As if that weren’t enough, this fast-paced alien shooter is arguably responsible for the first video game arcade boom and has remained one of the most influential titles of all time. In honor of Space Invaders‘ 40th birthday, Den of Geek is taking a look at this monumental game’s creation and development.
Special Thanks to George Lucas
When Tomohiro Nishikado, fresh from the release of his combat flight simulator Interceptor, set out to make a new game, his design featured tanks and planes shooting at attacking soldiers instead of spaceships and aliens. But his early prototype just didn’t feel right. Many of the vehicles were deemed too hard to maneuver, for instance. Another problem was that Taito had decided to ban the shooting of human targets as the company felt that would send a problematic message. Nishikado knew he needed to go back to the drawing board and so he gradually arrived at the idea of changing the game to aliens and spaceships. Given that the year was 1977, it’s pretty easy to see where the inspiration for Space Invaders came from. Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind both hit theaters while Nishikado was working on his alien game and it soon became clear that there was a large audience hungry for anything related to science fiction and outer space. In an interview with The Guardian, Nishikado said that Star Wars isn’t directly responsible for the space theme, but added that the George Lucas film did help him solve that problem about shooting humans. Space Invaders‘ gameplay was heavily influenced by Breakout, but Nishikado added his own twist. Instead of shooting a ball at static objects, Nishikado’s game would fire projectiles at moving objects. It was a change that would require special hardware to be developed as the existing tech of the day couldn’t handle the descending aliens. Nishikado originally called the game “Space Monsters” before the executives at Taito intervened and went with “Invaders” instead. The game released only in Japan at first and was not an immediate success. But after a few months in arcades, the advanced graphics and new kind of gameplay became a sensation and Japanese gamers were soon waiting in line for hours for a chance to play. The reason they had to wait so long is that Taito was caught unprepared and couldn’t make the machines fast enough to keep up with demand. The game’s massive success caught the attention of Midway, which secured a license to release the game in the United States. And with that, the worldwide revolution had begun. Along the way to its great success in the arcade, the game would also prove to be exactly the shot in the arm that the home console market needed to come back from the brink of death in 1977 (yes, an earlier sales downturn before the infamous 1983 crash that became the kiss of death for many console manufacturers). Home console makers were struggling badly prior to Space Invaders‘ release due to a glut of Pong clones that left gamers feeling bored and uninspired. Manufacturers were slashing prices and selling their boxes at a loss or leaving the market entirely. The fresh take on gameplay offered by Space Invaders was a godsend for the industry and for Atari, in particular, one of the only major console makers that managed to keep its lights on through the crash. 1980 would see Atari land the first home console license for Space Invaders, the first time an arcade game was licensed for a console. Sales of the Atari 2600 quadrupled after the game’s release, and over two million Space Invaders cartridges were sold in its first year. Needless to say, the game was a system seller. Space Invaders had a “revolutionary impact,” Taito told the BBC in 2013. “It helped lay the foundation for modern video games.” That impact led to a video game boom that would soon inspire some of the best-known developers in the business today.
A Lasting Legacy
Besides introducing a new type of gameplay, Space Invaders was also highly influential in a number of other ways. For Space Invaders, Nishikado decided to link the player’s score or points with their in-game progression and shepherded the idea of permanently saving high scores to the arcade cabinet for display. All of a sudden, video games were no longer just a fun waste of time. They were a competition. Sure, you could play Pong and plenty of other titles against a second player, but Space Invaders let you compete against every gamer on the high score list, even long after they had left the arcade. Other game developers took quick note of the eager fans lined up around the block for a chance at entering their initials and achieve gaming glory. Nishikado’s game also influenced some of the industry’s greatest creators. Gaming industry titans like Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear), Shigeru Miyamoto (The Legend of Zelda), and John Carmack (Doom) have all credited Space Invaders with getting them interested in making their own games. “About a year or two after I joined Nintendo, Space Invaders came out and became a huge hit,” Miyamoto told Glixel in 2016. “And so Nintendo decided to go into the video game business, and that’s how I got my start, designing graphics.” He told IGN in 2001 (just months before the release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty), “In any game you have an enemy coming at yourself that you have to shoot, if you go back to Space Invaders they shoot at you when they come at you, so how are you going to protect yourself? You’re going to shoot and that is a typical video game. In my game I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to make a game where you could avoid the enemy. That is when Konami told me to come up with a war game so I decided to take these two elements and make Metal Gear.” Space Invaders‘ influence has extended beyond gaming innovations, too. It’s not uncommon to see the Space Invaders alien icon in works of art. For example, French urban artist Invader (he took his pseudonym from the game to hide his true identity) began using the icon for his mosaics in the 1990s and has gone on to create other pieces inspired by the pixelated sprites of the arcade scene of the ’70s and ’80s. He has tagged 65 cities in 33 countries with his mosaics and refers to his pieces as “Invasions,” which is indicative of just how deeply the game has invaded our cultural zeitgeist.
