How Space Invaders changed the Industry for Full Sized arcades and home consoles

There has always been a game or two that had an x-factor that caused them to stand out firmly in the annals of history. There are many titles worthy of the game of the year award in recent years. But during the 70s, we had a title that boosted interest in gaming and popularity in full-sized arcades, and that was Space Invaders. We’re not only going to see how popular it was, but just how it managed to accomplish this. 

Sales Impact

Forty-three years ago, a game developer named Tomohiro Nishikado helped create one of the essential titles in arcades. The game is Space Invaders, and it helped inspire the gaming industry. Space Invaders was so successful that it had made over 3 billion dollars in revenue by 1982. It hit arcade stores and other people’s hands by the truckload in America, Japan, and other countries who wanted a piece of the action—selling just under half a million arcade cabinets to markets that wanted what everyone else was getting.

Innovation and change

The reason why it was so successful was because of innovation and a way of separating itself from the competition. Many games and full-sized arcades copied the concept from another, leaving the quality in what they brought to the table. This case was for games like pong, which had been remade and redone by multiple developers. Seeing a game where you had to fire upon multiple moving enemies that threatened to reach the bottom of your screen was a breath of fresh air that the industry needed and helped inspire other arcade games to follow suit. This was quite important for the second generation of console systems because there was an unneeded amount of repetitive games that were almost all similar in concept and in low quality, which was slowly killing interest in the gaming industry. You could think of space invaders as a form of an adrenaline shot into the market, greatly regaining interest for those in the industry.

Staying power

The game is so popular that there is a space invader extreme on steam even today if you so desire. The concept of the game was not only an adrenaline shot to arcade makers but also to home console companies that were struggling around that time due to a lack of the previously mentioned innovation. Space Invaders was just what these companies needed to keep their sales up, with many kids competing with one another to see if they could beat the other’s high scores through their skills in the game.

Progression

What made this title so enjoyable was that it initially wasn’t even going to incorporate aliens but fighting humans. It was initially going to finger tanks and planes, but due to the lack of technology to compensate for that movement, he stuck to the format that we know today. With this in mind, it’s fascinating to see just how much the game progressed from its original form and concept to the alien shooter that many play these days.

Inspirations

To design such a complex game for the time, Tomohiro drew inspiration from other games to help paint the picture that his own would become. Closely observing games such as Gun Fight, where you shoot targets, Tomohiro decided to make the moving targets fire back, adding a ripple to the game, which made it much more engaging. This, in turn, inspired other game developers, such as Metal Gear Solid, which is all about avoiding moving targets that could fire back at you, but through stealth. 

Conclusion

When you think of games that have an impact, you might not initially consider this game for people of the newer generation. But, make no doubt that when it came to playing full sized arcades back in the day, and even today, few can compare to what fun it could and even currently can be.

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