Space Invaders is a 1978 arcade game created by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan, and licensed in the United States by the Midway division of Bally. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser to earn as many points as possible. Space Invaders is considered one of the most influential video games of all time.
About Space Invaders in brief
Space Invaders is a 1978 arcade game created by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan, and licensed in the United States by the Midway division of Bally. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser to earn as many points as possible. Space Invaders is considered one of the most influential video games of all time. It helped expand the video game industry from a novelty to a global industry, and ushered in the golden age of arcade video games. The 1980 Atari VCS version quadrupled sales of the VCS, thereby becoming the first killer app for video game consoles. As of 2016, the many versions of the game are estimated to have grossed over USD 13 billion in total revenue, making it the highest-grossing video game of alltime. The game uses a similar layout to that of Breakout but has altered game mechanics. Rather than bounce a ball to attack static objects, players are given the ability to fire projectiles at moving enemies. As more aliens are defeated, the aliens’ movement and the game’s music both speed up. Defeating all the aliens on-screen brings another wave that is more difficult, a loop which can continue endlessly. The aliens attempt to destroy the player’s cannon by firing at it while they approach the bottom of the screen. If they reach the bottom, the alien invasion is declared successful and thegame ends tragically; otherwise, it ends generally if the player’s last cannon is destroyed by the enemy’s projectiles.
The player’s laser cannon is partially protected by several stationary defense bunkers that are gradually destroyed from the top and bottom by blasts from either the player or the player. Early enemy designs for the game included tanks, combat planes, and battleships. Nishikados drew inspiration from games like 1976’s ball-bouncing game Breakout and the 1975 shooter game Gun Fight, as well as science fiction narratives such as The War of the Worlds, Space Battleship Yamato, and Star Wars. He drew inspiration for the aliens from a novel by H.G. Wells, and from the 1974 anime Space Battlesship Yamato in Japan. After using a feature about using a space shooting feature, he thought of using a Star Wars feature about a space battle. He had to design his own custom hardware and programming tools in designing and programming the game. Because microcomputers in Japan were not powerful enough at the time to perform the complex tasks in designing the game, he created the game using his own computer board. He modeled the alien designs after squids and crabs, and created the initial bitmap after the octopus. He originally titled the game Space Monsters, but was changed to Space Invaders by the designer’s superiors because the game was a popular popular song in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. It has been ported and re-released in various forms, and has been adapted into numerous other games, including the PlayStation, Xbox, and PlayStation Portable.
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This page is based on the article Space Invaders published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
