Before Space Invaders, the targets in a shooting game waited to be hit. Tomohiro Nishikado’s aliens fired back, marched down the screen towards you and ended the game if they landed, however many shots you had left. Taito’s own sales staff hated both ideas. “Up until Space Invaders, shooting games didn’t feature enemies that would attack the player,” Nishikado told Retro Gamer, and those features “were vehemently opposed by the sales and businesspeople”. Within a year of its release in 1978 Japan was in the middle of what it called the “invader game” boom, and by 1980 the game had crossed to America and into the home.
Fast facts
- Designer: Tomohiro Nishikado, at Taito. He did the planning, design, graphics, program and hardware himself; a new employee made the sound effects.
- Released: 1978 in Japan (Retro Gamer gives July); built under licence in America by Midway.
- Hardware: an Intel 8080 processor at about 2 MHz and a one-bit bitmap screen of nearly 60,000 pixels, black and white, with coloured strips of film over the monitor on many cabinets.
- The wave: 55 invaders in five rows of eleven, four shields that crumble, and a mystery ship crossing the top.
- Home version: Atari bought the home rights in 1980 and its VCS cartridge became the fastest-selling of Atari’s games.
One man’s game
Nishikado had been at Taito for ten years when he started, and he began with someone else’s game. “The block destruction game Breakout was really popular in Japan, and I was hooked on it myself,” he told Retro Gamer. What held him was “deciding on a number of targets and that sense of achievement you’d get from destroying a whole group of blocks simultaneously to clear the stage”. He replaced the bricks with targets that had “more interesting forms”. His first targets were people, until Taito’s president told him to stop. Monsters came next, then aliens, because Star Wars was a hit in America and Japan was having “a bit of a ‘space boom’”. He modelled the invaders on sea creatures: octopus shapes at the bottom, crabs in the middle and squid at the top.
There was no microcomputer hardware to buy in Japan, he said, so he took American designs built round the Intel 8080 “as a reference point” and remodelled an existing game board, swapping its ROM for RAM so that he could load and test programs. He wrote his own development tools as he went, including a paint program worked with a light pen, and the tools took about half of the game’s twelve months. Memory was so short that he “could only program two patterns” of movement for the aliens. “But I felt that in some ways, simple was best.”
The hardware is also why the invaders speed up. The 8080 ran at about 2 MHz, too slow to redraw a whole screen each frame, so the game erases and redraws only the sprites that move, and moves just one invader per frame. With 55 invaders a full step takes 55 frames; with five left it takes five. Shoot them down and the survivors march faster, and the marching beat under the game quickens with them.
The invader boom
In Japan the game sold mostly as a table: the upright cabinet came first, but the table model “saved a lot of space”, Nishikado said, and supplanted it. Computer & Video Games, in a 1985 history built on Taito’s Japanese newspaper cuttings, described cafés and tea houses that stopped serving tea to make room for machines, queues of players, and dealers lining up outside Taito’s offices. It also recorded that Taito would not say who had developed the game. Nishikado confirmed in 2013 that his part “wasn’t known outside the company”.
The figures published in the West were large. Creative Computing reported in September 1980 that there had been over 100,000 machines in Japan within a year, taking over $600 million. Retro Gamer later gave a lifetime total of around 360,000 machines. The boom was short: by late 1979, C&VG wrote, it was over in Japan, and Taito had shipped the surplus abroad.
The coin shortage
The best-known story about Space Invaders is that it emptied Japan of 100-yen coins. Period American magazines stated it as fact: Creative Computing said in 1980 that “the Bank of Japan had to triple its production of 100 yen pieces”, and Electronic Games repeated the tripling in its first issue.
The evidence does not bear it out. The Japan Mint’s published output of 100-yen coins fell from 440 million in 1977 to 292 million in 1978, the year of the game’s release, then rose to 382 million in 1979 and 588 million in 1980. The biggest year came after the boom had ended, and even that was twice 1978’s figure, not three times. Nishikado himself would not claim it. “The effect of Space Invaders was certainly noted among businesses using 100-yen coins a lot,” he said, “but I don’t know whether the coins actually became less common because of the game.” Retro Gamer has since filed the shortage among the game’s “urban myths”. The 1985 C&VG history made the same point about another rumour, that 30 eight-ton trucks of coins arrived at Taito’s headquarters every day: a reporter from the Evening Fuji went to look and found none.
Midway and the reflector cabinet
Midway, Bally’s coin-operated game division, bought the American rights and began its own version in August 1978. Its upright cabinet reflected the black-and-white picture through a mirror onto a painted lunar landscape, so the invaders looked half-transparent, with strips of coloured film to tint the bottom of the screen green and the top orange. Japanese cabinets had their own versions of the film trick before Taito built a full-colour model. Nishikado had wanted colour from the start: “the capabilities of the Space Invaders arcade hardware were really low,” he said.
Home versions
In 1980 Atari bought the exclusive home rights. Creative Computing reported that the VCS cartridge “immediately became the fastest selling of Atari’s thirty-six games, surpassing even the perennial favorite, Break Out”, and Retro Gamer later wrote that it quadrupled the console’s sales; the Atari 2600 entry tells that side of the story. It was a loose adaptation, with 36 invaders instead of 55, three shields instead of four, and 112 game variations, among them moving shields, zigzagging shots and invisible invaders. Atari also sold a very different version for its 400 and 800 computers. The same licence was used to promote the machine: in 1980 Atari ran a national Space Invaders championship, the subject of the esports origins entry.
Atari kept the game to itself. Other arcade hits it licensed went out on other machines under the Atarisoft label, but Space Invaders did not, so there was no official version for the Apple II, the Commodore 64 or the ZX Spectrum. Their owners got imitations instead: Commodore’s own Avenger for its computers, and on the Spectrum Spectral Invaders and Space Raiders. Official versions reached other companies’ machines only in the middle of the decade, among them a 1985 cartridge for Nintendo’s console that Retro Gamer found tiny and shrill.
Later history
Nishikado made the sequel, Space Invaders Part II (1979), which added colour, invaders that split in two and, for the first time, a high-score table players could sign. By then Namco’s Galaxian was in the arcades. “When I saw how smooth the movement was in Namco’s Galaxian, and how colourful it was, too, I remember thinking Space Invaders had lost,” he said. Taito kept the name alive long after, with Return of the Invaders (1985), Super Space Invaders ’91, Space Invaders DX and a stream of anniversary collections, handheld versions and remakes such as Space Invaders Extreme and Space Invaders Infinity Gene. Nishikado left Taito and in 1996 set up his own studio, Dreams, in Tokyo.
Sources
- Retro Gamer Collection, vol. 4 (2010), pp. 247–251, Jonti Davies, “The Making of: Space Invaders”, interview with Tomohiro Nishikado: Breakout, humans, monsters and Star Wars, the sea-creature designs, the remodelled board and tools, twelve months’ work, the sales staff’s objections, the table cabinet, the cellophane, “I don’t know whether the coins actually became less common”, Part II and Galaxian, Dreams.
- Retro Gamer, issue 117, August 2013, pp. 57–62, Stuart Hunt, “Invasion of the coin snatcher”: release in July 1978, the coin shortage as an “urban myth”, Midway’s development from August 1978, the reflector cabinet, “wasn’t known outside the company”, around 360,000 machines, VCS sales quadrupled.
- Retro Gamer, issue 41, 2007, pp. 22–26, Stuart Campbell, “The Definitive Space Invaders”: the cabinet versions and their colour film, the VCS version’s 36 invaders, three shields and 112 variations, the Atari 400/800 version, no official Apple II, Commodore 64 or Spectrum version, the 1985 NES game, Space Invaders Part II.
- Wireframe, issue 9, March 2019, p. 32, Andrew Gillett, “Space Invaders’ disintegrating shields”: the 8080 at 2 MHz, erasing and redrawing sprites, one invader updated per frame.
- Creative Computing, vol. 6 no. 9, September 1980, p. 18: 100,000 machines and $600 million, “the Bank of Japan had to triple its production”, Atari’s home rights and the VCS cartridge’s sales.
- Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 1, Winter 1981, p. 31: the 1978 launch, the claimed tripling of 100-yen production, Midway’s American rights, the “march beat”.
- The Computer & Video Games Yearbook (EMAP, 1985), “The story behind Space Invaders”: the tea houses, the queues, Taito’s silence on who developed the game, the Evening Fuji coin-truck rumour, the end of the boom by late 1979.
- “100 yen coin”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Japan Mint circulation figures for 1976–1982. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_yen_coin