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Originally released to arcades in 1978, Taito's Space Invaders was a phenomenon: It became so popular in Japan that it caused a coin shortage. Two years later, the game was brought to the US by Midway.
Space Invaders (1978). |
The concept seems mind-numbingly simple today, but it was pretty heavy-duty stuff for the late '70s. You controlled a base station at the bottom of the screen. Three buttons let you move and fire from either side. Hanging in the sky above you were several rows of alien ships. The aliens moved from side to side, firing down at you all the while. When the aliens reached either side of the screen, they'd shift down one row and start moving in the opposite direction. Your job was to destroy the invaders before they could destroy you, either by shooting you or "landing" at the bottom of the screen. To provide a little defense, you had four shields that sat between you and the invaders. Shots would chip away at the shield, eventually putting holes in them so that shots could pass through. As you started taking out the invaders, they'd start moving faster and faster, until the final invader would streak back and forth at great speed. Of course, once you cleared out one rack of invaders, another set would take its place. As was the case with most early arcade games, the only "end" to Space Invaders came when you lost by running out of lives.
Xevious (1982). |
The game went on to spawn numerous sequels, ranging from simple updates like Space Invaders Deluxe to recent, albeit misleading, reinterpretations of the game for the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation. But the sequels aren't what make Space Invaders influential. Space Invaders essentially created the genre that we now know as "shooters." As the arcade scene has always been about cloning successful concepts, other companies jumped in on the action almost immediately. Namco's Galaxian (1979) was Space Invaders with a twist: Instead of merely hanging out up in the sky and firing, the enemies in Galaxian would dive down at you in an attempt to collide with your ship. Galaxian gave way (in 1981) to its sequel, Galaga, which is still considered to be one of the greatest shooters ever created. In 1982 Atari's Xevious arrived in the arcades, and this game took the "space shooter" concept in yet another new direction. Instead of merely being a stationary ship, your ship actually appeared to be flying over a planet, and your enemies no longer came level by level; instead they would fly onto the screen, attack in patterns, and fly away--if you didn't destroy them. While shooters like Galaga continued to appear in arcades for a few more years, Xevious' new direction quickly became the order of the day, leading to games like Capcom's 1984 release, 1942.
Today, the frequency of shooter releases is nothing like it was back in the '80s, but Capcom has recently released a few games--such as Giga Wing and Mars Matrix--that keep the spirit of Xevious (and thus Space Invaders) alive.
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