How Space Invaders Birthed Japanese Games

This is a history of game design. In this new series of videos, I’ll be looking at the most important, influential, and ground-breaking games from the last 40 years. In each video I will highlight a landmark game, look at where it came from, discuss its most revolutionary features, and chart its impact on the games that came afterwards. These games are trend setters, genre definers, and trailblazers. They, are the design icons.

In the summer of 1978, there was an invasion. Taito’s new game, Space Invaders, was released in arcades across Japan. The game depicts a fearsome army of alien soldiers who cascade down the screen in militaristic formation. As the lone soldier defending the Earth, you must shoot laser beams at the incoming extraterrestrial threat - while hopping in and out from behind destructible shields. There’s also a UFO that floats across the top of the screen, and bags you a random number of points when it’s shot.

It’s a simple set-up, but there’s a surprising amount of opportunity for strategy. It was one of the first shooters where the enemies shot back, for example, so you needed to dodge as well as attack. And you can manipulate the play-space to your advantage, because if you remove the aliens on the far side of the formation, your foes now have further to go each step, and thus take longer to reach the bottom of the screen.

Space Invaders was certainly a game of firsts. It was the first arcade game that would record your high score, adding a highly competitive element where nearby players could compete to see who could hold out for the longest. Though, it wasn’t until next year’s Star Fire that players could enter their initials next to their score. It was also the first game with a soundtrack that played continuously through the gameplay.

Sure, it was just a simple heartbeat thud (or, perhaps, a jackboot march), but it gave the game a remarkable feeling of impending doom. This was one of the first games that truly evoked a mood in the player. But the most influential design in Space Invaders is far more fundamental. Space Invaders was made by Taito engineer Tomohiro Nishikado, who made the arcade board himself, using microprocessors imported from the United States.

However: he quickly found that the tech wasn’t powerful enough to draw an entire army of alien invaders, moving at his desired speed. And so the extraterrestrials would instead slowly creep across the play field. But - every time the player shot and killed an alien, the processor had one one fewer sprite to draw, and that extra processing time meant the rest of the army would start to move slightly faster. By the time just a few aliens were left on screen, they moved quickly and aggressively towards the player.

This wasn’t what Nishikado intended to happen, but he discovered that this actually added an interesting wrinkle to the game: the better you did, the harder the game got. And instead of fixing the bug, he implemented it into the final game. It even made the music speed up, giving the game a prototypical adaptive soundtrack. Now, Space Invaders wasn’t the first game where the difficulty increased in relation to your success.

You see, Nishikado was influenced by Atari’s brick-busting, Pong-inspired game, Breakout, which was released in 1976. And one of the things he liked most about Breakout was the way the game got more difficult as you played - partly because the last block is really hard to hit, and partly because Atari programmed it so the ball speeds up at certain intervals. But here’s the thing. Breakout only has two levels, and they’re identical.

Space Invaders on the other hand has multiple stages and Nishikado made it so each level was harder than the one before it - as each stage begins with the aliens one row closer to the bottom of the screen. And together - the speeding up aliens, and the more difficult starting conditions - these two ideas give the game a distinct structure where the game’s difficulty increases throughout level one, then drops down to something a bit more manageable for the start of level two - before increasing again, and so on.

This strange wiggly line, is what Space Invaders brought to game design: a difficulty curve. And we now see some version of this spiky, wavy curve in practically every type of traditional video game. It’s a curve that keeps players engaged with a rising challenge that meets their increasing skill level, but also provides time to get your bearings and learn new mechanics. And it’s a curve that delivers excellent pacing - with rising tension and then moments of relief.

That difficulty curve, coupled with that high score system, led Space Invaders to become incredibly addictive and, perhaps, the first video game phenomenon. Long before kids were doing cringy Fortnite dances at weddings and finding dead bodies while hunting for Geodudes in Pokemon GO, there were news stories about Space Invaders addicts. Plus, the game took in billions of dollars in its first few years, and arcades in Japan were sometimes called “Invader Houses”.

Though, don’t believe the story that says the game led to a shortage of 100 yen coins in Japan - that one’s almost certainly a load of -. But most importantly, the tremendous success of Space Invaders would inspire more companies to get into games. Mario maker Shigeru Miyamoto has said “about a year or two after I joined Nintendo, Space Invaders came out and became a huge hit, and so Nintendo decided to go into the video game business”.

And Atari was struggling to shift its Atari 2600 console until it licensed a Space Invaders port in 1980 - which doubled the console’s sales to more than two million units, and made the system popular with developers and gamers alike. AD DAD: It's fun! But personally I think the whole idea of creatures from outer space is a little far fetched. Many of the games that cropped up during the dominance of Space Invaders were, of course, sci-fi space shooters.

Games like Galaxian by Namco, Defender by Williams Electronics, Asteroids by Atari, Astro Fighter by Data East, Gorf by Midway, Astro Invader by Konami, Ozma Wars by SNK, and Radar Scope by Nintendo were all hoping to cash in on this interstellar fad. And this would, of course, lead to the the shoot ‘em up genre that we still know today. Everything from Galaga to Ikaruga to Star Fox and to DoDonPachi can be traced back to these pixelated invaders.

And this is a genre that Space Invaders itself is still a part of, with modern instalments like the trippy, score-chasing reboot, Space Invaders Extreme, and the ever-evolving Space Invaders Infinity Gene. So, I think Space Invaders is the perfect game to kick this series off. While it was far from the first ever video game, it made a number of incredibly important contributions to the field of game design that would fundamentally change how games were made.

From high scores to destructible cover to adaptive soundtracks to the entire shoot ‘em up genre and that oh-so important difficulty curve, it’s clear to me that Nishikado’s Space Invaders was truly, a design icon. Hi there! Design Icons will be an ongoing series, that will take us from the earliest arcade games, right through to modern trendsetters. To make sure you never miss an episode, make sure you subscribe to Game Maker’s Toolkit on YouTube - and also hit the bell icon so you’ll be alerted whenever new episodes are available.

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