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SPACE INVADERS (1978): THE JAPANESE DESCEND

Toshihiro Nishikado's 1978 masterpiece Space Invaders is on the shortlist of the world's most important videogames—another master stroke that truly brought the masses to the medium. A success in both the United States and Japan, Space Invaders would become one of the most widely imitated games of all time: endlessly cloned, copied, and modified right up to the present day.

Screenshot from the original Space Invaders arcade game, with simulated color overlay.

Even if you've never actually played Space Invaders or even seen a working machine, chances are you've played one of its thousands of derivatives, such as Namco's ever-popular Galaga (1981) or Konami's Gradius (1986). Although Space Invaders is primitive even compared to these early games, its foundational influence is unmistakable. Space Invaders’ importance goes far beyond serving as the basis of so many “shoot ’em ups,” however. Perhaps even more so than Pong (see bonus chapter, “Pong (1972): Avoid Missing Game to Start Industry”), Space Invaders appealed to the general public. Their quarters and 100-yen coins advanced into coin slots as relentlessly as the aliens themselves descended, making millions for Taito, inspiring hundreds of would-be developers, and exploding the market for videogames. It's hard to imagine what the modern arcade and console markets would look like were it not for Japanese games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man (Chapter 13, “Pac-Man (1980): Japanese Gumption, American Consumption”)—assuming that it survived at all!

Arcade screenshot with simulated color overlay from Space Invaders II (1980), which featured a competitive mode where two players fight to destroy each other in addition to the advancing attackers.

Perhaps we should begin with some geography. How was Japan's gaming industry and pop culture different than those found in the United States, and why have so many Japanese games been so extraordinarily successful both here and abroad? Space Invaders was only the first of what would become an onslaught of Japanese imports that would become the foundations of the arcade and console industries. It's difficult to exaggerate the importance of Japanese games like Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. (Chapter 19, “Super Mario Bros. (1985): How High Can Jumpman Get?”), The Legend of Zelda (Chapter 21, “The Legend of Zelda (1986): Rescuing Zeldas and Uniting Triforces”), Street Fighter II (Chapter 17, “Street Fighter II (1991): Would You Like the Combo?”), and Final Fantasy VII (Chapter 7, “Final Fantasy VII (1997): It's Never Final in the World of Fantasy”). It's likewise a mistake to question the relevance of Japanese consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis, and the Sony PlayStation.

Superstar American developers—such as Richard Garriott (Chapter 23, “Ultima (1980): The Immaculate Conception of the Computer Role-Playing Game”), Roberta Williams (Chapter 11, “King's Quest: Quest for the Crown (1984): Perilous Puzzles, Thorny Thrones”), and Will Wright (Chapters 15 and 22)—all got their start on home computer platforms like the Apple II and Commodore 64. Though there was of course the occasional modestly successful port (such as SimCity for the Super Nintendo), Japanese games dominated the console market. Jack Tramiel, president of Commodore, had always worried that cheap Japanese home computers would topple the American home computer industry, but that never happened. Although the Japanese never seriously challenged America's desktops, they first captured the arcades and later the living rooms of U.S. gamers, where they have dominated ever since.

Chris Kohler discusses the Japanese gaming industry in depth in his book Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life (Brady Games, 2004). Kohler thinks that the reason Japan's gaming industry flourished was the country's unique pop culture, which was (and is) saturated with cartoons and comics (anime and manga, respectively). Whereas such things were typically viewed as fit only for children in the United States, they enjoyed far broader appeal and acceptance in Japan. Furthermore, the highly stylized aesthetics of anime and manga lent themselves well to videogames, which were (at the time) too limited to represent anything approaching graphical realism. Nevertheless, Kohler points out that Japanese games became increasingly like movies, borrowing frequently from film and working to spin coherent narratives around the gameplay. Kohler argues that whereas American games like Pong and Breakout were abstract, Japanese games were more like movies, with identifiable characters and fictional scenarios. Space Invaders, for instance, gives us a recognizable threat (alien invasion), and the player is cast in a desperate and ultimately futile mission to save the world.¹ The cinematic nature of Japanese games would become even more pronounced with Shigeru Miyamoto's Donkey Kong in 1981, another dizzyingly successful Japanese import.

Are the Japanese simply better at making games than their American counterparts? Although Kohler makes some good points about the Japanese gaming industry, we could also posit more banal explanations for why Japanese games came to dominate the West—or, more specifically, our arcade and console industries. Perhaps the most glaring factor was the frequently mentioned Great Videogame Crash of 1984, which devastated the American console industry, creating a massive vacuum that no American manufacturer or retailer seemed willing or able to fill. It was Nintendo who finally resurrected the console, joined later by Sega, another Japanese company. Though there were, of course, many American games made for these systems, the most successful were typically imported from Japan. Furthermore, while games like Super Mario Bros. and Final Fantasy VII were smash hits in both countries, few games originating in the West were popular in Japan. Even today, it's a surprise to find an American game on the Japanese best-seller charts. Of course, in recent years, Western developers have had a renaissance in the United States, creating a wide range of innovative best-sellers, though they still have an uphill climb in a mostly indifferent Japan.

In 1978, many an American game developer must have felt like the laser cannon in Space Invaders, hopelessly outnumbered and watching dismally as the last defenses eroded (a process often aided by the player's own shot). On a more positive note, the popularity of Space Invaders was hard to miss. Whole arcades sprang up around the machine, offering row after row of identical machines to satiate the public's desire to blast aliens. Although Pong had enjoyed tremendous popularity, Space Invaders made it look primitive in comparison. Who wants to knock a ball back and forth when you can save the universe?

Steven L. Kent discusses the game at some length in his The Ultimate History of Video Games (Three Rivers Press, 2001), noting that it wasn't an instant success in its mother country. After a few quiet months, though, the game swept across the country—even small shops selling raw vegetables would shove aside their inventory to make room for more Space Invaders machines. According to Kent, when the game was exported to the United States, arcade owners found they could recoup the $1,700 it cost to buy a Space Invaders machine in a single month. Taito and its partner Midway ended up selling the United States more than 60,000 machines. Naturally, the excitement and piles of cash that built up around Space Invaders helped spur the growth of the broader arcade industry, which was still very much in its infancy in the late 1970s. Indeed, before Space Invaders, it was rare to find an arcade machine outside of bars and arcades; afterwards, grocery stores, pizza parlors, and even waiting rooms were often stocked with them, predating the coming ubiquity and even greater dominance of Pac-Man machines.

Screenshot from the arcade version of Galaga.

What made Space Invaders such a hit? Before we discuss the gameplay, let's pause to consider the historical context. Specifically, Space Invaders arrived on the heels of George Lucas’ Star Wars, a 1977 science fiction film that became a true cultural phenomenon. That same year, Americans had also lined up to see Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another high-profile science fiction film about visitors from space. The space program was also still in its heyday, and many children dreamed of one day becoming an astronaut. Coupled with these science fiction films were plenty of paranoid thrillers, such as Spielberg's earlier movie, Jaws (1975), whose ominous music served as the inspiration for so many other movies and games. Indeed, as we'll see, Space Invaders relied heavily on movies like Jaws for inspiration for its sound effects, which certainly added to the tension and dread of the descending aliens. In short, the pop cultural milieu of the late 1970s was perfect for a game like Space Invaders, which combined science fiction themes with a level of tension and anxiety comparable to the groundbreaking thrillers of the era.

Screenshot from the arcade version of Galaxian.

Space Invaders’ gameplay is not as simple as some take it to be. The player controls a laser cannon that can be moved left and right along the bottom of the screen; vertical movement is not possible. Pressing the fire button causes a shot to move rapidly from the cannon to the top of the screen, assuming it is not “intercepted” by an object or alien. Only one shot can be in the air at one time, so players either have to wait for it to hit something or reach the top of the screen. In the middle of the screen are five rows of invaders. In a movement reminiscent of a manual typewriter, the aliens move to the extreme left and right of the screen, dropping down one row each time they reach the border. Between the cannon and the aliens are four destructible fortifications that serve as (temporary) cover. The typical strategy is to duck in and out of cover, fire some shots, then use the cover to avoid the alien bombardment. The player can also try to shoot the aliens’ bombs with the cannon; doing so renders the bomb harmless. The aliens speed up as they are eliminated; the last few move very quickly and can be very difficult to hit. The game also features a flying saucer that occasionally flies across the top of the screen. Hitting this target requires precision, timing, or just dumb luck.

The invaders come in three basic designs. Nishikado mapped these designs onto graph paper first, striving to create bitmapped images that would resemble the alien monsters of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. In a 2005 interview with Edge magazine, Nishikado said that his original idea had been to have the player battling against tanks or airplanes, but couldn't find a way to make these objects look recognizable with limited graphics technology. “Human movement would have been easier,” said Nishikado, “but I felt it would be immoral to shoot humans, even if they were bad guys. Then I heard about a movie called Star Wars released in the U.S. which was coming to Japan next year, so I came up with a game based in space which had space aliens as targets.”² Nishikado's challenge was great—he not only had to design the game itself, but the hardware to run it. It was an incredible achievement for the 34-year-old engineer.

Perhaps the single most-discussed feature of Space Invaders is its innovative use of sound. The most important of these is the “thump thump thump” that plays as the aliens advance, gradually rising in frequency like an over-excited heartbeat. Later games such as DynaMicro's Dungeons of Daggorath (1982) for the Radio Shack Color Computer would borrow or adapt this feature. Sounds also play when the player fires a shot or strikes a target. All of these effects make the game almost as fun to listen to as to see in action, and indeed, many gamers can easily identify the game by sound alone.

Besides the innovative sound and graphics, we might attribute some of Space Invaders’ success to more basic impulses. For instance, most of us feel somehow responsible for the fate of the laser cannon (and the world under attack by the aliens). It needs us to save it; neglecting it for even a few seconds results in catastrophe. We might also compare destroying the aliens to rapidly popping the air pockets in a sheet of bubble wrap—an activity which, we might add, has recently made its way into several casual and Web-based games.

Another key aspect of the game's appeal was its high score indicator, an innovation that quickly became a mainstay of the arcade industry. Space Invaders didn't offer the more elaborate high score tables with initials seen in later games—only the single highest score was recorded and displayed. Nevertheless, this component added a vital competitive edge to an already engrossing game, and no doubt many an aggressive gamer spent that extra quarter to try once more to beat the existing score.

As everyone knows, Space Invaders was widely imitated, spawning a massive genre that eventually split into a variety of subgenres. Although it is well beyond this chapter to offer a comprehensive look at the thousands of games inspired by Space Invaders, we can't help but mention at least a few of the most celebrated.

Perhaps the most famous of all Space Invaders clones is Galaga, a 1981 shooter developed by Namco and manufactured in the United States by Midway. Galaga, which is still widely available today in almost any venue that offers arcade machines,³ was based on an earlier game, from the same company, named Galaxian (1979), which we'll discuss first. Galaxian introduced several key innovations to the Space Invaders formula. Besides vastly improved audiovisuals (it was the first arcade game in 100% RGB color⁴), the aliens could now attack in kamikaze-style formations. The four destructible shields were gone as well, making the game even more difficult. Galaga is essentially an enhanced remake of Galaxian, offering stat tracking and better audiovisuals. The best innovation, though, is that the enemy's motherships (“Boss Galagas”) can trap the player's ship in a tractor beam. If the player is out of ships, the game is over. Otherwise, the player can try to destroy the mothership that's holding the trapped ship; if successful, the captured ship is released. It then attaches to the side of the player's ship and doubles its firepower.

With Space Invaders and its clones causing so much commotion in arcades, it was only a matter of time before it swept into living rooms. At this time, the “console market” was almost entirely limited to self-contained Pong systems. Atari had released its famous Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS) in October of 1977, but success had proven elusive. Even though several of Atari's first game releases for its VCS were translations of their own arcade titles, none were true blockbusters that people wanted to play badly enough to buy the system. It wasn't until 1980 when arcade blockbuster Space Invaders was converted to the VCS that the first console killer app was born. It became the best-selling game of the year and helped establish the VCS as the definitive videogame console of its era.

Screenshot from the Atari 2600 VCS version of Space Invaders, which was the first of several arcade-to-home conversions that put the system on the map. Though not necessarily a faithful conversion, Space Invaders for the 2600 was a great deal of fun and featured more than 100 play variations. Although this version is among the most famous home conversions, nearly every other platform during this era—no matter how obscure or limited—would receive at least one knock-off of this game, if not an official port.

Space Invaders-style games would eventually evolve into a plethora of styles. One of the first major innovations was scrolling. Instead of showing all the action on a single screen, games like Konami's Scramble (1981) and Gradius featured a background that moved horizontally as the game progressed. The player's ship could also move up and down as well as left and right, increasing the complexity considerably. Defender (bonus chapter, “Defender (1980): The Joys of Difficult Games”), introduced in 1980, is perhaps the most difficult and sophisticated of all such games. Instead of a background that moved independently of the player (as with Scramble), Defender let players move all over the map (and even gave them a radar to keep their bearings). Although such a setup was undoubtedly more advanced, games that continuously autoscrolled were far more common.

Screenshot from the Atari 2600 VCS version of River Raid.

Namco's Xevious (1982) is often credited with being the first vertically scrolling shooter, though it was predated by Atari's arcade game Sky Raider (1978). In any case, vertical scrolling became quite popular. Activision's River Raid (1982) for the Atari VCS is an example of an early console game of this type. Other influential arcade shooters of the 1980s include Capcom's 1942 (1984; vertical), Toaplan's Tiger-Heli (1985; vertical), and Irem's R-Type (1987; horizontal), just to name a few. As the years progressed, the audiovisuals improved dramatically, along with nice features like powerups, damage resistance, and boss fights. The genre seemed to peak in the 1990s with ambitious titles such as Konami's Axelay (1992, Super Nintendo), which featured both horizontal and vertical scrolling along with a bevy of impressive visual effects. The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga computers were also home to plenty of lavishly detailed shooters, particularly those from the British company Psygnosis, such as Menace (1988), Blood Money (1989), and Agony (1992). Game developers competed to see who could design the best-looking and best-sounding shooters, and even if the actual gameplay varied little, gamers looked forward to these richly aesthetic experiences. For instance, though the shooters from Thalamus, Sanxion (1986) and Delta (1987), offered little-to-no innovation gameplay-wise, their superb musical scores (composed by Rob Hubbard) are still enjoyed today on Remix.Kwed.Org and other Commodore 64 music sites.

Screenshot from the arcade version of Centipede.

There were also plenty of exotic shooters that innovated even more radically from the Space Invaders model. These include Atari's Centipede, a fast-paced 1980 arcade game that utilized a trackball for more fluid movement. Another 1980 arcade classic from Atari is Tempest, a 3D vector-based shooter that is rather difficult to describe. Essentially, players move a ship around the edges of a complex web that emanates outward from the center of the screen. The enemies begin at the center and move toward the outer edges, destroying the player's ship if they make contact with it. Instead of a trackball, this game used a spinner⁵ to give players more precise control around the grid. Konami seems to have been inspired by Tempest to create the raster-based Gyruss in 1983. Gyruss lost the spinner in favor of a joystick and the abstract, grid-look of Tempest, but maintained its intriguing 3D look and feel.

Screenshot from the arcade version of Tempest.

It's tempting to try to lump all games that involve spaceship combat under the “shooter” designation. However, it seems more sensible to attribute games like Atari's Asteroids (1979) and Midway's Omega Race (1981) to an earlier influence—namely, Spacewar! (bonus chapter, SpaceWar! (1962): The Best Waste of Time in the History of the Universe). Like Spacewar!, Asteroids and Omega Race employed realistic physics, complete with inertia and momentum. This characteristic seems to set it and games like it apart from the less realistic action of Space Invader-style games. Likewise, it seems ludicrous to group first-person games with light flight simulation elements like Atari's Star Raiders (1979) and Star Wars (1983) under the “shooter” label, as no one would confuse their gameplay with Space Invaders.⁶

What about “shooter” games that feature human or humanoid avatars rather than some type of flying craft? Often enough, “run ‘n’ gun” arcade games like Capcom's Commando (1985), SNK's Ikari Warriors (1986), and Nazca Corporation's Metal Slug (1996) end up in the same category as Space Invaders, though it's plain that these games have precious little in common with conventional shooters. Even though all these games involve shooting enemies, the control scheme (and thus the gameplay) is entirely different.

One might also wonder why games like id's Doom (Chapter 5, “Doom (1993): The First-Person Shooter Takes Control”) are called first-person shooters, as though they shared a heritage with the shooters we've been talking about. Again, just because these games involve shooting enemies doesn't seem a sound reason for placing them alongside Space Invaders and Galaga; one might as well throw in Nintendo's Duck Hunt (1984) and Sega's The House of the Dead (1996)—arcade light-gun games—for the same reason.

But, we are at something of an impasse here if we try to nail down precisely what we mean by “shooter,” “shoot ’em up,” or, as they are known by their fans, “shmups.” The only criterion that really seems to distinguish them is the player's inability to direct the avatar's (or ship's) progress through the gameworld. Instead, the player can navigate only within a designated area, and is either prevented or punished for violating those boundaries.⁷

For instance, Space Invaders and Galaga are fixed-screen games; the player cannot move the ship beyond the confines of the screen (though in Galaga the aliens can move out of sight). Scrolling games may give players the freedom to move in all four directions, but players don't change the way the screen moves. It's comparable to a child bouncing around inside a school bus. Although the child may be free to move all around the vehicle, he or she is unable (hopefully, at least!) to change the direction the bus is moving. In fact, many games, like the aforementioned River Raid and Blood Money, actually punish the player for straying from the path. In the almost sadistically difficult Blood Money, for instance, contact with the walls damages the player just as much as colliding with an enemy ship or being hit by its fire.

Box back from Opcode Games's 2003 homebrew release for the Coleco ColecoVision, Space Invaders Collection, featuring near-perfect ports of both Space Invaders and Space Invaders Part II. Space Invaders and its basic play style continues to be an inspiration for new games today.

In short, a conventional shooter constrains players’ range of movement, forcing them into a sort of dodgeball match with the computer. Indeed, perhaps dodgeball is the closest physical analogy we have to these games, though with one exception—the player can throw balls as well (at enemies who seldom bother to dodge!).

Space Invaders is responsible for many “firsts” that came to define the arcade experience. It was the first mega hit from Japan, a country whose exports remain a vital part of the American gaming industry. It also represents a bold step toward representational (as opposed to symbolic) graphics; the aliens looked like aliens, not blocks or wedges. The sound effects were revolutionary, escalating the tension of an already intense experience. The high score added the all-important competitive spirit that would afterwards come to characterize the arcade era. Finally, the easy-to-learn yet hard-to-master gameplay of Space Invaders would be endlessly duplicated and refined in hundreds if not thousands of clones and derivatives. Practically any games-capable device in existence has some form of Space Invaders. We even find versions that rely totally on character-set graphics!

Treasure's Ikaruga, screenshot from the 2002 Sega Dreamcast version shown, is one of a long line of fast-paced shooters from Japan that continue to be released today. Their designs are in stark contrast to the relatively pedestrian pacing of classics like Space Invaders. Some critics argue that these later games were so difficult and elaborate—making it a point of pride to fill a player's screen with bullets—that casual fans turned away, leaving only hardcore enthusiasts in the cockpit.

With the possible exception of Pac-Man, no game seems to represent all of videogaming as well as Space Invaders. Even people who have never seen or played the game are familiar with its iconic aliens and trademark sound effects. Even if the industry has come a long way since the first eager teenager plunked in a quarter and blasted her first space invader, there's still something strangely satisfying about a good shmup. Let them come, wave after wave; we'll happily burst each bubble of the bubble wrap. Thankfully, the aliens are a fully renewable resource.

¹Though Kohler doesn't seem to recognize it, Breakout did have a recognizable, if abstract, story that was established through the cabinet art—help some crooks break out of a prison.

²See http://www.edge-online.com/news/the-creation-space-invaders.

³Galaga is usually seen nowadays in a special combination cabinet with Ms. Pac-Man.

⁴RGB is a convenient Red, Green, Blue color model for computer graphics, because the human visual system works in a similar manner.

⁵A paddle or dial that spins freely. See bonus chapter, Pong (1972): Avoid Missing Game to Start Industry, for more information.

⁶For more on Star Raiders and the Star Wars arcade game, see bonus chapter, Star Raiders (1979): The New Hope.

⁷Of course, even with this, there are exceptions, such as Sega's Fantasy Zone (1985; Arcade), where players can control the scrolling by moving right or left.