Like this story? Buzz it up on Yahoo! Buzz.

Thirty years ago this month, Taito released Space Invaders, one of the most important and influential videogames of all time, to Japanese arcades. The seminal space shooter -- progenitor of an entire genre -- called on players to repel hordes of marching, thumping space creatures for the first time in videogame history. Space Invaders delivered the essential cultural breakthrough that permanently brought videogames to mainstream consciousness. Everyone knows it set its native Japan ablaze and drove America crazy, but have you ever wondered why? Well, you're about to find out. Here are 10 things everyone should know about Space Invaders.

1. It Was Developed by One Man, Alone

Space Invaders was created by a team of one: Tomohiro Nishikado, who designed and programmed not only the game, the artwork, and the sounds, but even engineered all the game's hardware himself. That means he had to put together a microcomputer from scratch in a time when personal computers were far from ubiquitous.

Space Invaders ran on a custom platform based around an Intel 8080 processor, which was sophisticated and costly hardware for 1977. With only primitive (and mostly homemade) development tools available, Nishikado often remarks that, compared to creating the hardware, the rest of the game's design was a piece of cake.

The designer originally planned to have players shoot down planes in his new, Breakout-esque combat game, but he wasn't satisfied with his attempts at animating flight. He then briefly considered human soldiers as targets, but decided it would be immoral to fire at people. Nishikado then heard about the popularity of Star Wars in America -- a film that would soon be released in Japan -- and decided to give the game a space theme. For design inspiration, he turned to H.G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, which featured octopus-like alien invaders. Soon he populated his game with flying monsters resembling sea life -- including crabs, squid, and jellyfish -- while letting the player control a moving laser base in a noble, last-ditch defense of the planet. A legend was born.

2. It Created a New Genre

Space Invaders spawned a new video game genre, the vertical progressive shooter (also known as top-down shooters, shoot 'em ups, or simply "schmups"). More specifically, it introduced the vertical space shooter, a genre which ruled Japan's arcades in the 1980s and early 1990s.

A handful of shooter games had come before Space Invaders in the arcade (some of the closest are Missile Radar (1974) and Guided Missile (1977)), but none of them "put it all together" in the same perfect combination as Taito's space classic. It inspired seminal arcade classics like Galaxian, Phoenix, 1942, Xevious, and Galaga, to name a few. More modern schmup classics include titles like Blazing Lazers, Raiden, Radiant Silvergun, and Ikaruga. And don't forget the horizontal-scrolling space shooters like Gradius and R-Type. Space Invaders' has extended to nearly every shooting game since 1978.

3. It Changed the Subject

Before Space Invaders, many arcade video games thematically resembled a preschooler's picture book: they were filled with whimsical and innocent racecars, planes, helicopters, birds, sharks, jugglers, clowns, and firemen. You could play sports like baseball, bowling, and football for a quarter, while Nintendo had recently released its first arcade video game, Computer Othello. *yawn* Even violent video fare usually featured surprisingly down-to-earth dangers like missiles, bombers, submarines, tanks, and cowboys -- most of which you could see on the nightly news. If you wanted to leave the planet, you'd find a half-dozen clones of Spacewar! (1962), an early two-player computer game. A rare few innovative space games like Atari's Starship I (1976) reached the arcades, but they failed to catch on.

Then came the aliens. Taito's relentless, marching menace from outer space captivated the public's consciousness in ways that no earthbound subject matter could, especially after the 1977 release of blockbuster space movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The game spoke not only of invasion -- triggering man's deep-seated, gut wrenching fear of facing a superior conquering force -- but of alien invasion. For 1978, that was some heavy stuff, and it deeply changed the nature of video game storylines from that point forward. After Space Invaders, space-themed titles were no longer relegated to a sub-genre of video games; they became the genre for some time to come.

4. It Drove Japan Crazy

The first three months after Space Invaders' release in its native land were the roughest. Taito was initially discouraged; sales proved slow, and it seemed like nobody wanted to play the game. But Space Invaders' exciting reputation began to spread by word of mouth along the streets of Japan, and the game took off like a rocket. Before long, Space Invaders swept up the populace in an electron-fueled frenzy the likes of which the East Asian archipelago had never seen.

People stood in line for blocks for a chance to play the new game, which was so profitable that some shopkeepers cleared out their inventory and set up makeshift Space Invaders-only arcades. Taito had trouble keeping up with demand, cranking out 100,000 Space Invaders machines for the Japanese market over the next few years.

At the height of Space Invaders' popularity -- or so the story goes -- so many 100-yen coins were tied up in the coin boxes of Space Invaders machines that it caused a nationwide shortage, forcing the Bank of Japan to triple the coin's production. While this claim is difficult to verify from contemporary Japanese sources, considering the sheer extent of the mania, it doesn't sound too far-fetched.

5. It Drove America Crazy

Midway licensed Space Invaders from Taito and released it in the United States in 1979. It didn't take long for the shooter to sweep the country and capture the public's imagination, much like it did in Japan. Invaders-themed T-shirts, hats, and dolls went on sale, and fan clubs formed around the country. Midway, like Taito in Japan, had trouble keeping up with demand for their hot new arcade machine. And in 1981, 4,000 people lined up in New York City for a Space Invaders contest held by Atari to promote their home version of the game.

But like any craze, Space Invaders triggered a fearful reaction from certain elements of society, largely fueled by sensational journalism. Newspapers carried stories about kids stealing money from their parents to get their Space Invaders fix, while they also featured articles about "Space Invaders wrist," a repetitive stress injury allegedly caused by manning the game's controls too long (and you thought "Wii-itis" was a new affliction). America's obsession with the addicting space game triggered history's first wave of speculative articles and editorials pondering whether videogames might rot the minds of young people. "The game's popularity is a puzzle to doctors, sociologists, and psychologists," wrote one desperate New York Times reporter in 1980.

In what must be the height of the hysteria, concerns about Space Invaders-inspired juvenile delinquency prompted the conservative city of Mesquite, Texas to ban public videogame playing by anyone under 17 without the presence of a guardian. Amusement chain Aladdin's Castle challenged the restrictive new law, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Thankfully, for school-skippers everywhere, the nation's highest court overturned the ordinance in 1982, upholding the rights of minors who wanted roam the arcades alone.