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| Space Invaders | |
|---|---|
 Arcade flyer | |
| Developer(s) | Taito |
| Publisher(s) | Atari, Inc. (home) |
| Designer(s) | Tomohiro Nishikado |
| Series | Space Invaders |
| Platform(s) | Arcade, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, MSX, handheld, tabletop, watch, calculator,[9] NES,[10] SG-1000,[11] WonderSwan,[12] VG Pocket,[13] mobile,[14] iOS[15] |
| Release | Arcade |
| Genre(s) | Fixed shooter |
| Mode(s) | 1–2 players alternating turns |
Space Invaders[b] is a 1978 shoot 'em up arcade video game, developed and released by Taito in Japan and licensed to Midway Manufacturing for overseas distribution. Commonly considered to be one of the most influential video games of all time, Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter and the first video game with endless gameplay (meaning there was no final level or endscreen) and set the template for the genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser cannon to earn as many points as possible.
Designer Tomohiro Nishikado drew inspiration from North American target shooting games like Breakout (1976) and Gun Fight (1975), as well as science fiction narratives such as the novel The War of the Worlds (1897), the anime Space Battleship Yamato (1974), and the film Star Wars (1977). To complete development, he had to design custom hardware and development tools. Upon release, Space Invaders was an immediate commercial success; by 1982, it had grossed $3.8 billion ($14 billion in 2023-adjusted terms),[16] with a net profit of $450 million ($1.7 billion in 2023 terms). This made it the best-selling video game and highest-grossing entertainment product at the time, and the highest-grossing video game of all time.
Space Invaders is considered one of the most influential video games ever made, having ushered in the golden age of arcade video games. It was the inspiration for numerous video games and game designers across different genres, and has been ported and re-released in various forms. The 1980 Atari VCS version quadrupled sales of the VCS, thereby becoming the first killer app for video game consoles. More broadly, the pixelated enemy alien has become a pop culture icon, often representing video games as a whole.
Gameplay[edit]
Space Invaders is a fixed shooter in which the player moves a laser cannon horizontally across the bottom of the screen and fires at aliens overhead. The aliens begin as five rows of eleven that move left and right as a group, shifting downward (advancing on the shooter) each time they reach a screen edge. The goal is to eliminate all of the aliens by shooting them. While the player has three lives, the game ends immediately if the invaders reach the bottom of the screen.[17][18][10][19] The aliens attempt to destroy the player's cannon by firing projectiles. The laser cannon is partially protected by stationary defense bunkers which are gradually destroyed from the top by the aliens and, if the player fires when beneath one, the bottom gets destroyed.
As aliens are defeated, their movement and the music both speed up. Defeating all the aliens brings another wave which starts lower, a loop which can continue endlessly.[17][18][10][19] A special "mystery ship" will occasionally move across the top of the screen and award bonus points if destroyed.
Development[edit]
Space Invaders was developed by Japanese designer Tomohiro Nishikado, who spent a year designing it and developing the necessary hardware to produce it.[20] The game was a response to Atari's arcade game Breakout (1976). Nishikado wanted to adapt the same sense of achievement and tension from destroying targets one at a time, combining it with elements of target shooting games.[20][21][22] The game uses a similar layout to that of Breakout but with different game mechanics; rather than bounce a ball to attack static objects, players are given the ability to fire projectiles at moving enemies.[23]
Nishikado added several interactive elements that he found lacking in earlier video games, such as the ability for enemies to react to the player's movement and fire back, and a game over triggered by the enemies killing the player (either by getting hit or enemies reaching the bottom of the screen) rather than simply a timer running out.[21] He replaced the timer, typical of arcade games at the time, with descending aliens who effectively served a similar function, where the closer they came, the less time the player had left.[22]
Early enemy designs included tanks, combat planes, and battleships.[20] Nishikado, however, was not satisfied with the enemy movements; technical limitations made it difficult to simulate flying.[20][24] Humans would have been easier to simulate, but the designer considered shooting them immoral.[24][25] After seeing the release of the 1974 anime Space Battleship Yamato in Japan,[26][27] and seeing a magazine feature about Star Wars (1977), he thought of using a space theme.[20][21] Nishikado drew inspiration for the aliens from a novel by H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, and created initial bitmap images after the octopus-like aliens.[20][21][24] Other alien designs were modeled after squids and crabs.[20][24] 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 designer's superiors.[20][21]
Hardware[edit]
Nishikado designed his own custom hardware and development tools for Space Invaders.[20][24] It uses an Intel 8080 central processing unit (CPU), displays raster graphics on a CRT monitor using a bitmapped framebuffer, and uses monaural sound hosted by a combination of analog circuitry and a Texas Instruments SN76477 sound chip.[28][25][29] The adoption of a microprocessor was inspired by Gun Fight (1975), Midway's microprocessor adaptation of Nishikado's earlier discrete logic game Western Gun, after the designer was impressed by the improved graphics and smoother animation of Midway's version.[30] Space Invaders also adopted the multi-chip barrel shifter circuit first developed by Midway for Gun Fight, which had been a key part of that game's smoother animation. This circuit allowed the 8080 CPU to shift pictures in the graphics framebuffer faster than it could using only its own native instructions.[31]
Despite the specially developed hardware, Nishikado was unable to program the game as he wanted—the Control Program board was not powerful enough to display the graphics in color or move the enemies faster—and considered the development of the hardware the most difficult part of the process.[20][24] While programming, 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 a compensation for the speed increase, he decided that it was a feature, not a bug, and kept it as a challenging gameplay mechanism.[21]
Taito released Space Invaders in July 1978.[5] They released both an upright arcade cabinet and a so-called "cocktail-table" cabinet; following its usual practice, Taito named the cocktail version T.T. Space Invaders ("T.T." for "table-top"). Midway released its upright version a few months later and its cocktail version several months after that. The cabinet artwork featured 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.[20] In the upright cabinets, the graphics are generated on a hidden CRT monitor and reflected toward the player using a semi-transparent mirror, behind which is mounted a plastic cutout of a moon bolted against a painted starry background. The backdrop is visible through the mirror and thus appears "behind" the graphics.[10] Both Taito's and Midway's first Space Invaders versions had black-and-white graphics with a transparent colored overlay using strips of orange and green cellophane over certain portions of the screen to add color to the image. Later Japanese releases used a rainbow-colored cellophane overlay,[10] and these were eventually followed by versions with a color monitor and an electronically generated color overlay.[10]
Music[edit]
Despite its simplicity, the music to Space Invaders was revolutionary for the gaming industry of the time. Video game scholar Andrew Schartmann identifies three aspects of the music that had a significant impact on the development of game music:
- Whereas video game music prior to Space Invaders was restricted to the extremities (i.e., a short introductory theme with game-over counterpart), the alien-inspired hit featured continuous music — the well-known four-note loop, consisting of the first four notes of the descending D minor natural scale — throughout, uninterrupted by sound effects: "It was thus the first time that sound effects and music were superimposed to form a rich sonic landscape. Not only do players receive feedback related directly to their actions through sound effects; they also receive stimulus in a more subtle, non-interactive fashion through music."[32]
- The music interacts with on-screen animation to influence the emotions of the player: "That seemingly pedestrian four-note loop might stir us in the most primitive of ways, but that it stirs us at all is worthy of note. By demonstrating that game sound could be more than a simple tune to fill the silence, Space Invaders moved video game music closer to the realm of art."[32]
- The music for Space Invaders popularized the notion of variability—the idea that music can change in accordance with the ongoing on-screen narrative. The variable in Space Invaders, the tempo, is admittedly simple, but its implications are not to be underestimated. "Over the years, analogous strategies of variation would be applied to pitch, rhythm, dynamics, form, and a host of other parameters, all with the goal of accommodating the nonlinear aspect of video games."[32]
At the deepest of conceptual levels, one would be hard-pressed to find an arcade game as influential to the early history of video game music as Space Invaders. Its role as a harbinger of the fundamental techniques that would come to shape the industry remains more or less unchallenged. And its blockbuster success ensured the adoption of those innovations by the industry at large.
— Andrew Schartmann, Thought Catalog (2013)
Next Generation editor Neil West also cited the Space Invaders music as an example of great video game art, commenting on how the simple melody's increasing tempo and synchronization with the enemies' movement chills and excites the player.[33]
Reception and versions[edit]
| Publication | Score |
|---|---|
| AllGame |  (Arcade)[34] (Atari 5200)[35] (SNES)[36] |
| Games World | 80% (Game Boy)[37] |
| Publication | Award |
|---|---|
| Arcade Awards | Game of the Year[38] |
| VideoGames | Best Game Boy Game (runner-up)[39] |
| Guinness World Records | Top Arcade Game of All Time[18] |
| The Times | Most Influential Video Game Ever[40] |
Arcade version[edit]
Space Invaders initially received mixed responses from within Taito and amusement arcade owners. Nishikado's colleagues praised it, applauding his achievement while queuing up to play, whereas his bosses predicted low sales as games often ended more quickly than other timer-based arcade games at the time. A number of amusement arcade owners initially rejected it, but some pachinko parlors and bowling alleys adopted it; it quickly caught on, with many parlors and alleys clearing space for more Space Invaders cabinets.[41] In the first few months following its release in Japan, Space Invaders became popular,[25] and specialty video arcades opened with nothing but Space Invaders cabinets.[20][25]
By the end of 1978, Taito had installed over 100,000 machines and grossed $670 million ($3.1 billion adjusted for inflation) in Japan alone.[9][42] By June 1979, Taito had manufactured about 200,000–300,000 Space Invaders machines in Japan, with each unit earning an average of ¥10,000 or $46 (equivalent to $193 in 2023) in 100 yen coins per day. However, this was not enough to meet the high demand, leading to Taito increasing production to 25,000–30,000 units per month and raising projections to 400,000 manufactured in Japan by the end of 1979.[5] In order to cope with the demand, Taito licensed the overseas rights to Midway for distribution outside of Japan. By the end of 1979, an estimated 750,000 Space Invaders machines were installed worldwide, including 400,000 in Japan, 85,000 in the United Kingdom,[6] and 60,000 within a year in the United States[43][44][45] (where prices ranged from $2,000 to $3,000 for each machine);[46] the game eventually sold 72,000 units in the United States by 1982.[47] By 1979, it had become the arcade game industry's all-time best-seller.[48]
Space Invaders had about 8 million daily players in Japan, with daily revenue peaking at ¥2.6 billion or $12,000,000 (equivalent to $56,000,000 in 2023).[49] Space Invaders machines had grossed more than four billion US quarters ($1 billion at the time, or $4.7 billion adjusted for inflation) by 1979.[50] It remained the top arcade game for three years through 1980.[9] In 1981, several years after its release, it still had weekly earnings of $7.7 million in the United States, second only to Pac-Man.[51] By 1982, it had crossed $2 billion in quarters[52][53] (equivalent to $9.34 billion adjusted for inflation),[54] with a net profit of $450 million[53] (equivalent to $2.1 billion adjusted for inflation).[54] This made it the best-selling video game and highest-grossing "entertainment product" of its time,[52] with comparisons made to the then highest-grossing film Star Wars,[52][55] which had grossed $486 million,[55] with a net profit of $175 million.[55] By 1982, it had grossed $3.8 billion, equivalent to over $13 billion as of 2016.[16] Space Invaders earned Taito profits of over $500,000,000 (equivalent to $2,300,000,000 in 2023).[20][56]
Home versions[edit]
The 1980 Atari VCS (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.[10][57] It sold over one million units in its first year on sale as a home console game, then over 4.2 million copies by the end of 1981, and over 5.6 million by 1982; it was the
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