The Space Invaders Story
Space Invaders is a 1978 arcade game created
by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan, and licensed in
the United States by the Midway division of Bally. Within the shooter genre, Space Invaders
was the first fixed shooter and set the template for the shoot ’em up genre. The goal is to
defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser to earn as
many points as possible. Tomohiro Nishikado spent a year designing
the game and developing the necessary hardware to produce it. The game’s inspiration is reported
to have come from varying sources, including an adaptation of the mechanical game Space
Monsters released by Taito in 1972, and a dream about Japanese school children who are
waiting for Santa Claus when they are attacked by invading aliens.
Nishikado himself has
cited Atari’s arcade game Breakout as his inspiration. He aimed to create a shooting
game that featured the same sense of achievement from completing stages and destroying targets
but with more complex graphics. The game uses a similar layout to that of Breakout but has
altered game mechanics. Rather than bounce a ball to attack static objects, players are
given the ability to fire projectiles at moving enemies.
Early enemy designs for the game included tanks, combat planes, and battleships. Nishikado,
however, was not satisfied with the enemy movements; technical limitations made it difficult
to simulate flying. Humans would have been easier to simulate, but the designer considered
shooting them immoral.
After the release of the 1974 anime “Space Battleship Yamato” in
Japan, and seeing a magazine feature about Star Wars, he thought of using a space theme.
Nishikado drew inspiration for the aliens from H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, and
created initial bitmap images after the octopus-like aliens. Other alien designs were modeled after
squids and crabs. The game was originally titled Space Monsters after a popular song
in Japan at the time, “Monster”, but was changed to Space Invaders by the Taito management.
Because computers in Japan were not powerful enough at the time to perform the complex
tasks involved in designing and programming Space Invaders, Nishikado had to design his
own custom hardware and development tools for the game. He created the arcade board
using the latest microprocessors from the United States, the Intel 8080, and sound from
the Texas Instruments SN76477 sound chip.
The adoption of a microprocessor was inspired
by Gun Fight, Midway’s microprocessor adaptation of Nishikado’s earlier discrete logic game
Western Gun. Despite the specially developed hardware, Nishikado was unable to program
the game as he wanted—the Control Program board wasn’t powerful enough to display
the graphics in color or move the enemies faster—and he ended up considering the development
of the game’s hardware the most difficult part of the whole process. While programming
the game, Nishikado discovered that the processor was able to render each frame of the alien’s
animation graphics faster when there were fewer aliens on the screen. Since the alien’s
positions updated after each frame, this caused the aliens to move across the screen at an
increasing speed as more and more were destroyed. Rather than design compensation for the
speed increase, he decided to keep it as a challenging gameplay mechanism.
Space Invaders was first released in a cocktail-table format arcade cabinet with black-and-white
graphics, while Midway released the Western version in an upright cabinet; it used strips
of orange and green cellophane over the screen to simulate color graphics.
The graphics are
reflected onto a painted backdrop of a moon against a starry background. Later Japanese
releases used rainbow-colored cellophane, such as T.T. Space Invaders in 1978, and were
eventually followed by a version with a full-color display. The cabinet artwork features large
humanoid monsters not present in the game. Nishikado attributes this to the artist basing
the designs on the original title of “Space Monsters”, rather than referring to the actual
in-game graphics. In the first few months following its release
in Japan, Space Invaders became very popular. Specialty arcades opened with nothing but
Space Invaders cabinets, and by the end of 1978 Taito had installed over 100,000 machines
and grossed over US$600 million in Japan alone. By 1980, Taito had sold over 300,000 Space
Invaders machines in Japan, and 60,000 in the United States. By 1982 Space Invaders
had grossed $2 billion in quarters (equivalent to almost $8 billion in 2020).
This made it
the best-selling video game and highest-grossing “entertainment product” of its time, with
comparisons made to the then-highest-grossing film Star Wars, which had grossed $486 million,
with a net profit of $175 million. Space Invaders earned Taito profits of over $500 million.
The 1980 Atari 2600 version was the first official licensing of an arcade game for consoles
and became the first “killer app” for video game consoles after quadrupling the system’s
sales. It sold over two million units in its first year on sale as a home console game,
making it the first title to sell over a million cartridges. Other official ports were released
for the Atari 8-bit computer line and Atari 5200 console, while Taito later released it
for the Nintendo Famicom in 1985, but just in Japan.
Numerous unofficial clones were
made. Technology journalist Jason Whittaker credited
the game with ending the video game crash of 1977, caused by Pong clones flooding the
market, and beginning the golden age of video arcade games (1978–the 1980s). IGN attributed
the launch of the “arcade phenomenon” in North America in part to Space Invaders. Game Informer
considered it, along with Pac-Man, one of the most popular arcade games; it tapped into
popular culture and generated excitement during the golden age of arcades.
As one of the earliest shooting games, Space Invaders set precedents and helped pave the
way for future titles and the shooting genre. Space Invaders popularized a more interactive
style of gameplay, with the enemies responding to the player-controlled cannon’s movement,
and was the first video game to popularize the concept of achieving a high score, being
the first to save the player’s score. While earlier shooting games allowed the player
to shoot at targets, Space Invaders was the first in which targets could fire back at
the player.
It was also the first game where players were given multiple lives and had
to repel hordes of enemies, in addition to being the first game to use a continuous background
the soundtrack, with four simple diatonic descending bass notes repeating in a loop, which was
dynamic and changed pace during stages, like a heartbeat sound that increases pace as enemies
approached.
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