Nostalgia: Space Invaders at 25
Space Invaders is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and there's even a commemorative PlayStation 2 version out (Taito official homepage in Japanese). Decided to refresh my memory about just how big an impact the game had when first launched in Japan--a few gleanings can be found below.
The concept behind Space Invaders was very simple. Games that involved shooting falling blocks were big at the time, and developer Tomohiro Nishikado's idea was to spice things up by having the blocks shoot back. The inspiration for turning them into aliens came from Star Wars, though until the last minute the game was called "Space Monsters," a play on the title of a pop hit of the time (why the company ordered it changed is not clear). Incidentally, Nishikado wasn't heading up a development team, as would be the case now; he created the thing single-handed, drawing H.G. Wellsian creatures in a sketchbook that morphed into the pixelated baddies now familiar the world over.
The game was something of a slow-burning hit, with arcades initially complaining that having the aliens fire back made it "too difficult" (that fact by itself speaks volumes about how far games have evolved since then). After a couple of months, though, younger players got hooked. The result is history: queues formed outside Taito's offices to purchase the arcade machines, with some cafes replacing all their tables with the tabletop version; and at one point the Bank of Japan had to increase the circulation of 100-yen coins to cope with the shortage as they disappeared into the maws of machines nationwide.
Ironically, it turns out that one of the things that made the game such a hit was the result of a bug. Nagoya-uchi (the "Nagoya attack") was a method whereby one destroyed one column of aliens and then dodged like mad until the rest were one row from the bottom of the screen, at which point one's ship became invulnerable to attack and it was possible to mop them up (I have a vague memory of doing this as a child, though the name is a new one on me). Why Nagoya? The accepted theory seems to be that it was where the discoverer was from, though a local TV station doing an anniversary special apparently failed to dig up anything else.
I was a few years too young to experience the boom first-hand (the ZX Spectrum and BBC B are about where I started), but the tabletop version remained in cafes in England for years afterwards, and I remember sitting in them at more than one place and time and blowing up countless rows of coloured aliens until the 10p coins ran out.
Most of the background for the above comes from a retrospective interview with developer Tomohiro Nishikado here (in Japanese).