But after a few months in arcades, the advanced graphics and new kind of gameplay became a sensation and Japanese gamers were soon waiting in line for hours for a chance to play. And with that, the worldwide revolution had begun. Space Invaders soon established domination over every arcade it was installed in.
So in-demand was the title that many arcades opened featuring nothing but this one cabinet. Along the way to its great success in the arcade, the game would also prove to be exactly the shot in the arm that the home console market needed to come back from the brink of death in yes, an earlier sales downturn before the infamous crash that became the kiss of death for many console manufacturers.
Manufacturers were slashing prices and selling their boxes at a loss or leaving the market entirely. The fresh take on gameplay offered by Space Invaders was a godsend for the industry and for Atari, in particular, one of the only major console makers that managed to keep its lights on through the crash.
Needless to say, the game was a system seller. Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Besides introducing a new type of gameplay, Space Invaders was also highly influential in a number of other ways. All of a sudden, video games were no longer just a fun waste of time. They were a competition. Sure, you could play Pong and plenty of other titles against a second player, but Space Invaders let you compete against every gamer on the high score list, even long after they had left the arcade.
This was never proven. Space Invaders is also credited with helping to bring video games mainstream as opposed to just being a novelty. Space Invaders has been parodied in TV shows and has been featured in cultural exhibits. Space Invaders characters have been featured on many handmade items, and continue to be used for a variety of purposes due to the game's iconic place in video game history.
There have been numerous books about Space Invaders published dating as far back as Space Invaders was the first video game that made it possible to save scores and achieve high scores. Tomohiro Nishikado created Space Invaders when the science fiction movie zeitgeist reached its zenith: the release of Star Wars.
His creation was credited by many as transforming video games from niche product to mass consumer appeal. While simple in execution, Space Invaders was fun and addictive. Nishikado was hired initially to help the Japanese Taito corporation with its ubiquitous line of pachinko and vending machines.
Nishikado would go on to develop other games before starting work on Space Invaders in His game was partly inspired by play mechanics from popular brick breaking video games such as Break-Out, but rather than have the player remove bricks by deflecting a ball, Nishikado envisioned shooting a projectile at incoming waves of bricks aliens would replace bricks later in development.
In the pioneering days of video games, hardware and software tools had to be created from scratch. Looking back on Space Invaders some years later, Nishikado said:. I had to create everything by myself. I created a development device, wrote a part of the game that runs on it, and then created more devices along the way. In any case, Taito executives were not comfortable with the idea of shooting people. And you must not create the image of war.
To design the aliens or monsters , Nishikado took inspiration from marine life like squids, crabs and octopuses. Initially released in Japan during the summer of , Space Invaders enjoyed popularity hitherto unseen, with demand so high that new arcade venues opened with nothing but Space Invaders cabinets. This was an improbable and since debunked notion, but made for good marketing nonetheless. Popularity of the game soon spread globally. Here in Britain, the craze managed to attract the attention of Parliament.
As deviant as Space Invaders was, other MPs scoffed at the idea of regulating an electronic game in the same way a council would regulate gambling or alcohol. Thankfully, Parliament dismissed the Bill and it never came to pass. The game inspired more songs than any other video game to date, with Taito themselves releasing a CD dedicated to it in
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