The game credited with starting the ‘Golden Age’ of arcade gaming turns 40 this month (June 2018). Bikkuri! Wow! Space Invaders is the two-dimensional shooter game where the player controls a laser cannon by moving it horizontally across the bottom of the screen and firing at the descending aliens.

It was created by Tomohiro Nishikado who was inspired by Atari’s arcade game ‘Breakout.’ He wanted to create a shooting game that gave the player the same deep sense of satisfaction from completing stages and destroying targets but with more complex graphics.

Discoveries
Nishikado designed his own custom hardware and development tools for the game using microprocessors from the United States. While programming the game, he discovered the processor was able to render the alien graphics faster when there weren’t so many on the screen. Rather than design the game to compensate for the speed increase, he decided to keep it as a challenging game play mechanism.

The game mechanics were a forerunner to a number of those still being used today including: high scores, multiple lives and difficulty curves. Space Invaders went on to net the Taito Corporation an eye-watering billion plus dollars and inspire some of the gaming industry’s greatest minds. Image Credit: Original sketches by Tomohiro Nishikado courtesy of Taito Corporation.

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