History of Space Invaders

The game Space Invaders is one of the most successful and best-selling arcade machines and consoles in the history of all. In terms of modern money, the total revenue from slot machines alone amounted to almost $ 10 billion. This was ensured by a successful hit directly into the golden era of arcade machines.

That was the time of the second generation of game consoles: Atari 2600, Magnavox Odyssey² and others, which differed in the presence of 2-16 colors, a screen resolution of about 160 × 192 pixels, RAM, the volume of which was measured not even kilobytes, but bytes, processors in megahertz or even lower and at best they could squeak at two or three frequencies.

But the most important was the use of removable media, which distinguished the new consoles from the Pong clones of the previous generation, which could play one or more games. Today it seems natural, but in 1977, for these reasons, the gaming industry collapsed - manufacturers capable of playing only a limited number of games of old consoles threw them on the market for nothing. Those companies that were able to survive lost millions, but today almost none of the pre-crisis companies exist.

In 1983, another collapse occurred in the video game industry, known in Japan as the Atari shock. The industry still in the diapers was almost destroyed - the decline in sales amounted to 97%. And Space Invaders owes its success precisely in the period between these two crises, which is called the golden age of slot machines. Some even consider it not as a consequence, but as a reason for the onset of prosperity. Of course, technical innovations, some game bugs and ordinary luck played a huge role.

Space Invaders is authored by Taito Corporation employee Tomohiro Nishikado. The list of his inspirations is made by the electromechanical game Space Monsters, Atari Breakout (the famous clone of which is Arcanoid) and the film "Star Wars".

Initially, the game was supposed to have tanks, planes and ships as opponents, but Nishikado was not satisfied with their animation and even thought of adding people as enemies, although he later realized that the gameplay would be burdened with moral problems.


Electronic gambling slot machine

In 1977, Nishikado saw an article in the magazine about the previously released Star Wars movie and decided to give the game a space setting. The aliens owe their form to the Martian invaders from the adaptation of the “War of the Worlds” of 1953. The remaining creatures were painted with crabs and squids.

The game received the name Space Monsters after the name of the popular Monster song in Japan at that time, but the authorities changed it to Space Invaders.

It was the end of the 70s, so the developer was forced to write low-level program code and often solder the circuit manually. This was particularly promoted by the fact of the low prevalence of microcomputers in Japan. The prototype of the slot machine was assembled from a mixture of Japanese and American components.

A Fujitsu MB14241 shift register was set in the machine to provide video output of a raster graphic of a monochrome signal with a resolution of 224 × 256 pixels to a monitor with a cathode ray tube, and the Texas Instruments SN76477 chip in combination with an analog circuit provided sound operation. Today, this configuration is known as the Taito 8080 .

In addition to the iron part, the Japanese had to create their own development environment from scratch. In general, the process was difficult and lengthy. Even despite the Intel 8080 eight-bit processor running at 2 MHz, the system remained too weak for what I wanted to write. There was not enough power to display color graphics, and the adversary was moving too slowly. However, the latter was converted into a feature.

The two-dimensional playing field is divided into an area in which the player can move the gun. Five rows of aliens, eleven in each, need to be destroyed from the cannon. These rows move horizontally and also slowly go down. Aliens can also shoot, and the number of deaths is limited. When the aliens reach the bottom of the screen, the game ends. An important component is the sounds or, in fact, the soundtrack. He, along with the movement of the enemy, accelerates as there are fewer aliens on the screen. After the destruction of the adversary, a new, more complex wave began, and the player gained one more life. The game could go on forever.



And the game owes this acceleration effect to the weaknesses of the filling of the slot machine. Instead of correcting the already absolutely menacingly quick movements of the last alien, Nishikado left this small detail to make the game harder. Perhaps this has become one of the most important reasons for the success of the game. The scheme of the motherboard of a gaming machine Taito released a machine in Japan in the form factor of a horizontal table. In that version, a film of several colors was pasted over the screen to create the illusion of a color display. In the USA, a vertical case machine was distributed by the Bally / Midway licensee, in this version there were only orange and green cellophane stripes on the screen. In both versions, a backdrop was also pasted with a background image of a lunar landscape, stars and a creature similar to an alien enemy.






The success of the game was phenomenal. By the end of 1978, Taito installed 100 thousand machines and earned more than $ 600 million. The legend is often mentioned that the game caused a shortage of coins of 100 yen. This is probably the efforts of the PR department of Taito Corporation.

By 1980, 300 thousand machines were sold only in Japan, 60 thousand cars were installed in the United States. In total , half a million machine guns were built . Taito's revenue by 1981 amounted to a billion dollars and continued to bring in 600 million a year. Each of the machines cost from two to three thousand dollars. It's funny that the Space Invaders game surpassed the highest grossing film of the time, which served as a source of inspiration: “New Hope” raised 468 million, and by 1982 the game brought 8 billion quarters ($ 2 billion).

In 1980, the game was released on Atari, and Space Invaders was the first game to be sold with more than a million cartridges. In just the first year, 2 million copies were sold, and sales of the Atari 2600 console soared four times as a result. This was the first remake of the arcade machine game for the home console.

The game attracted the attention of several people who then began to work in the video game industry, primarily Shigeru Mayamoto and Hideo Kojima.

It might seem that Space Invaders was no different and just got into a wave. But this is far from the case. If we draw analogies of games with cinema, then it is worth remembering that such an outwardly simple installation technique as the Kuleshov effectalso demanded its discovery. Here are just a few of the most important outwardly simple, but revolutionary video game innovations:

• Music, these four sounds, repeated from time to time, was a novelty in the industry. Before Space Invaders, music was presented as a short introduction before the game, and the sound in the gameplay only required to fill the silence. The player’s emotions in Space Invaders were influenced by the accelerating pace of the music, not interrupted by the sound of gunfire. Although the melody was primitive, it brought games closer to art and not to entertainment.
• Yes, before Space Invaders there were games that allowed the player to shoot targets, but this was the first game in which the enemy also answered with fire. The player first saw the destructible barriers that he could hide behind.
• Now there was an opportunity to make a mistake several times, introduced the concept of life.
• The game popularized the achievement of a high score and its storage in the memory of the machine for display in the achievement table.
• An increase in game complexity has been introduced. Today it is the basis of single-player games.
• Space Invaders showed that games can compete with films and music both in popularity and in fees.
• Previously, games imitated real life: Pong and its clones were a simulator of real tennis, and not some other processes. After Space Invaders, the games created their own fantastic, unlike player world.

The game was later ported to many other platforms . At the same time, for some of them, the graphics had to be simplified, for later consoles it was improved on the contrary: they increased the resolution, added colors and detail of objects. In remakes and ports, sometimes new types of shots, invisible aliens, moving defensive barriers, a cooperative regime for two players were added, but the 1978 version will always remain the classic and most valuable.

Based on materials from The Rev. Rob Times , Giant Bomb , en.wikipedia.org and The Register .