That wasn't always the case, though. Video games were born in America, and for the first half-decade following the release of Pong, every game of note was developed in the U.S. It was a logical situation; video games were born as a footnote to the invention of computers, which were in turn a leap of technological progress spurred forward by the Cold War and America's determination to remain ahead of the Soviet Union. Sure, they may have beaten us into space with Sputnik, but thanks to Spacewar we had 'em licked when it came to virtual spaceship battle technology.

It wasn't until Taito released Space Invaders upon an unsuspecting public that Japan got its figurative foot in the proverbial door. The game was an instant and unprecendented success in Japan -- a well-known legend surrounding its arcade run is that its popularity caused a national shortage of the 10-yen coins used to play it. Space Invaders certainly wasn't the first Japanese video game, nor was Taito the first Japanese developer to venture into this particular America-pioneered field of entertainment.

Truly the first game to be able to claim, "I'm big in Japan."

While Space Invaders wasn't nearly the success abroad that it had been in its home territory, it was profitable enough to allow Taito to expand their presence in the U.S. And the game became moderately ingrained in the minds of western gamers; even people who have never actually seen the game recognize the name. And of course the enemy invaders have become iconic enough to appear in numerous places even 25 years later -- including the pages of a certain multi-format video gaming magazine.

More Than This

Were Space Invaders simply the title to have given rise to the juggernaut Japanese gaming industry, it would be a hugely important landmark in the history of the medium. But the game worked more subtle (yet equally significant) influences as well.

Prior to Space Invaders, most games were fairly realistic. True, thinking of Pong and its children as "realistic" requires a huge stretch of the imagination today; but despite the abstraction of the graphics and the bloopy sound effects, most early games attempted to digitize familiar, real-world situations. For the most part, video games of the 1970s were based on sports -- an understandably literal application of the term "video game."

Atari's 2600 version offered 100+ variants along with strangely deformed enemies.

Apart from the odd movie rip-off (like the blatantly Spielberg-inspired Shark Jaws and the Buck Rogers-like Spacewar), most creative efforts in the arcade stuck to the tried and true: tennis, hockey, football, racing.

Space Invaders, however, removed the familiar iconography of sports to give players something more fantastic. Players took control of a moving gun turret blasting away at an advancing armada of alien invaders. The enemies advanced slowly, but inexorably: when they reached the player's level or scored a hit with return fire, the player lost a life. A skilled gamer could clear a few waves of the aliens, but with each new round they marched faster and fired more aggressively. Even the best arcade-goer would eventually succumb to the relentless tide of extraterrestials; it was a no-win game, and the real point was to squeeze as much play time (and as high a score) as possible from a single credit.

With Love From Japan

Why, precisely, this formula appealed so powerfully to Japanese gamers is unclear. Maybe the futility of the scenario tapped into the same shared love for impossible odds as pachinko. But another (and far more likely) possibility is that the invaders themselves resonated with the Japanese. Despite being low-resolution black-and-white abstractions, the character sprites possessed an unprecedented amount of charm. Though the player's avatar was little more than a tiny dome with a gun, the encroaching aliens resembled nothing so much as an assortment of merchandise from a fish market stall. Crabs, squid, octopi: were it not for the title, one might assume the invaders were approaching from the sea rather than the sky.

In gracing its villains with this rudimentary sense of personality, Taito tapped into the innate Japanese fondness for the cute.

Squid? Nope. According to the U.S. cabinet art, Space Invaders starred bomb-chucking Chewbaccas.

It's probably no coincidence that the majority of gaming's iconic figures hail from Japan: the country generates simple, lovable and immensely marketable cartoon creations at a frightening rate. And this quickly extended to gaming: Toru Iwatani created Pac-Man by giving a partly-eaten pizza a voracious appetite, and Akira Toriyama created the enduring (and endearing) Dragon Quest slime by adding a smile to a blue teardrop. Space Invaders was the first successful effort to infuse a game with that idiomatic Japanese love for minimalistic charm, and inspired thousands of subsequent games.

Space Invaders also set the template for the 2D shoot-em-up genre. It's an artform which seems to have lost the battle of evolution by playing dinosaur to the first-person shooter's tiny mammal, but during the 16-bit era it was king. Practically anyone who owned a Genesis/MegaDrive or TurboGraFX-16/PC Engine is a living repository for shoot-em-up war stories. (Or "shmups," as they are sometimes called by people with a burning desire for efficiency at any cost.) It's easy enough to see how the entire space shooter genre grew out of Space Invaders (particularly the top-down shooters). Add in enemy movement patterns and you have Galaxian; add weapon upgrades to the mix and you have 1943; drop in wild, screen-filling sprays of weapon fire and suddenly it's DoDonPachi or Gunbird.

Taito promoted Space Invaders' 25th anniversary quite vigorously last year, at least in Japan. For whatever reason, the anniversary went completely unremarked in the U.S.; an arcade reissue is coming soon, but for now American gamers interested in reliving this little slice of gaming history in all its myriad forms should track down a copy of the budget-priced import Space Invaders Anniversary for PlayStation 2. Still, even if the game tends to be a bit underappreciated and underrepresented in America, it still stands as an important moment in the history of the medium. So long as people continue to violate copyright laws by wearing or reprinting its iconic, cretaceous invaders and the pulsating beat of its soundtrack, its memory will live on.

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Space Invaders

Landmarks:

• First Japanese-developed hit game
• Broke games from "realistic simulation" mold
• First game to capitalize on Japanese love for quirky characters
• Established traditional shooter genre

• Galaxian series
• Astrosmash
• Missile Command
• 194X series
• countless other shooters

Space Invaders at KLOV

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Space Invaders ripped off in Java (with style)

Musings:

"Space Invaders was a little before my time -- by the time I was old enough to really enjoy video games (i.e., tall enough to see over an arcade control console) Namco had already upped the stakes with Galaga. And for my money, Galaga is the ultimate shoot-em-up. You can keep your Panzer Dragoon Ortas and Radiant Silverguns, friends. Nothing will ever match Galaga's zen-like combination of reflex, simplicity and strategy. Nothing will top the thrill of killing swarms of evil space bees. Stealing back your fighter craft and plowing through an entire bonus wave without missing a shot is one of those perfect gaming moments that simply sticks with you ever after.

"Of course, Galaga could never have happened without Space Invaders -- it's basically a faster, more involved version of Taito's groundbreaking original with more aggressive enemies and no defense shields. Galaga represents the pinnacle of Namco's attempts to refine Space Invaders into something even better, and falls somewhere between Galaxian and Xevious. (Oddly enough, Namco released it the same year as King & Balloon, a genuinely rotten SI clone.) Shooters come and shooters go, but for my 25 cents, none of them pack as much fun and addictiveness as Galaga. Just watch out for the 20th anniversary Galaga/Ms. Pac-Man reissue from a few years back: the oversized screen makes it harder to keep an eye on the entire playfield and seriously inhibits the gestalt trance required for a high-scoring game.

"As for Space Invaders itself? It was pretty OK, too. Too bad last year's crazy P.N.03-style 3D remake didn't make it to the U.S."

Article by
Jeremy Parish