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30 years ago, Space Invaders was created by a team of one: Tomohiro Nishikado, who designed and programmed not only the game, the artwork, and the sounds, but even engineered all the game's hardware himself. That means he had to put together a microcomputer from scratch in a time when personal computers were far from ubiquitous.
Please watch the video below for an interesting review of Space Invaders and it's origin.
By today's standards, Tomohiro Nishikado's 1978 classic Space Invaders seems remarkably simple. However, lets flashback to a time when Arcades were in their infancy and the games that inhabited them, had very little to hold the peoples attention that played them for very long. Then along comes this game called Space Invaders, a two-dimensional space shooting game, that is backed with the thudding bass beat of dozens of Alien Invaders, as they descend down from space to our planet with one intention, destroy our world.
The player takes command of a single laser cannon that slides horizontally across the bottom of the screen, while firing at wave after wave of aliens that are arranged in a tight row and column formation. The invaders march in unison back and forth across the screen, as they descend towards the players lone laser cannon, by dropping down one level each time. The only thing that stands between the players ship and the incoming invasion are several stationary defense bunkers, that can be used to play a dangerous game of fire and retreat. However, the bunkers offer only a temporary place of safety, as they are gradually destroyed by the aliens and their assault.
The objective of the game is to defeat the five rows of eleven aliens by shooting them with your laser cannon. With every alien that is destroyed the player earns points to help them achieve a high score. As more aliens are defeated, their movement and the thudding bass beat which resembles the sound of a beating heart speed up. Defeating all the aliens will bring yet another wave that is more difficult, then the previous. As The aliens descend towards the bottom of the screen, they attempt to destroy the players cannon by firing their own lasers at it. If the player fails to stop the invasion and they complete their trek , the aliens are successful and the game ends. From time to time a special "mystery ship"(better known as the UFO) will sometimes move across the top of the screen and will award bonus points if it is destroyed by the player.
Space Invaders had a very straightforward design that was immensely popular amongst the crowds that attended arcades at that time. Some of this popularity can be contributed to the fact that Space Invaders is probably one of the few games (of that era), that offered a real challenge to the player, with a style of game play that becomes more intense with every new level. The introduction of a High score, no doubt also had an impact, as players now had the ability to compete amongst one an other for a sense of achievement.
These new elements in game play helped Space Invaders to become one of the hottest fads on the globe in 1978. Space Invaders literally redefined arcades of that time, by setting new standards for the games that would inhabit them. Making this arcade classic, responsible for not only propelling the Arcade scene into a source of profitable income, but also opening the doors for the VideoGame market to become the multi-billion dollar industry that it is today.
In case you have just woke up out of a coma, or maybe perhaps, you have been living in a cave for the best 30 years and have never played Space Invaders. Feel free to give it a shot and see what the legend is all about by playing a game or two below.
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In Japan Taito released Space Invaders first in an up right Cabinet. Known as Big Blue, the cabinet was large, rectangular with blue and white side art featuring large, humanoid monsters that were not actually present in the game. (Nishikado attributes this to the artist not looking at the in-game graphics, and basing designs on the original title, Space Monsters).
The control panel layout consisted of a joystick, 3 buttons and game instructions. The bezel was placed up right on the front of the machine just above the control panel. The art which ran around the boarder of the bezel, featured a colorful epic battle taken place on a moon, with space monsters descending down and UFOs flying across the night sky. The words Space Invaders appeared on the top of the bezel in big bold yellow letters, and just to the left was the Taitotronics logo in red, a light positioned inside the cabinet illuminated both logos. The center of the bezel was clear and allowed the player see right into the machine. Although the Raster: Standard graphics of the game appeared to to be playing directly in front of the players eyes, the CRT: Black and White monitor actually was positioned vertically and upside down inside the machine just below the bezel. The black and white images with the help of red and green overlays, were then projected onto a special two-way mirror that sat up right inside the cabinet. A colorful space scene that showed an orange half moon on the bottom surrounded by bluish night sky was placed behind the two-way mirror. A light, positioned behind that lit up the space scene when the game was turned on. This set up gave the illusion that the aliens, bases, UFO and the players ship were in color and floating on top of scenic space background.
The CPU boards consisted of two boards positioned together, resembling the letter L. Taito used standard edge connectors to hook up the wire harnesses to the CPU boards, (oppose to Midway who changed them to odd pin connectors). The game featured monaural sound, and each sound in the game had a separate volume control as well as a main master volume, (Midway dropped all of the volume pots and just went with a single volume control). The game is powered by an Intel 8080 central processing unit, which was sophisticated and costly hardware for 1977. With only primitive (and mostly homemade) development tools available, Nishikado often remarks that, compared to creating the hardware, the rest of the game's design was a piece of cake.
After Space Invaders was released in Japan, restaurants complained that customers were playing instead of eating, Taito remedied this problem by simply releasing Space Invaders in a sit-down cocktail cabinet.
Within the emerging amusement scene Space Invaders became one of the most bootlegged and copied of the classics. To address this, Taito licensed the game to Bally Midway for US release, (they had already established a relationship with their previous video arcade products such as Gun Fight). Bally Midway wound up redesigning the cabinet, they replaced the joystick with a left and right button set-up, and changed the bezel, control panel, and side-art completely (including putting the Midway Bally logo on the bezel). This however would cause confusion as to who really developed Space Invaders and in the end Midway did nothing to correct the perception that the game was developed by them. The overall quality of the Taito machine is arguably superior to the Midway version since its cabinet graphics are much more detailed. Taito eventually did release their original version of the Space Invaders cabinet in both the US and European markets.
Nishikado was first inspired by Atari's arcade game Breakout, and aimed to create a game that featured the same sense of achievement from completing stages.
After seeing a magazine feature about Star Wars, he thought of using a space theme.
Early enemy designs included tanks, combat planes, battleships, and human beings, but Nishikado felt shooting humans was immoral.
Nishikado drew inspiration for the aliens from 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 in development for a year which was divided between designing the game and developing the necessary hardware.
The game was originally titled Space Monsters, which was inspired by a popular song in Japan at the time ("Monster"), but was changed to Space Invaders by Nishikado's boss.
The game is also attributed to a shortage of yen in Japan in 1978, which led to an increase in production of 100-yen coins.
Many regular produce and goods stores in Japan removed their products and converted into Space Invaders parlors overnight, complete with giant speakers broadcasting the 'thump-thump-thump' of the marching invaders.
Invaders contains the first attract mode with a sense of humor. It would first display 'PLAY SPACE INVADERS' with the 'Y' in 'PLAY' upside-down, and an invader would come along taking the offending upside-down 'Y' and carrying it off the screen, and then coming back with the 'Y' right side up and putting it back in place. The invader would then disappear from the screen. The attract mode would also display 'INSERT CCOIN' and an invader would come along and bomb the offending extra 'C.
It was the first single-player game that gave players a life-limit, rather than a time limit, enabling really skilled players to rack up massive scores on only one quarter, popularizing the concept of achieving a high score.
There are exactly 55 invaders per screen and exactly 11 different in-game sounds.
Space Invaders was the first arcade game to work its way out of seedy arcades and into pizza parlors and ice cream shops.
About 65,000 units were produced in the U.S. and a reported 350,000 world wide.
The Space Invaders phenomenon stunned many conservative adults of the time who were convinced that video-games soured the minds of their youngsters. Residents of Mesquite, Texas, pushed the issue all the way to the Supreme Court in their efforts to ban the illicit machines from their Bible-belt community.
The 1980 Atari VCS version was the first official licensing of an arcade game to a home console system.
By 2007, Space Invaders has generated almost US$ 500 million in revenue. Over multiple platforms including coin-op, The Atari 2600, and Nintendo.
Space Invaders, along with Pac-Man and Pong, shares the notorious distinction of being one of the most duplicated, bootlegged and/or hacked arcade games.
In the movie Iron Man, The sound used during a "target lock on" in Iron Man's heads up display. Is the sound of the laser cannon firing in the original Space Invaders game.
The "FURRER" trick allows you to get 300 points per mystery ship every time. It has to do with the way the random number generator works - at the beginning of every board count 22 shots (whether you hit an invader or not). Wait for the mystery ship. Shoot once to hit it to earn 300 pts. Now count 14 shots. Wait again for the mystery ship. Shoot once at it for another 300 pts. count 14 shots and repeat for the rest of the level. Once on the new level, start again at 22 and repeat to 14. This trick was invented by Eric Furrer who to this day holds the Stratford Record for non-stop Space Invaders play -- 38 hours and 37 minutes and an accumulation of 1,114,000 points (111 roll overs, averaging three rolls an hour). Mystery Ship Shot Deflection: On the fifth wave of invaders, the second mystery ship will deflect your shot with the rarely heard "deflection shot;" a shot played backwards.
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