")

(1990)

Space Invaders DX (1994)
Akkan-vaders (" The Attack Of The Lunar Loonies") (1995).

The release of Pac-Man in 1980 broke the mold of "alien invader" games, and it opened the way for more creativity and originality in the video gaming industry. But the legacy of Space Invaders lives on, and action-based science fiction games continue to pay homage to the original shoot-em-up video game.

Enemies based on Space Invaders also appeared in Bubble Bobble games. To top it off, Bubble Symphony featured both a giant Space Invader guarded by aliens who move just like in Space Invaders as a boss and cameo appearances by the player controlled spaceship as a companion for the main characters.

Super Space Invaders was a Space Invaders clone for a range of systems including the Amiga, Master System and Super Nintendo Entertainment System featuring greatly upgraded graphics and sound, along with additions to the gameplay such as power-ups and advanced forms of aliens. Despite this, it was given average reviews at best, and sold very poorly.

Space Raiders (Space Invaders: Invasion Day in Europe) was released in 2001 and is a 3D version of space invaders. Rather than a laser at the bottom shooting up, the player is a human shooting forward at aliens in the street: a prime example of how much games have changed over the years.

Space Invaders, Space Invaders Part II, and Return of the Invaders were re-released in October 2005 as part of Taito Legends for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC. The other three arcade Invader games, Space Invaders DX, Super Space Invaders '91 and Space Invaders '95: Attack of the Lunar Loonies are scheduled for re-release in the Fall of 2006 as part of Taito Legends 2 for the same platforms.

Street art

Space Invaders has also inspired a form of street art, championed in particular by a French artist named "Invader". He is anonymous. Using ceramic tiles, Invader cements together mosaic images inspired of traditional Space Invaders aliens, bonus spaceships, and variations on those themes, sometimes including characters from the Pac-Man series, Super Mario series, and other video games. Most of the mosaics tiles are small and others are as large as murals. The mosaics are cemented onto building walls, lamp post bases, and other structures. The form has spread throughout the world since the 1990s, among more than 30 cities over 5 continents, Invader is still in activity. Some of the thousands of individual Invaders have been documented with photographs on Invader's website.

Songs Inspired by Space Invaders

In 1979, a group of Australian performers calling themselves Player (1) released a song entitled "Space Invaders", using sound effects from the game. Player (1) never put out an album, but this song can be found on a few 1980's collections. It was also released as a 7" record in Australia only, backed with a second possibly-related song entitled "A Menacing Glow in the Sky".

In 1980, a novelty singer named Uncle Vic released another song entitled "Space Invaders", which likewise included sound effects from the game, ending with the lyrics speeding up faster and faster until the invaders "crash" down at the end. This song can only be found in novelty collections, for example Dr. Demento's album Dr. Demento's Mementos.

In 1980, the American/British band The Pretenders recorded an instrumental track called "Space Invader" on their first album. The end of the song featured sounds of game play from the arcade game

References in other Media and Popular culture

In the miniseries V (1983), one of the alien visitors is seen playing Space Invaders on a Atari 2600 console.

An episode of the cartoon sitcom Futurama features a parody scene where the main character Fry drives a tank and shoots spaceships in the style of Space Invaders. He does this while listening to "Tom Sawyer" by Rush, which has the lyrics "Today’s Tom Sawyer/He gets high on you/And the space he invades/He gets by on you".

In the concluding part of the "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" episode of The Simpsons, Groundskeeper Willie claims he was unable to fire a gun because of crippling arthritis in his fingers from "space invaders" in 1977 (the game's release date). However, he did not know about the arcade game.

The Ramones make a reference to Space Invaders in the song 7-11 from their 1981 release Pleasant Dreams

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, the tavern known as the Mended Drum has a massive clockwork powered game called "Barbarian Invaders" that is, effectively, exactly like space invaders, only with wood targets and the fact that it is barbarians rather than aliens. In another of Terry Pratchett's books, the video game-based Only You Can Save Mankind, the Space Invaders are briefly seen and painted in a tragically sympathetic light. Johnny Maxwell sees the huge derelict hulks of the Space Invaders' ships drifting through space, devoid of life. The book describes the ship as being comprised of gigantic cubes bolted together (a reference to the now-old fashioned 8-bit pixels), and seared by laser fire. The alien Captain remarks that the race that built the ships has long been extinct in "Gamespace".

External links

Article at The Dot Eaters, featuring a history of Space Invaders
The Space Invaders Shrine - All about the game incl. Onlinegame
The Killer List of Video Games entry on Space Invaders
AtariAge entry for Atari 2600 Space Invaders
MobyGames' home system entry for Space Invaders

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