*So, Space Invaders. We’ve talked about games that were very popular and started laying the groundwork for video games as we know them today. But as groundbreaking and popular as games like Pong and The Oregon Trail were, Space Invaders towers above even those games in just about every way. Space Invaders was the first real cultural phenomenon of the video game industry.
*First, some history. The game was developed by Tomohiro Nishikado; he cited Breakout as a major inspiration, which at first seems kind of weird, but then makes sense. In Space Invaders, as in Breakout, the player is at the bottom of the screen sending a projectile up toward rows of enemies (I don’t know that one would really call the bricks in Breakout “enemies, but you get the parallel) in order to make them disappear.
*Nishikado saw room for numerous improvements. Instead of just bouncing a ball, he thought the player should be able to control when to fire the projectile. And the wall of enemies shouldn’t be static, he thought; why not add to the tension of the game by having it slowly advance downwards toward the player? And if we’re increasing tension, why not have the enemies fire back at the player? And there is the basic template for Space Invaders.
*So, you play as a laser base at the bottom of the screen. A wall of aliens, five rows deep, eleven columns across, slowly advances toward you. You fire to destroy them; they fire at you. You have stationary walls that you can hide behind to avoid missile fire, but those walls are slowly destroyed when they are hit by missiles. You have three lives.
*I found this detail in the history really interesting. The alien spaceships have become cultural icons in the same way Mario and dying of dysentery have, but it was really kind of a weird personal choice that led to those spaceships being created. Nishikado apparently had moral problems with actually depicting a living creature being shot and killed. That’s such a weird little detail.
*Nishikado has yet another innovation in mind: music. Music had existed in video games before, but never during gameplay. It would play before gameplay and at the game over screen, but during gameplay, you got sound effects and that was all. Nishikado created an incredibly simple musical motif for this game, just four bass notes in a descending loop, but it was a huge leap forward. Just having the music during gameplay was groundbreaking enough. But the game layered the music and sound effects on top of each other, which was amazing, and the music actually changed, speeding up the closer the alien hordes got to the bottom of the screen. So the music was actually not just playing behind the gameplay, which would have been crazy enough in 1978; it was actually dynamic by REACTING to the gameplay.
*So, this game got released and it blew the **** up. It became incredibly popular and by the end of 1978, there were over 100,000 machines in Japan alone and the game had already grossed over 600 million dollars. The game was released in June of 1978, so that’s SIX MONTHS! The game crossed the 1 billion dollar mark in mid-1981. ONE BILLION DOLLARS!
*Arcades were opened with only Space Invader cabinets. Entire arcades with just one game. That’s insane. And the cabinets exploded out of the arcades for the first time. Space Invaders was the first game to cross over to restaurants and movie theaters in a big way.
*A Space Invaders tournament was held in 1980, the very first electronic sports event and over 10,000 people attended. That is an insane amount for 1980.
*The negative response says a lot about the game too. “Space Invaders Wrist” was a condition discussed in medical journals. And in 1981, there was an effort to ban the game in Britain because of its “addictive properties” and the assertion that it caused “deviancy.” So, there’s another first for Space Invaders; it was the first game to cause a censorship debate, the first game that people tried to ban.
*All of this is rather amusing when you think about gaming today. People tried to ban SPACE INVADERS? The guy who basically created modern gaming didn’t think you should depict people being shot?!
*One last detail. There is a spider called Taito spaceinvaders because the marking on its back resembles one of the aliens from this game. THERE IS A SPIDER NAMED TAITO SPACEINVADERS! YOU GUYS!
*Oh, yeah, and that just happened in 2014. So, this game’s cultural impact has hardly waned over the years.
*One last thing. Four people have said publicly that they weren’t interested in video games until they played Space Invaders. Four people? How much impact could four people have on gaming?
*Well, here they are. Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Donkey Kong, Mario Bros. & The Legend of Zelda); this guy NAMED Mario & Luigi. Mario was created in Donkey Kong, but didn’t have a name; Miyamoto named him Mario and decided he need a brother named Luigi. He came up with the original concept for The Legend of Zelda. He also created a ton of the games in those three franchises; he didn’t just lay down the template. He’s behind Super Mario Bros., Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, A Link to the Past, Majora’s Mask.
*Next, Hideo Kojima. Producer/designer/director of basically the entire Metal Gear franchise, which, by the way, means he basically invented the stealth game. He also, by the way, created P.T., the Silent Hills demo that brought YouTube gaming to an entirely new audience. And, even though Silent Hills never happened (DAMN IT!), just for the P.T. demo alone, he influenced an entire generation of indie game designers.
*Next, let’s combine the last two: John Romero & John Carmack. The founders of id Software. The producers & designers of Doom. Quake. Wolfenstein 3D. Again, you say Doom & Quake, you’re talking about an entire generation of gamers being created. Even if they didn’t create immersive first person shooters, they absolutely defined them and, for a certain generation, perfected them.
*These guys haven’t just said that they were heavily influenced by Space Invaders. They’ve all said they HAD NO INTEREST in video games until they played Space Invaders.
*These are the ripples of these early games. It’s like even if Space Invaders hadn’t been played by countless people all over the world, just getting to these four guys changed the face of gaming forever. It’s wonderful.
*Okay, well, that’s a really long intro, but if any game deserves a long intro, it’s Space Invaders.
*Anyway, the book specifies the arcade version. The game did, of course, get a home port.
*I was, somewhat miraculously, able to find an arcade cabinet of the game. There’s a wonderful little joint in Tulsa called the Max Retropub and the aesthetic of it revolves around the eighties and so it’s packed absolutely full of arcade games. They not only have some cabinets with several retro games loaded on them, they also have some very old cabinets available for play. Space Invaders is one of them. And it’s one of the few cabinets in the place that’s actually set to Free Play. So, that’s amazingly cool.
*This would be a good time to mention that I’ve been playing these games and banking the reviews for a while. So, I’m going to be talking about playing the arcade cabinet at this bar, but be assured that this was all pre-pandemic.
*The cabinet is typically deceptive. It features large humanoid figures with glowing eyes. Kind of wolfman-esque actually.
*First surprise: no joystick. You move your base left & right by using two buttons. At first, I wasn’t sure about this. I thought that a joystick would be a lot more intuitive, but I actually adjusted very quickly and I now kind of think it was more easily controlled that way than with a joystick.
*It is, I’d say, fairly easy to clear the first screen down to the last one to two or three enemies. The pattern is pretty easy to follow and they move very slowly at the start. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as getting in position and blasting all five aliens up one row without moving.
*But as they get closer, they get a lot faster and start firing a lot more missiles.
*I found one little nugget from the backstory fascinating. Nishikado set the speed up pretty high because he wanted the game to move quickly, but the computer wouldn’t do it as fast as he wanted it done. But it turned out, the reason the computer was moving so slowly at the start was that it couldn’t render all of the alien spaceships very quickly. What this meant, however, was that as one got down to fewer and fewer spaceships, the computer could handle the load better and better and so the movement sped up as the game progressed, until by the last two or three ships, they’re just flying across the screen so quickly that you can’t actually catch up to them if you’re chasing them.
*That’s right, Nishikado accidentally stumbled onto this absolutely brilliant gameplay mechanic by accident because computers at the time weren’t able to do what he wanted them to do. Luckily, once he realized what was happening, he was able to see that it was a great mechanic for the game and he fixed the game to do it purposely.
*I will say this: as simple and rudimentary as that little four note theme is, as the ships get closer and faster, it also speeds up and it has a LOT to do with why this game is as tense as it is. The addition of music, even in just this tiny form, elevates this game to a new level of gaming in my opinion.
*Okay, so, let’s just spoil the ending here so I don’t have to dance around it with phrases like “new level of gaming.” This is the most fun game I’ve played so far and genuinely the most addictive.
*So far, I would call Pong and Boot Hill my favorites, both really good games. The 1975 Oregon Trail would be a tick below that at good. Breakout got pretty frustrating pretty quickly and Combat was actually mostly bad. But this is the first one of these games that I have no trouble labeling great. It’s a masterpiece of a kind.
*I think something really interesting about it is that it avoids the Breakout problem somehow. I spent a fair amount of time getting down to, let’s say, the last five aliens and then screwing up at some point with those last five and usually losing the game when there were one or two aliens left on screen. But I never got tired of the game. There was always that little “aarrgh” moment when I would lose, but I would always be up for the next round immediately.
*One thing it took me a while to figure out was that you can only have one missile on screen at a time. The aliens can fire as many as they want, but you only get one. When you’re taking out those first two rows, you can spam missiles pretty well, because they usually hit an alien and disappear almost immediately, but toward the end of the game, if you a miss a shot, it takes a fair amount of time for it to travel all the way up to the top of the screen and disappear and when you’re down to just a couple of alien ships, every. second. counts.
*Because these things are super fast. You essentially have to plant yourself and fire when the ship passes your position once they’re at maximum speed because they are legit moving so fast you can’t catch them.
*Anyway, after a fairly long time of getting down to the last couple of ships over and over again, I looked up some strategy ideas online and I was shocked to see a couple of really natural strategies that I had somehow not thought of.
*So, the horde moves back and forth across the screen, right to left, then left to right, then back again, etc. And every time the horde reaches the edge of the screen, it takes a step down. So, a really cool strategy is to plant yourself on the left and as the horde approaches the left side of the screen, that first row will come into your line of fire. And you just blast them all. They’re still moving really slowly at this point, so you can do that. And if you can keep doing that, they won’t advance toward you, because they only advance when they hit the side of the screen. Make sense? You’re trying to just keep chopping that row that’s closest to the left off as it moves to the left. You can get the first three rows pretty easily before the missiles get too thick for you to keep it up. At that point, the horde hits the left side of the screen, comes down a line and starts moving back to the right. So, you book it over to the right and do the same thing.
*It’s kind a natural impulse to try to take them out by rows; that bottom row seems like the main threat – it’s the one that’s going to reach you first. But the secret is to take them out by columns. This keeps them from advancing for a fair bit. If you’re good, you can take out four or five columns before the horde even advances one line.
*Getting really technical there, but this really is a game-changing strategy. I won in like the first two games after I started trying it.
*Did I talk about win conditions at all? Space Invaders is a game that really doesn’t have a win condition. You can max out the score counter, I suppose, but every time you clear a screen, the game just throws another screen at you at a faster speed and just keeps this up until you die. So, I set my goal at clearing a screen. Just, you know, wipe out an entire wave of aliens. And I got past that.
*Actually, using the strategy outlined above, I got past it and onto the second screen with two lives left, which was kind of amazing.
*I think this is a game that you genuinely do get better and better the longer you play. That’s key to avoiding the Breakout problem; in Breakout, it really felt like I hit a certain point and I played for hours after that and never got any better. In Space Invaders, I feel like you could get better and better to the degree that I could keep going and eventually get through a lot of screens on just five lives.
*But I set one screen as my win condition, we’re all hurtling toward death and I have 995 games left. So, let’s move on.
*So, not a lot of wrap up. I really loved this game. It’s a ton of fun and really addictive. Just for fun, I did play the version on my Atari Flashback console at home and it was equally fun, but I will say that I’m super glad I got to play the arcade cabinet. Using two buttons instead of a joystick wasn’t exactly a game changer, but it was different.
*Next time, we’ll jump into 1979 with an interesting home console game that’s maybe the first of its genre: Adventure!