How
different things might have been had the aliens in Space Invaders not been
aliens at all, but aeroplanes as originally intended. Sadly for Tomohiro
Nishikado’s design vision, but happily for retro games merchandisers ever
since, processor output at the time was roughly equivalent to a modern candle,
which meant that aeroplane graphics could not be rendered convincingly
enough. Neither could alien space craft, but as no one knew what an alien
space craft looked like, there was far less room for debate.

And so it came to pass. Enemy Invaders became Space Invaders and engineering
graduate Nishikado, with his tenth attempt at game design, became known as the
father of the coin-op. Curiously, continuing a pattern we’ve seen before, the whole thing started with a dream.

Nishikado’s dream involved schoolchildren who find
themselves being attacked by aliens while waiting for Father Christmas. While this would have been an odd theme for a lighthearted leisure activity, it
did provide Nishikado with the germ of an idea for a game in which the player
protected something from something, with something. Inspired by breakthrough, in which the player batters a wall down brick by brick with a bat
and ball, he decided to make the ‘wall’ move and allow the player to shoot
missiles at will. To spice things up a bit, he chucked in four shields
which are gradually eroded under enemy fire – or the player’s own if he is
using the old trick of shooting through one of them to provide a safe place to
hang out and blaze away at the descending interstellar horde.

The cultural impact of Space Invaders was, of course, profound. The
release of the game in June 1978 is usually cited as the moment at which video
gaming changed from a novelty to an industry, and it is very difficult to
disagree with this. Incredibly, Space Invaders was the first game to
popularise the idea of a Hi Score – which shows how deeply rooted in old skool
pinball and table football ethos the emergent arcade culture was. It’s a
surprisingly mesmerising game, due to the relentless nature of the approaching
aliens – which look slightly crablike as they were modelled on seafood in a
fishmonger’s shop in Nishikado’s native Osaka.

There are so many remakes of and references to Space Invaders in so many
different and varied media that you would have to be some kind of maniac to
attempt to list them all. For example, the slightly sinister sounding
Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs chose it to represent Japan itself in
2008, which is a pretty lofty accolade for an arcade game appearing at the very
end of a social history stretching back several thousand years.

Interestingly,
at the presentation ceremony, Nishikado was finally able lay to rest the story
behind the cabinet artwork, which features humanoid creatures of the same
blocky graphic style as the Invaders themselves. Gaming folklore has it
that these are characters unlocked by some as yet unachieved score – a legend
which has persisted despite being obviously nonsense. Nishikado explained
the artist commissioned to produce the artwork was working on an early version
of the game which featured human assailants. This idea was dropped -
although there was not enough development budget to recommission the artwork -
at Nishikado’s insistence, due to his belief that the portrayal of human death
in a video game was immoral. His feelings on the current state of the
gaming industry that he, more than anyone else, gave to the world must be mixed
indeed.