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Saturday 17 March 2018

Space Invaders

The electronic shooter game Space Invaders was created by Tomohiro Nishikado, who was in charge of the Taito Corporation of Japan's game making department. Nishikado drew inspiration for the aliens from H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. He spent a year designing the arcade game and developing the necessary hardware to produce it.

Nishikado made the entire game himself. Not only was he its designer, programmer, artist, and sound mixer, but he also engineered the game’s microcomputer from scratch.

Space Invaders | by Plutor 

During development, Space Invaders had an unintended side effect of causing the game to run faster when there were less aliens onscreen that the computer had to render. Rather than remove this 'bug', Nishikado decided the increasing difficulty improved the game and left it as is.

Space Invaders was released to the public in 1978 by the Taito Corporation of Japan. It is often credited as the first shoot 'em up video game.

At first Space Invaders was just an arcade game. The shooter game was such a hit in Japan, it led to a shortage of 100 yen coins needed to play.


When the gaming industry was in its infancy during the 1970s, consoles were hard-wired to play one or two crude games such as Pong. Atari changed that with the 2600, the first console to take an unlimited number of games cartridges. The 1980 Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders quadrupled the system's sales and became the first "killer app" for video game consoles, heralding the age of the Wii, the PS3 and the Xbox 360.

An anonymous French urban artist, Invader, has spent over two decades installing over 3300 Space Invaders mosaics in more than 65 cities all around the world.

Source The Independent

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