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WHY SPACE INVADERS IS THE BEST GAME EVER - by Mr Biffo

20/2/2018

19 Comments

 
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Space Invaders is the best game ever. I don't say that lightly. I mean it literally and sincerely; it's really, really good. 

I realised this last weekend, when I played it for the first time in, y'know, forever. I think, like all of us, I'd been taking Space Invaders for granted for far too long. Its ubiquity as the spark which ignited the Golden Age of Gaming has overshadowed what a work of genius the game actually is.

Yes, it was a whole bundle of firsts, and it's important in all manner of ways, but there's a reason why it's Space Invaders and not, say, Gun Fight, that has endured. And that reason is this reason: like The Beatles, or The Sex Pistols, or Star Wars, or the iPhone... it was in and of itself brilliant; not just for the time, but for all time.

I've played so many old games that I remember fondly, and now I sort of come to expect them to be broken, straining at the restrictions of the hardware, or glitchy, or trying too hard to experiment, or just damned impossible.

​Space Invaders, much to my surprise, isn't like that; it works as well now as it did then. 
DO YOU REMEMBER THIS?
I don't remember when I first saw a Space Invaders machine. I can recall having it for our Atari 2600. I clearly remember my mother attempting to play it - and leaning her entire body left and right as she moved the joystick - but I don't remember that moment when it first became embedded in my mind. It feels as if has always been a part of our culture.

​I mean, I recall seeing it in arcades and on TV, because it was everywhere. The black and white original, the version with the coloured overlay, the one with the moonscape backdrop, the cocktail cabinet version. Space Invaders was just so utterly omnipresent in the late-70s and early-80s that it was impossible to avoid.

​The artwork on the cabinet always stood out to me, because the monsters on it looked nothing like the ones in the game... and I liked the ones in the game, so could never understand why they didn't use those. And yet, that cabinet artwork, in its own way, also became iconic.
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PERFECTION FROM SPACE
Space Invaders is, of course, considered to be the tipping point for gaming. There had been games before it - Space War, Breakout, Pong - but Invaders is the one which transformed gaming from being a niche, novelty, sideshow to bona fide global industry. The subsequent Atari 2600 home interpretation was the killer app which turned Atari into a world-conquering brand (for a while at least), and the design of the Invaders themselves has since become a shorthand for video games. 

However, I think it's fair to say that these days we dismiss it, wrongly, as simplistic, a faltering, necessary, first step. We've forgotten that it didn't become a phenomenon because it was the first... but because it was genuinely great. ​

Playing Space Invaders at the weekend, I was suddenly struck by how perfect it is. It's incredibly well balanced, simple to understand and play, yet difficult to master. It's a game that anyone can play. Graphically and sonically it may be basic, but that simplicity is precisely why it has sustained.

That restraint and purity is something which has been lost. There have been many Space Invaders sequels and spin-offs, but none of them managed to recapture that magic. Indeed, pick almost any video game released in the last 40 years, and you can probably find Space Invaders' DNA in there - but buried by decades' worth of evolution, experimentation, and one-up-manship.

The "noisier" games get, the harder it is to identify the spine binding them together. The more games have become sprawling, map-mopping, epics, with blockbuster visuals, the less easy they are to grasp.

There's an old adage about the best songs being the ones you can strip down to play on an acoustic guitar... It's hard to think what the "unplugged" versions of Far Cry, or GTA, or Assassin's Creed would be - because they're almost an entire arcade in one, compilations of differing playing styles and mini games, strung together by setting and story.

Space Invaders, admittedly due to the limitations of the technology, never lost sight of what it was, never deviated from its core gameplay mechanic. There's something beautifully democratic in there; nobody is left behind. It starts easy, so everyone can be a part of it.
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TOMO NEVER DIES
Space Invaders' creator, Tomohiro Nishikado - who not only had to create the game, but the custom hardware upon which it played - took his initial inspiration from the classic Breakout.

He hit upon the idea of making the ball a weapon, and the bricks targets... and - for the first time - having the targets fight back. His employers, Taito, forbade him from making the enemies human, so he instead tried to make them into aeroplanes... but struggled to animate them smoothly.

Depending on which version of the story you choose to believe, the decision to go with aliens was either inspired by War Of The Worlds, a magazine article about Star Wars, or a dream he had in which a group of children waiting to meet Father Christmas were attacked by space monsters.

The number of firsts in Space Invaders is immeasurable, but one of its greatest contributions to the fundamentals of gaming was the option to save a player's score on a high score table.

It was also responsible for the first e-sports gaming event - a Space Invaders Tournament, attended by 10,000 guests - and the first tabloid video game scare stories; the media ran with nonsense about students bunking off school to play it, and others suffering from "Space Invaders Elbow". In the UK, a Labour MP even drafted a bill to restrict the sale of the game due to its addictive qualities, which - he claimed - promoted "deviancy". The unmistakable four-note looping music was heard in hit singles, and even became part of the late-70s disco craze.

The game made billions for Taito and Midway, inspired the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto to become a games designer, and spawned countless - more colourful - clones, which arguably lacked the same clarity as their inspiration. Its success opened a path away from basic sports simulations to more fantastical settings.

Because of Space Invaders, the potential of gaming was suddenly limitless. That's a given. What remains a surprise is how it still holds up today.

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19 Comments
Psshow psshow
20/2/2018 10:01:30 am

Apologies for the boring comment, but I enjoyed this article, and I agree. I don't think my fondness for old games is *entirely* nostalgia - there's something about the minimalism or purism too.

I recently got Data Wing on my phone, and it's the first game I've got into in a couple of years. Nice feeling.

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Col. Asdasd
20/2/2018 10:31:32 am

"It's hard to think what the "unplugged" versions of Far Cry, or GTA, or Assassin's Creed would be"

Hmm. Maybe the original Legend of Zelda? In many ways it's the original open world game.

Space Invaders has some rather ingenious design touches. The fact that the last invader gets super fast means that the intensity of the game is always rising, never falling. A lot of games completely fail to learn this lesson, leading to scenarios where you're having to do boring map-cleaning just when the excitement should be at its peak. Strategy games in particular are often guilty of this.

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DEAN
20/2/2018 11:34:39 am

The original Zelda game is my all time favourite game ever ever ever and is always likely to be because.... just is.

Space Invaders - best thing about it was the cabinet artwork - worst thing was the game itself - boring. Not as bad as Pac-Man but still pretty shit. Pong is the best grandpa game I thinks.

Last time I played Space Invaders was on a GIGANTIC screen and it was this : okay.

Going back to the fabulous artwork - it was those furry monsters that always made me happy.
Also, the way the font ominously looms over you in 'waves' - genius!

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/78/dd/2b/78dd2b36e8f94605ce72bebd31d6ed70.png

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Mrtankthreat
20/2/2018 01:59:00 pm

Pac Man is boring? How very dare you. I still play it everyday on my phone. Despite the dodgy touch controls it still holds up and there's also daily tournaments and tons of additional levels.

Tetris for me though is the ultimate video game. It still needed a few tweaks along the way though. Not sure t-spins and such were in the original.

DEAN
20/2/2018 03:29:05 pm

Far be it for me to tell you that it’s boring BUT...

It’s like hoovering - sort of satisfying but not as much so as jet-washing a filthy patio slab.

Best thing about Pac Mac is nothing.

Retro Resolution
20/2/2018 01:33:44 pm

To be fair (and not wanting to be 'that guy') the incremental speed increase, as the number of remaining invaders decreases, was a lucky accident (resulting from the reduced processing burden with less objects to manage and display)

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Nick
20/2/2018 01:42:16 pm

Art through accident.

Col. Asdasd
20/2/2018 02:01:18 pm

Hey, that's really interesting to know.

Craig Grannell link
20/2/2018 12:01:47 pm

I wonder how much Space Invaders needs the machine – that filling of your vision, and the blooping sound effects caressing your ears? I certainly don't find the original SI that much fun these days in handheld formats, or on a PC, despite having fond memories of it (the cab being the first I ever played), and recognising its huge importance in gaming's story.

Funny to see the line about sequels and spin-offs not recapture the original's magic. I agree they obviously don't have the same clarity and purity – how could they? But magic? Oh yes. Space Invaders Extreme on the GBA kept me engrossed for weeks, and Infinity Gene is a game I deeply miss on iOS (Square Enix apparently having no interest in keeping it alive in 64-bit, having more or less told me to go away when I asked if that would happen).

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Ste Pickford
20/2/2018 01:17:47 pm

Yeah, Space Invaders Extreme was ace.

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Retro Resolution
20/2/2018 01:37:32 pm

Iirc, the sound on Space Invaders was analogue, giving a tremendous bass to the iconic heartbeat pulse, and scintillating crispness to the laser blasts.

I've always found all attempts to play it tedious outside of the arcade cab (first coin op I ever played, whilst stood on a crate to reach the controls...), and the Atari VCS incarnation (when I was a child - just can't find any joy in it under emulation)

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Kelvin Green link
20/2/2018 12:28:28 pm

I liked the Amiga version.

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Craig Anderson link
20/2/2018 12:49:46 pm

I could spend hours on Space Invaders. I'm not good at it by any means, in that I can probably only clear three screens max, but I just really enjoy it.

The first time I saw a Space Invaders machine was when my Grandpa took me to the local club (a 70s pub) one afternoon. I must have been 6 and had never had a computer or seen an arcade machine in real life before.

He got a chair and I stood on it to look at the screen moving, totally in awe.

SUCH fond memories of Space Invaders.

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Alex Darby
20/2/2018 01:52:46 pm

This article speaks deep truth. Good work Mr Biffo.

Interesting fact - the speeding up during each wave was originally a bug caused by the fact that there was no framerate lock and so the game got faster as you killed aliens because there were less of them to update each frame....

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Nick
20/2/2018 01:58:45 pm

I've not played any version of Space Invaders for years. I can't say I ever loved it as a game but I have very fond memories of playing it.

Between the ages of 7 and 10 there was a glut of family and family friends weddings. Living in a small town meant that most of these had the reception in the same venue. The bar of the venue had a cocktail table Space Invaders machine and me and various cousins would cadge 10p pieces from my grandad to play on it all evening.

A few years later there was an advert in the local paper selling the machine for £50.

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Chris Wyatt
20/2/2018 04:58:07 pm

Space Invaders '94 was my first Gameboy game, and I think the only Gameboy cartridge ever to have a SNES game inside of it (which you could play via the Super Gameboy).

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Space Invaders Are Smarter Than You
20/2/2018 05:17:09 pm

I just got a Super NT (fancy FPGA SNES) and enjoyed a blast of Space Invaders yesterday. I agree with everything you said, it definitely holds up in its way.

Space Invaders Extreme (a DS game, not on GBA) is sweet as well, and recently came out on Steam for PC. I'm waiting fo a price drop but I love that noisy, psychedelic version.

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CdrJameson
21/2/2018 10:15:50 pm

Pong also holds up very well.

Most of us played the fairly crappy Grandstand home console version, which isn't really much fun. Arcade Pong actually ran a hell of a lot faster, and as such it actually feels like an achievement to get a rally going.

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StreetMap
23/2/2018 03:08:30 pm

"or the iPhone" ?
You've got it bad man. See a doctor.

Reply



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