Have you ever seen someone sitting on their laptops (it used to be arcade machine but times have changed) playing a game with floating pixelated aliens who have the sole purpose of destroying their ship/base? Yes? Then you’ve seen someone playing space invaders. A few questions this article will go over are:
- What the objective of the game is
- A brief overview of the history of the game
- The current owner of the game
*we may even go over a few bonus tidbits of information as well.
Video of Space Invaders Gameplay
What exactly is Space Invaders?
What exactly is space invaders? Well, Space Invaders is a game with the sole objective of protecting your base from aliens. To make sure that your base is protected from aliens, players must make sure that they kill every single row of the 5 rows of 11 aliens that they start out with. To kill the aliens, the game creators equipped you with a cannon that you can use to blast through their shields. If you don’t want to die while playing this game you also want to make sure that you don’t get hit by the bullets that the aliens will be firing back at you during gameplay. Also, did I mention that as you kill off aliens the remaining aliens will speed up as they’re moving downwards towards you? If an alien hits your shield that part of the shield will be
That’s pretty much it. Of course, there are other aspects to the gameplay of Space Invaders but, for the most part, this is what you should expect.
In short, this game is a 2D shooter with the main focus of keeping earth’s inhabitants safe from the aliens.
Brief History
Space Invaders is actually a very old game, seriously. In 1978 Space invaders was released by Taito– a major game development company. The creator of the game, Tomohiro Nishikado, developed the game from ideas incorporated from other, very popular games in that time period. A funny thing about the creation of the game is that it was originally supposed to be a game that focused on shooting actual human people rather than space aliens. Now, with the idea that shooting actual human beings being bad in mind, Taito decided it was better to simply change the point of the game to killing aliens.
Shortly after the game was released, Space Invaders got to be very popular. While it was initially created to be played in coin-operated machines, it wasn’t long until it could be found for the Atari 2600, and the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Who Currently Owns Space invaders
Taito Corp – a company with the main focus of developing games, publishing arcade hardware, and creating mobile phones – created and owns Space Invaders. *p.s. They are owned by Square Enix Holdings – a huge name in the gaming industry.
To play the game online you can go here
Space Invader Fun Facts
- The hardware for the game had to be designed from scratch because the hardware in 1978 (microprocessors etc. ) didn’t have the capabilities necessary to handle the gameplay.
- Space Invaders was the first-ever game with the ability to save/ and or reach high scores
- The game can be considered one of the pioneers in the shooting game genre for arcade games – leading the way for the futuristic shooting games we see today
- Space invaders was one of the first games to utilize a music style that had an emotional influence on its players
- Breakout, War of the Worlds, and Star Wars were major influences on the Space Invaders game play
- Here’s a good one. Space Invaders was said to be so popular that it caused a shortage of yen in Japan
- The aliens in the game were fashioned after sea creatures (crabs, squids, and octopuses)
- The name for Space Invaders was this close (imagine I’m holding 2 fingers together) to being called “Plane Invaders”.
- Lol. Space Invaders was so popular that it was said to raise suspicion as to whether arcade games had a negative effect on individual brain health
- The original release for Space Invaders was in a cocktail table format
- There are parody television shows fashioned after Space Invaders
- Space Invaders has featured in movies like Terminator 2, Pixels and a few others
- There are a few books written about Space Invaders
- More than a billion dollars were made from Space Invaders by 1981
- It was the first-ever cartridge video game to sell more than a million copies
The information in this article is sourced from Wikpedia
Resources:
https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Space_Invaders/Walkthrough
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taito
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Enix_Holdings
http://www.classicgaming.cc/classics/space-invaders/history.php