In the summer of 1978, Space Invaders, one of the most important video games in history, arrived in Japan. A game cost a 100 yen coin and guaranteed three lives, to be used to defend against an invasion of dozens of very tidy alien spacecraft that the more time passed, the closer and faster they became.
Space Invaders came out a few years after Pong, the first real video game in history, and a couple of years before Pac-Man. In the first year alone and in Japan alone, the Taito company sold more than 100,000 Space Invaders cabinets (arcade machines). For the first time, video game cabinets also ended up in laundries and restaurants, and many shopkeepers changed business: instead of selling fruit or household products, they bought dozens of Space Invaders cabinets and opened single-issue arcades. In the eighties the game also arrived in Europe, in the United States and then in the homes of many fans, with similar successes. Eddie Adlum, editor of the thematic magazine RePlay, told the New York Times in 2002 that “Space Invaders was to the video game industry what the Beatles were to music”.
For years there were stories that at the end of the seventies in Japan the 100 yen coins had even run out, because everyone was using them to play. This is not true, for the simple fact that the coins used were obviously then taken up by video games and put back on the market.
Just as the Beatles went beyond music, Space Invaders also went beyond video games. Explaining how to play Space Invaders is perhaps like saying who those four are crossing the road at Abbey Road, but maybe someone needs it.
There is no context or plot in Space Invaders. It is not known how and why but five (or six, depending on the versions) rows of alien spacecraft proceed in order from top to bottom and, at the same time, horizontally. As they proceed, they drop bombs downward. The player has a mobile cannon with which he can only move sideways, and to destroy the alien spacecraft he can fire as many missiles as he wants. To defend against the aliens the player has some defensive bunkers, which the further you go the more they are damaged by the aliens (or by the missiles that the unwary player fires at us). The fewer aliens there are, the faster those left go. It is not that once the first wave of aliens is destroyed, the Earth is safe and the game is won: the aliens always keep coming.
The object of the game is to use your three lives to survive as long as possible and destroy as many aliens as possible. To score points, it is also very convenient to hit, when you can and when it passes, the rapid “mystery ship”, which passes from time to time to the top of the screen: “the space invaders' 300-point spaceship”, says a song by Offlaga Pax disc. To score 300 points, however, a complicated trick must be implemented, known as the “Furrer trick”, from the surname of the one who perfected it. The game also has a crescendo of music: the faster the ships go, the more pressing the music becomes.
There is also something philosophical about Space Invaders, perhaps: as written in the Smithsonian, «avoiding the enemy only delays the inevitable. Players cannot go forward or backward, only defend the space they occupy. There is no reason for the invasion. But the players know that the invader must be destroyed “.
Another important tip on how to play is found in an installment of Futurama where the Space Invaders aliens actually attack Earth, and win (at least momentarily). One of them says, “You lost. Instead of shooting where I was, you should have shot where I was going “.
Space Invaders is a game sold by Taito, but it is a game by Toshihiro Nishikado, who developed every technical and graphic aspect of it. Taito had existed since the 1950s and had sold mainly juke-boxes and pinball machines. In 1973, however, she also started selling video games, especially trying to make products similar to Pong, in which a ball bounced between two arms. Nishikado was 34 and one of the employees looking for ways to build on that concept and do similar things. He said he thought about Space Invaders after seeing the video game Breakout, an evolution of Pong that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had also collaborated on, before moving to Apple.
Nishikado told the New Yorker that the game was not “the result of a flash of genius” but the fruit of a long process of trial and error: “I had made up my mind to do something that was even better than Breakout. I thought about what it would have been like if instead of standing there waiting to be hit by the ball, the bricks had moved forward, returning fire. ” He said that at first he thought that enemies must be airplanes (but changed his mind because their horizontal movement was not very believable) or soldiers (but changed his mind because he didn't like the idea of having to kill humans). It was also based on “Space Monster”, an electromechanical game by Taito and on the description of the aliens in the book War of the Worlds. Taito probably pushed for an alien video game because the first Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had hit theaters the year before. But Nishikado told the Guardian: “I was not affected by any phenomena. I just wanted to make an interesting and fun game to play “.
Conceiving the game, Nishikado realized that no hardware of the time (the set of physical components of a “computer” or a console) was able to support it. He then devised a hardware on purpose. The fact that the speed of the spacecraft decreases was a consequence of the hardware, not a choice of gameplay. Simply dozens of spacecraft demanded a lot of processing, and therefore moved slower. If they were few, they could go faster.
The first versions of Space Invaders were distributed with a horizontal screen (you sat and played looking downwards, as if it were a chessboard); it soon moved instead to cabinets with vertical screens, and with parts of the screen covered with colored films that gave the illusion of color. On some of the early cabinets there were monsters drawn, because the artist who dealt with them was based on one of the working titles: “Space Monsters”. In Italy the game was distributed by Sidam under the name Invaders; Midway Games distributed it in the United States.
The National Space Invaders Championship held by Atari in 1980. pic.twitter.com/8lLZFaUngj
– History In Pictures (@HistoryInPix) March 1, 2017
A big turning point in the game came when Atari bought the rights to put it in its Atari 2600 console, one of those that made video game history. If in the early Eighties you wanted to play Space Invaders on the sofa at home, without going to the bar, you had to play it on the Atari 2600; and many showed that they wanted to play it at home. That's why “Space Invaders in the Atari 2600” is considered the first “killer app” in video games: people bought the console because it was the only one with that game, and that game was the thing that made that console unique and desired. .
Space Invaders remained because it is an essential game, with nothing superfluous: just start playing it to feel the strong desire to destroy all those damned aliens. Warren Spector, a programmer and former professor at the University of Texas, told the BBC that “Space Invaders represents the birth of a new art form, which has changed the world. It is important as a cultural artifact, no less than the silent films of the twentieth century or the first printed books “.
In the seventies and eighties it was also the first video game in which one played and many, perhaps because they were waiting, watched it play. And it was also the first game that worried someone: some doctors talked about the problem of the “Space Invaders elbow” and some parents and associations worried about children who skipped school to play it or the impact that addiction to that video game could have. about the boys. In 1981 a bill on “Control of Space Invaders” was rejected by the British Parliament. The support for much of this criticism was the case, in Japan, of a 12-year-old boy who – the New Yorker wrote – carried out an (armed) robbery in a bank and demanded that he be given only coins, not banknotes; he then explained that he needed them to play Space Invaders.
A book was also published on Space Invaders in 1982 – Space Invaders: An addict's guide to battle tactics, big scores and the best machines – written by Martin Amis, with a preface by Steven Spielberg. He talks about the author's addiction to gambling, and then makes a historical, sociological and technological analysis of the game, on which he also proposes some techniques to score more points.
Among those who have never made many points, there is Nishikado: «I'm scarce at video games», he said: «In Space Invaders I struggle to get beyond the first level». However, he said that in the early years, in which by contract he could not reveal that he was the creator of the game and in which his name did not appear on any screen, he secretly went to see others play.
Maybe after all this talking about it you want to play it, if you are in front of a computer. You are welcome.
