Tatio Corporation's Space Invaders is a fixed 2-dimensional shooter that was designed by Tomohiro Nishikado and hit the Japanese arcades in 1978. Later in1980, Atari adapted a version of the game for American release. The game was so popular after its release though, that it actually caused a coin shortage in Japan. Now that's a lot of coins.
The objective of the game is to defend the planet from a space invasion (...would you look at that). You do this by controlling a laser cannon at the bottom of the screen that pans left and right and shoots straight upwards towards the descending alien swarm. The swarm consists of 11 columns by 5 rows of different types of aliens, and the random mother that will pan across the screen at the very top. Also, you have 4 shields that help protect you from the incoming alien fire, but they will slowly degrade from the damage taken.
You score by shooting and destroying each alien as they descend upon you. Each different alien is worth a different point score, and the mother ship's point total is random. It only takes one blast from your cannon to destroy a ship, but that becomes more difficult as the swarm steadily increases their descend towards the planet with their own left to right panning motion. You lose when you either run out of lives or the swarm reaches the planet. You earn lives by defeating each incoming wave. After a wave is defeated, a new wave will appear with an increased descending speed, increasing the difficulty as you progress.
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| You can see the player controlled cannon as it fires upward towards the swam. |
I found the game to be pretty fun and really addicting to play. With the awesome soundtrack to jam to while I blasted away my alien invasion nightmare, I felt the urge to keep playing the game. This was as if the lives I gained at the end of each wave more like money to me than the actual points being scored. It became my goal to collect as many lives as I could. Though, this only lasted about 10 minuets before the repetitiveness of the game slapped me in the face with the rear hand of boredom. As fun as I thought this was, I couldn't help but become bored with the same thing happening over and over again with the only difference being the increase in the pace of the decent. For me, when I play the exact same thing with out a change in strategy or even scenery, I become uninterested and just want it to end. The thing that I did not like most about the game though was the firing speed of the cannon. The cannon would not fire a new round until the previous round hit an alien or vanished at the top of the screen. I do not know if this was because they did not have the technology to set a constant firing speed for the cannon at the time, but to me it just made the game frustrating.
Taito Corp. released 4 more squeals to the Space Invader franchise, ending in 1995. In 2008 Nintendo released the "Space Invaders Get Even" for the Wii gaming console, where you controlled the aliens instead of the cannon.
The game, though very repetitive, is a great classic. It set the standard for most alien shoots and side scrollers for its generation.
References:
http://www.history.com/topics/space-invaders
http://www.brentradio.com/SpaceInvaders.htm
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