DUNCAN LAURENCE & 'ARCADE', THE NETHERLANDS WIN

Duncan Laurence in Eurovision, 2019

Today, The Grandma has been talking with The Watsons about Duncan de Moor, the Dutch singer who won the last Eurovision Song Contest representing her country in 2019 singing Arcade.

This is the last day of The Grandma with The Watsons. They have been aisled during lots of weeks and now it is time to go out, with all the precautions and respect for others, and continue with their lives.

It is not a goodbye, it is only a break to give The Watsons the possibility of enjoying their relatives and friends again before continuing again with this Purchasing & Sales Course.

Duncan de Moor (born 11 April 1994), professionally known as Duncan Laurence, is a Dutch singer-songwriter.

He began his music career in 2014 and became a semi-finalist in the fifth season of The Voice of Holland.

Laurence represented the Netherlands in the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 with the song Arcade and went on to win the competition, giving the Netherlands its first Eurovision win since 1975.

Born in Spijkenisse, Laurence grew up in Hellevoetsluis. He has been writing his own songs since he was 13 years old, as an escape from being bullied. He started his musical career at the Rock Academy in Tilburg, playing in a number of school bands, including his own, The Slick and Suited.

Formed in 2013, the band went on to perform at Eurosonic Noorderslag. In an Instagram post in February 2020, he revealed he had oxygen deprivation at birth, and thus had a motor disorder affect his right hand.

More information: Duncan Laurence Official Site

Laurence participated in the fifth season of The Voice of Holland, choosing Ilse DeLange as his coach. He advanced to the Cross Battles/Semi Finals before being eliminated.

In March 2016, he decided to stop as lead singer of The Slick. Laurence graduated from the Rock Academy in 2017. He, with Jihad Rahmouni, wrote the song Closer on K-pop duo TVXQ's 2018 album New Chapter #1: The Chance of Love.

In January 2019, Laurence was internally selected to represent The Netherlands in the Eurovision Song Contest 2019. He was nominated by Ilse DeLange, with whom Laurence still had contact after The Voice. His song Arcade was first revealed in March 2019.

Duncan Laurence won Eurovision in 2019

On 18 May 2019, Duncan Laurence won the event in Tel Aviv, Israel with 498 points from 41 international juries and the public vote. The juries gave him 237 points, while the public vote gave him 261 points. He finished 26 points ahead of Italy and 128 points ahead of Russia, the two runners-up.

He is the fifth Dutch entrant to ever win the competition, and the first since Teach-In won the Eurovision Song Contest 1975 with the song Ding-a-dong. Laurence will tour The Netherlands and Europe in late 2019 with one concert also scheduled for Amsterdam in March 2020.

On 10 June 2019, he performed at the 50th anniversary Pinkpop Festival in Landgraaf, the first Dutch Eurovision winner to perform at the event. He replaced Swedish duo First Aid Kit on the bill, who dropped out due to health reasons.

On 23 October 2019, Laurence released his second single Love Don't Hate It. It was also announced that he signed a deal with Capitol Records.

In 2020, the artists' entrance at Rotterdam Ahoy was re-named Door Duncan in his honor.

On 29 April 2020, Laurence announced the release of his first EP, Worlds on Fire, it was released on 13 May 2020 and includes the singles Arcade, Love Don't Hate It and Someone Else.

More information: Twitter

Arcade is an English-language song by Dutch singer Duncan Laurence. It represented The Netherlands in the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 in Tel Aviv, Israel, which it won. The song was released as a digital download on 7 March 2019. The song was written by Duncan Laurence, Joel Sjöö, Wouter Hardy and Will Knox.

After the complete line-up of songs was announced, Arcade was the odds' favourite to win Eurovision, and had remained so until the contest ended. An acoustic version of the song was released on 19 July 2019.

In February 2020, Arcade won an Edison Award for best pop song of the year. 

In May 2020, Arcade was included on Duncan's debut extended play Worlds on Fire.

Duncan Laurence wrote the song while he attended the Tilburg Rock Academy. He worked on the song for over two years, predominantly while collaborating with Wouter Hardy, a former band member with Kovacs.

Duncan Laurence won Eurovision in 2019

The song is inspired by the heartbreak of a loved one of Duncan's who died. According to him, Arcade is a story about the search for the love of your life, and about the hope to reach something that seems unreachable.

The namesake lyric Smalltown boy in a big arcade refers to his experience, being from a small town, as a Rock Academy freshman entering the summer fair of Tilburg, the largest in The Netherlands. Throughout the song, the fair and its arcade games are used as a metaphor for love, addiction and gambling with relationships.

Arcade is inspired by film soundtracks and consists of 165 tracks. The song opens with four chords played on piano, accompanied by a simple piano riff and overdubbed vocals. The triple metre verses contrast with the 4/4 time signature of the rest of the song, giving it a distinct sound. Heavy emphasis is put on Duncan's vocals. After the soft verses, in which he expresses his sadness and vulnerability, the chorus kicks in with heavy drums, accompanied with a choir of backing vocals, to enhance the lyrics' expressions of anger and frustration.

On 28 January 2019, an allocation draw was held, which placed each country into one of the two semi-finals, as well as which half of the show they would perform in. The Netherlands were placed into the second semi-final, held on 16 May 2019, and were scheduled to perform in the second half of the show.

More information: Instagram

Once all the competing songs for the 2019 contest had been released, the running order for the semi-finals was decided by the show's producers rather than through another draw, so that similar songs were not placed next to each other. The Netherlands performed from starting position 16 and qualified for the final.

The performance of the song in Tel Aviv featured Duncan Laurence sitting behind an electric grand piano, with three backing vocalists supporting him offstage.

DeLange and the creative team decided that Duncan sit behind a piano on stage, because, him being a singer-songwriter, they wanted to portray him on stage as a musician. Surrounding Duncan and his piano, smoke and water effects, reminiscent of the official music video, and lighting effects accompanied the performance. Reactions to the simplistic performance were mixed.

In the Grand Final, Duncan Laurence was drawn to perform in the first half of the show, on spot 12. Arcade received 12 points from six national juries, and twice from national audiences. The Netherlands were closely followed by North Macedonia, Sweden and Italy during the jury vote and the latter during the televoting sequence, but ended up winning the Eurovision Song Contest with 498 points. It was the first Eurovision victory for the country since 1975, when Teach-In won for The Netherlands with Ding-a-dong.

More information: Nolala

I'm afraid of all I am
My mind feels like a foreign land
Silence ringing inside my head
Please, carry me, carry me, carry me home.

Duncan Laurence

SPACE INVADERS, A MYTHIC ARCADE GAME SINCE 1978

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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