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| Space Invaders |
Today, The Grandma is very happy. She has received a beautiful present from her friends, a Space Invaders Machine. The Grandma loves this game and since it appeared in 1978, she has been a great fan and user.
Space Invaders is an arcade game. The Grandma isn't a great follower of new technology. She doesn't play with PSP's but she loves ancient games like Packman, Tetris or Space Invaders.
Space Invaders, in Japanese スペースインベーダー, 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.
Space Invaders is considered one of the most influential video games of all time. It helped expand the video game industry from a novelty to a global industry, and 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.
Designer Nishikado drew inspiration from games like 1976's ball-bouncing game Breakout and the 1975 shooter game Gun Fight, as well as science fiction narratives such as The War of the Worlds, Space Battleship Yamato, and Star Wars. To complete development of the game, he had to design custom hardware and development tools.
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| The Grandma is playing Space Invaders at home |
Space Invaders is a fixed shooter in which the player controls a laser cannon by moving it horizontally across the bottom of the screen and firing at descending aliens.
The aim is to defeat five rows of eleven aliens -although some versions feature different numbers- that move horizontally back and forth across the screen as they advance toward the bottom of the screen. The player's laser cannon is partially protected by several stationary defense bunkers -the number also varies by version- that are gradually destroyed from the top and bottom by blasts from either the aliens or the player.
The player defeats an alien and earns points by shooting it with the laser cannon. As more aliens are defeated, the aliens' movement and the game's music both speed up. Defeating all the aliens on-screen brings another wave that is more difficult, a loop which can continue endlessly. A special mystery ship will occasionally move across the top of the screen and award bonus points if destroyed.
The aliens attempt to destroy the player's cannon by firing at it while they approach the bottom of the screen. If they reach the bottom, the alien invasion is declared successful and the game ends tragically. The game will also end if all the player's cannons are destroyed by the enemies.
More information: Free Invaders
Space Invaders was created by Japanese designer Tomohiro Nishikado, who 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.
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| Tomohiro Nishikado |
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 a novel by 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 designer's superiors.
Because microcomputers 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.
More information: Forbes
The game uses an Intel 8080 central processing unit (CPU), displays raster graphics on a CRT monitor, and uses monaural sound hosted by a combination of analog circuitry and a Texas Instruments SN76477 sound chip. 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.
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 he ended up considering the development of the game's hardware the most difficult part of the whole process.
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| Space Invaders Screen |
While programming the game, Nishikado discovered that the processor was able to render the alien graphics faster when there were fewer on the screen. Rather than design in 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.
More information: Classic Gaming
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.
Despite its simplicity, the music to Space Invaders was revolutionary for the gaming industry.
An urban legend states that Space Invaders' popularity led to a shortage of 100-yen coins in Japan. In actuality, 100-yen coin production was lower in 1978 and 1979 than in previous or subsequent years.
Additionally, arcade
operators would have emptied their machines and taken the money to the
bank, thus keeping the coins in circulation.
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| Space Invaders |
Reports from those living
in Japan at the time indicate nothing out of the ordinary... during the height of the Space Invaders invasion.
As one of the earliest shooting games, Space Invaders set precedents and helped pave the way for future titles and for 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, had to repel hordes of
enemies, could take cover from enemy fire, and use destructible
barriers, in addition to being the first game to use a continuous
background 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.
More information: Ranker
Game developers including Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the franchises Donkey Kong, Super Mario, and The Legend of Zelda, Hideo Kojima and John Romero and John Carmack have cited Space Invaders as their introduction to video games.
Miyamoto considers Space Invaders to be the game that revolutionized the video game industry.
Edge magazine attributed the shift of games from bars and amusement arcades to more mainstream locations, such as restaurants and department stores, to Space Invaders.
Its popularity was such that it was the first game where an arcade machine's owner could make up for the cost of the machine in under one month, or in some places within one week.
More information: The Guardian
Space Invaders and games
like it represent
the roots of everything we see today in gaming.
It
represents the birth of a new art form,
one that literally changed the
world.
Warren Spector
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