Space Invaders history

Space Invaders game is one of the most successful and best-selling arcade machines and consoles in the entire history. In terms of modern money, the total revenue from gaming machines alone amounted to almost $ 10 billion. It was ensured that it was a good hit right into the golden era of arcade machines.

It was the time of the second generation game consoles: Atari 2600, Magnavox Odyssey² and others, which were distinguished by 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 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, on which one could play one or several games. Today it seems natural, but in 1977, for these reasons, there was a collapse of the gaming industry - manufacturers capable of playing only a limited number of games of old consoles threw them onto the market for nothing. Those companies that were able to survive lost millions, but today practically none of the pre-crisis companies exist.
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In 1983, another video crash occurred in the video game industry, known in Japan as the Atari shock. The industry still in diapers was almost destroyed - the decline in sales was 97%. And the success of Space Invaders is due to the hitting between the two crises, which is called the golden age of slot machines. Some even consider it not as a consequence, but as the cause of the beginning of the heyday. Of course, technical innovations, some game bugs and ordinary luck played a huge role.

The author of Space Invaders is Taito Corporation employee Tomohiro Nisikado. His inspiration list is the Space Monsters electromechanical game, Atari Breakout (Arcanoid is a clone of which is known in our country) and the movie Star Wars.

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


Electronic gaming machine interior

In 1977, Nisikado saw an article in the magazine about the Star Wars movie, which had been released earlier, and decided to give the game a space setting. The aliens owe their uniform to the Martian invaders from the adaptation of the “War of the Worlds” of 1953. The remaining creatures were drawn from crabs and squid.

The game received the name Space Monsters by the name of the popular Japanese song Monster 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 especially due to the fact that microcomputers are not so popular in Japan. Protopip gaming machine was assembled from a mixture of Japanese and American components.

A Fujitsu MB14241 shift register was installed in the machine to provide video output of a raster graphics monochrome signal with a resolution of 224 × 256 pixels to a monitor with a cathode ray tube, and a Texas Instruments SN76477 chip in combination with an analog circuit provided the sound. 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 long. Even though the 880-bit Intel 8080 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 turned into a feature.

The two-dimensional playing field is divided into an area in which the player can move the weapon. From the gun you need to destroy five rows of aliens, eleven pieces in each. 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 are the sounds or, in fact, the soundtrack. He, along with the movement of the enemy, accelerates as the number of newcomers on the screen becomes smaller. After the destruction of the adversary, a new, more complex wave began, and the player was added one life. The game could go on forever.



And to this effect of acceleration, the game owes to the weakness of the filling of the slot machine. Instead of correcting the very alien movements of the last alien, Nisikado left this little detail to make the game harder. Perhaps this was one of the most important reasons for the success of the game.


The scheme of the motherboard gaming machine

The company Taito has released a machine in Japan in the form factor of the 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 US, the vertical-case automat was distributed by the licensee Bally / Midway, in this version there were only bands of orange and green cellophane on the screen. In both versions, a backdrop was also pasted with a background image of the 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 100,000 automatic machines and earned more than $ 600 million. Often mentioned is the legend that the game caused a shortage of 100 yen coins. This is probably the effort of the PR department of Taito Corporation.

By 1980, 300 thousand machines were sold only in Japan, 60 thousand machines were installed in the USA. In total , half a million automata were built . By 1981, Taito's revenue amounted to a billion dollars and continued to bring 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 that time, which served as a source of inspiration: “New Hope” collected 468 million, and by 1982 the game had brought 8 billion quarter-dollars (2 billion dollars).

In 1980, the game was released on Atari, and Space Invaders was the first game that sold over a million cartridges. In the first year alone, 2 million copies were sold, and sales of the Atari 2600 console soared four times. It was the first remake of the game from an arcade machine for a home console.

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

It may seem that Space Invaders was nothing special and just got into the wave. But this is far from the case. If we draw analogies of games with cinema, then it is worth remembering that such a seemingly simple editing technique as the Kuleshov effect also required its discovery. Here are just a few of the most important outwardly simple, but revolutionary video game innovations:

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

Later the game was 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 detailing of objects. In remakes and ports, sometimes new types of shots were added, invisible newcomers, moving defenses, a cooperative mode for two players, but the 1978 version will always remain the classic and most valuable.

According to The Rev. Rob Times , Giant Bomb , en.wikipedia.org and The Register .