Space Invaders

Space Invaders (スペースインベーダー Supēsu Inbēdā) is an arcade video game designed by Tomohiro Nishikado and released by Taito in 1978, the beginning of the golden age of video arcade games as well as the earliest, popular arcade game in the history of video game industry. It was originally published and sold by Taito in Japan, and was later licensed for production in America by Bally Midway.

In designing the concepts for a game, Nishikado drew inspiration from popular media: Breakout, The War of the Worlds, and Star Wars. To complete it, he had to design custom hardware and development tools.

Gameplay
Each round starts with 5 rows of 11 aliens, and 4 fully built bunkers in front of the laser cannon. As the game is a fixed shooter, the cannon can move to the left or the right, and there is only one type of projectile that can be shot at the aliens to kill them. The cannon can only shoot one projectile at a time.

All aliens move to from left to right in the same direction, while shooting projectiles to try to destroy the laser cannon. If an alien collides with the borders of the screen, all aliens will change movement direction. Each one killed will speed up their movement and the music's speeds little by little.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) It is the earliest and first video game in the shoot 'em up genre ever released commercially, which has further been expanded with cooler mechanics such as moving enemies, side-scrolling backgrounds.
 * 2) It was one of the forerunners of modern video gaming and helped expand the video game industry from a novelty to a global industry, with Midway publishing the game in North America and Europe. When first released, it was very successful, selling over 400,000 cabinets and grossed over $3.8 billion in revenue (more than $13 billion today), making it the highest grossing video game of its time.
 * 3) Simplistic controls, as it is a fixed shooter, you can only move to the left or right and shoot a unique projectile to kill the aliens. This type of control just requires a control pad and a single button which is easy to understand how to use.
 * 4) Very challenging gameplay, as the aliens can sometimes shoot very fast projectiles that give you little time to react before dodging. Because of this, you would need to stalk them by hiding under bunkers, then briefly move aside to shoot at the aliens.
 * 5) Each alien killed in a round speeds up their movement speed, and even the game's music. This makes the game rather fast-paced, as the aliens can move much faster than the laser cannon, which can only shoot one projectile each time.
 * 6) Retro-perspective graphics with machine-displayed background.
 * 7) You can simply defeat infinite waves of aliens with a player-controlled core cannon that shoots cursor lasers to earn more score, which adds replay value like racking up the score up to 9,990 points and dodging enemy projectiles, which can lose a single life once the cannon got hit.
 * 8) It has been successfully spawned the inspiration for other video games, spin-offs, re-released on multiple platforms, and led to several sequels.

The Only Bad Quality

 * 1) The "mystery ship" doesn't give more than just score after being shot, not willing to grant power-ups to the player like double projectiles.

Reception
Space Invaders immediately became viral after launch, selling over 100,000 units by the end of 1978 and grossing $670 million ($2.6 billion adjusted for inflation) in Japan alone. By June 1979, Taito had already produced 200,000 to 300,000 cabinets with each unit earning an average of ¥10,000 ($46) in 100 yen coins per day. It had about 8 million daily players in Japan with daily revenue peaking at ¥2.6 billion ($114 million). This made it the best selling video game at the time.

External link

 * Space Invaders on Wikipedia