Space Invaders is the one video game that nearly everybody knows. First published by Japanese corporation Taito in 1978, it was a phenomenal hit, and goes on being successful even today, over thirty years later. Now that Warner Bros. has announced plans to make a feature film based on the game, it is a good time to recapitulate its origins.
The sole father of Space Invaders is veteran game developer Tomohiro Nishikado. He got the original idea from Atari's game Breakout, where there are layers of bricks above a player-controlled horizontally moving pad. Space Invaders can be seen as an improvement of the layout. In the place of bricks, Space Invaders has downward marching enemy layers, that the player shoots by moving a laser cannon in and out of protective bunkers, while the enemies keep dropping bombs of their own and moving faster all the time.
Originally, Nishikado envisioned this as a straightforward war game, involving shooting down airplanes, but Taito dismissed this proposal as too militaristic. At the time,Star Wars had just come out, so Nishikado thought of a space-themed game. He replaced the airplanes with a set of aliens reminiscent of crabs and other forms of sea-life. According to another story, the motivation behind the invaders was just a matter of expediency. At the time, realistic movement of airplanes was beyond the processing capacity of the Intel 8080 video game chip, whereas the blocky movement of the aliens posed no difficulty.
For the first couple of months after its release, the game went relatively unnoticed. Then all of the sudden its popularity started to soar. People were lining up to play Space Invaders, and there were arcades with nothing but Space Invaders. A legend tells that at the height of the craze, Bank of Japan had to triple the production of 100-yen coins, as so many of them disappeared into the slots of Space Invaders cabinets.
Soon it was America's turn to succumb to the invaders, when Midway licensed the game in 1979. The game spawned fan clubs, hats, T-shirts and other merchandise, as well as attracting the attention of concerned parents - could excessive playing cause wrist injury? Moreover, keeping in mind Atari's role in the formation of the game, it is only fitting that Atari would acquire exclusive rights to the console version of the game in 1980, thus doubling the sales of the Atari 2600 unit.
It is difficult to overestimate the impact of this first video game superstar. Not only was it the first video game to burst into the cultural consciousness, it was also commercial success never seen before, it was also the first Japanese game to make its way to the US, thus paving the way to Nintendo's success. Space Invaders also inspired a new breed of video game developers, whose eyes were suddenly opened to the limitless possibilities inherent in the video game genre.
Source: Gaming: Console Games Articles from EzineArticles.com
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