The Space Invaders! They’re here! You’re next!

Bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp… you hear it in your head now, right? Space Invaders, 1978

Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado in 2009

Tomohiro Nishikado, creator of Space Invaders, in 2016

Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado in 2023

Taito Corporation (pronounced Tie-toe) is a Japanese manufacturer of jukeboxes, electromechanical arcade games and Pachinko games (players drop balls down into a colourful playfield and try to direct them into holes for points). They also dabble in the videogame market, with entries in the early 70’s PONG goldrush like Elepong, created by Taito engineer Tomohiro Nishikado. He also makes Western Gun, the source game for Midway’s groundbreaking Gun Fight. In 1978, inspired by Atari’s Breakout,  Nishikado designs and programs another video game. Utilizing the microprocessor design created by Taito’s U.S. partners Midway for Gun Fight, Nishikado wants to portray animated human characters involved in a war-time setting, but the idea of making a video game featuring the shooting of human characters on such a large scale is nixed by upper management. Taking further cues from the watershed SF movie Star Wars and the 50’s classic SF movie War of the Worlds, Nishikado changes things to a cosmic venue with aliens as targets, and so Space Invaders is born, although the creator refers to it as Space Monsters during development.

HQ for Taito Corporation, Hirakawacho, Chiyoda, Tokyo. 1983

Taito’s entry in the PONG gold rush: Elepong, 1973. Designed by Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado

Another game by Tomohiro Nishikado, Western Gun. Kinda looks like John Wayne there, pilgrim.

Breakout gameplay

In the game, players are charged with protecting the planet from relentless hoards of aliens marching single-file down the screen, with just a single-shot moving gun and four shot-blocking bunkers as protection. The more aliens you shoot, the faster they move, accompanied by an ominous, thudding marching sound that ratchets up speed as you progress. Once you clear a screen, another block of 55 aliens appear, this time starting one row closer to the bottom and the player’s ship. Once three of your rolling gun platforms are destroyed, or even one of the invaders reaches the bottom of the screen, it’s game over. The game’s display is black and white, with screen overlays giving the appearance of colour. Adding to the festivities is an entertaining attract mode, featuring the little critters fixing on screen typos like running out to replace an inverted “Y” in “PLAY SPACE INVADERS” or shooting away the extra “C” in the game’s request to “INSERT CCOIN”. The competitive spirit is promoted heartily in Space Invaders, as it is the first game to display a high score, although it doesn’t allow the victorious player to save their initials with it.

The original coin-op Space Invaders, 1978

Click the button to play the arcade version of Space Invaders

Full-Scale Invasion of Space Invaders

Original grid paper character designs for Space Invaders

When Space Invaders is released on June 16, 1978, it practically causes riots across Japan. It is also responsible for a nationwide coin shortage that, after a Government inquiry, leads to the government of Japan requesting that coin boxes for Space Invaders be emptied more frequently and forces the Bank of Japan to triple the production of 100-yen coins to keep the coin in circulation. To cash in on the craze, shop owners and operators of traditional Japanese tea rooms clear out their equipment and merchandise and set up all-Space Invaders arcades overnight, called Invader Houses; some establishments line the walls with up to 200 of the machines. While Taito has to licence production to six other companies to manufacture machines to keep up with demand, a thriving black-market of stolen and unlicensed game cabinets surfaces just as quickly.

Sign for Space Invaders parlor in Japan, 1979

An “Invader House” cafe filled with many Space Invaders cocktail tables, circa 1978

Space Invaders fill an arcade space (along with at least a couple Super Breakouts) in Japan, circa 1978

Space Invaders cocktail tables fill ‘Invaders House’ in Japan, 1979

Space Invaders “Invaders House” cafe in Japan, 1979

A Space Invaders cafe in Osaka Japan, 1979

Japanese Taito ad for Space Invaders, 1978

Space Invaders 1978 ad, a game by Taito/Midway

Space Invaders have exploded in the arcade, 1978 ad

Take a load off while blasting aliens. Deluxe Space Invaders cocktail table, 1979

By the end of 1978, there are 100,000 arcade units installed in Japan, pulling in over $600 million for Taito. By mid-1979, the intense popularity of the game has inspired a kind of Reefer Madness-style panic across Japan, with media such as the vaunted Mainichi Daily News printing distressing stories of Japanese youth fully corrupted by their insatiable passion for Space Invaders. These tales include a senior high school girl in Okayama who reportedly engages in prostitution to feed her electronic habit. Other horror stories: a group of seven junior high school students in Higashi Sumiyoshi-ku break into their school to steal ¥45,000 (about $230 USD) to feed their Invader addiction, and an enterprising gang of Tokyo junior high school students who establish a shoplifting ring to finance their blasting of the alien menace, to the tune of ¥400,000 (about $2000 USD). Things get so crazy that the National Police Agency institutes a national fact-finding survey to establish the connection between this delinquency and the arcade game, municipal school boards issue edicts to districts prohibiting playing of the game, and the Japan Amusement Trade Association puts forth a plan to combat the menace: only businesses with on-site caretakers can install the game, players under the age of 18 must not be allowed to play after 11pm, no prizes be offered for Space Invaders high scores and any children under 15 must be accompanied by an adult.

Midway Manufacturing moves from electro-mechanical to the new video game age, 1979

Cartoonist Jim Mazzotta’s Cosmic Debris, 1980

Player putting his whole body into playing Deluxe Space Invaders, Penn Station, NYC. Undated photo

In a smart bit of foresight, Midway, licensing the game for North America, begins production of Space Invaders in October of 1978, before its introduction at the AMOA coin-op trade show a month later. The game becomes a sleeper hit at the show, with long lines waiting at the Midway booth to play it by the end of the show. Unleashed onto the public, Midway soon finds itself in possession of the biggest arcade video game hit in America up to that point. Released in the U.S. in November of 1978, the game transcends the regular video game ghettos of pool halls and bars, popping up in department stores, restaurants, and other mainstream venues; within a year, 60,000 units have been installed in the U.S. Arcade operators scramble for the machines, aware that within one month, income from the game at prime locations will have paid off its $1,700 price tag. Even after 16 months of production of Space Invaders, distributors are faced with a five-week back order for the game. Internationally, 370,000 Space Invaders cabinets have been sold.

JUMP: Space Invaders video playlist

Taito follows up Space Invaders with Space Invaders Part II in 1979, licensed again by Midway who sell it as Deluxe Space Invaders the same year. The sequel hews closely to the original in gameplay, with a few twists: there are two flying saucers worth different points, as well as Invaders who are dropped from a UFO as reinforcements during a round, and stellar beasties who split into two when hit.

Space Invaders Part II arcade game by Taito, 1979

Deluxe Space Invaders arcade game as released by Midway, 1979

Invaders Revenge, unofficial conversion of Space Invaders, 1979

Invaders Revenge, an unauthorized conversion kit for Space Invaders, 1979

Knock-off game Invaders Revenge

Thanks to its various video creations and imports, Midway’s profits skyrocket by fifty percent in 1980. Hoping to replicate this success, numerous other imitators and sequels such as Invaders Revenge, an unauthorized conversion kit for Space Invaders by UK company Zenitone Microsec from 1979,  are released in the original’s wake, and Space Invaders becomes a huge force in the home videogame market in 1980 as the first arcade game licensed for a home console, the Atari VCS. This home version of the game, complete with 112 variations of gameplay, moves over one million cartridges in its first year of release and develops into a huge system-seller for Atari’s console.

A Space Invaders club at Sonoma State University in California practise for the first Space Invaders/Breakout National Championships, 1981. L-R: Butch Hoover, Sue Strader, Dave Smeds, Karen Escalera and George Lewis.

Other companies eventually release their own Space Invader clones for the arcade home consoles, when it becomes apparent to lawyers at Mattel that the original copyright for the game has not been properly protected, with only a change of the trademarked “Space Invaders” name required to avoid litigation. This allows the company to release Space Armada in 1981, which becomes a big hit on the Intellivision with 931,000 copies sold. Other companies take a whirl at the concept, including Namco’s own genre-defining take that has the enemy swirling out of formation and attacking the player, Galaxian. On the home front, there’s Tomy’s Cosmic Combat, an electronic handheld copy of Space Invaders in their Tomytronics line.

Space Invaders invade the home, on the Atari 2600

Space Invaders: It’s In the Wrist

Space Invaders also creates a new physical ailment. Discovered by University of Arkansas College of Medicine student Timothy McCowan, the symptom is a stiff and pained wrist, due to the “large number of rapid, repetitive arm movements” required in playing the game. Called Space Invader Wrist, it is written up in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1981.

In spite of our tortured wrists, in its various official incarnations, Space Invaders has pulled in billions in revenue over the years. By 1980, there are 360,000 units installed world-wide… a global record broken only by that year’s Pac-Man phenomena. 40th U.S. president Ronald Reagan gets in on the craze, making a perhaps slightly dated reference when he talks about video games as possible military training tools in 1983 while addressing a crowd of 500 teenagers at EPCOT center, Walt Disney World, Florida:

Aspiring military personnel can also practice forceful delivery of projectiles into targets by playing Space Invaders… the Pinball, released by Bally in 1980. Coming on the heels of the hugely influential horror movie Alien, the pinball playfield and backglass by Paul Faris strongly apes the horrific imagery created for the movie by Swiss artist H.R. Giger… so much so that 20th Century Fox sues Bally, eventually settling out of court with the game maker.

Page out of the Space Invaders Pinball flyer showing the Giger-esque artwork that got Bally sued, 1980

Page out of the Space Invaders Pinball flyer showing the Giger-esque artwork that got Bally sued, 1980

And what would a classic arcade game be if it wasn’t the target of a seemingly superfluous modern updating? In Space Invader‘s case, it comes at the hands of game developer Z-Axis and distributor Activision, releasing their revamped Space Invaders on the Nintendo N64, Sony PlayStation and Windows gaming platforms for Christmas 1999. Along with the obligatory graphics enhancement, the new game throws power-ups, multiple weapons and end-level bosses into the mix. I’ll fast-forward my George Pal time machine to 2016 and highlight a Space Invaders game that puts you right into the seat of the laser bunker, Space Invaders Frenzy. It’s apropos that this version is made for Taito by game developer Raw Thrills, founded by Defender creator Eugene Jarvis… influenced by the heart-pounding, non-stop shooting action of the original arcade game.

1999 logo for Tomohiro Nishikado’s development company Dreams Co

Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado in 2000

Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado at his desk at Dreams Co., 2000

As for Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado, he moves into a managerial position at Taito in the aftermath of the game’s immense success. Tired of being so far away from a position of  actually creating games, he eventually leaves Taito and starts game development company Dreams Co., Ltd. in 1997. Among many other games, including work on the Cooking Mama series, they make the explicit game Battle Raper for Windows where you sexually molest your opponents in a one-on-one fighting game, and more apropos to this article, a game for the Playstation 2 and Gamecube called Space Raiders in 2002 and 2003, respectively. A spin-off of the original Space Invaders, the game has players in a 3D third-person environment shooting aliens amongst an Earth city laid to waste by the Invaders. In 2013, Nishikado returns to invade the Taito Japan offices as a technical consultant.