Arcade Week: Day #1

So it turns out I’ve played quite a few arcade games during my lifetime, and I was just gonna review most of these separately. But then I thought: remember the NES week? So I’m bringing it back but this time for Arcade games, and what better game to start it off with then Space Invaders!

In the game you play as a laser cannon which can only move horizontally as you try to shoot 5 rows of aliens that are slowly moving down the screen also shooting at you. You also have 4 stationary ‘bunkers’ (they’re basically shields) which survive a certain amount of fire. You also only have 3 lives, with the game ending either if they run out or the aliens reach the bottom of the screen and take humanity, in a less dark way then it sounds. And…that’s Space Invaders. A game inspired by media like Star Wars and made a similar amount of money. People were obsessed with this game and it’s not hard to see why. Overall, for one of the biggest arcade classics, it still holds up. Maybe it doesn’t hold up greatly and it is clearly dated but its ideas are still classics and can be enjoyed by anyone.

Classic, noises, those alien names are adorable

I mean this game DID help create a giant video game boom for a reason, yanno? It's definitely simplistic, shoot the bad guys, don't get shot, don't let them reach the bottom or else you get an immediate game over. Though the mechanics of having only one shot of yours onscreen provides depth in that not only do you have to be precise and make every shot count, but also provides more firepower the closer that you are to an enemy. For a game this early, they really nailed the game balance and that's to be commended. There are even fun little secrets such as how the UFO gives more points if you destroy it on a particularly numbered shot. It's simple, and it can also be a bit frustrating near the later levels where the invaders basically start right in front of you, but for its time it's an incredibly well-designed game.

Nishikado's foundational arcade shoot-em-up continues to vex and perplex. For instance, we still don't know for sure if the game's popularity in Japan's "invader houses" did or didn't precipitate a 100-yen coin shortage. Only word of mouth (aka community legend) suggests the famous 5-rows-1-straggler technique, an early in-game secret, came from the Nagoya area. The designer-programmer himself has openly talked about the game's development over time, but internal documents from Taito may never surface, leaving out part of the picture. Compare this fragmented history to that of Pong, whose creation, proliferation, and sustained legacy is well-recorded in so many ways. For the Western gaming world, Space Invaders might as well be that Unidentified Foreign Object of desire. It drones, it transforms, and it dislocates your imagination.

I've played a comical number of Invaders clones over the past few days, all part of playing through the quote-unquote Golden Age arcade gaming pantheon. There's a lot of clunkers, but some impressive iterations too. None of them, aside from standouts like Galaga or Moon Cresta, match the elegance and entrancing rhythm the original achieved. I also can't think of any with a scoring strategy as risky yet rewarding as the Nagoya Shot, which proved this early that 1 coin's all you need to play forever—or die trying.

For all its simplicity, how did Space Invaders manage to trounce its increasingly complex, flashier competitors? Nishikado himself has his answers. He saw this work as a necessary answer to Breakout, a game where "you couldn’t advance to the next stage until you’d destroyed every block," whereas "previous games didn’t have that “all clear” concept". To make said blocks more than a passive threat, they needed their own projectiles, their own player-like identity you could immediately sense. What we see as barebones today was a major jump in difficulty and complexity then, so much that Taito sidelined the game as long as they could until it went viral. Let's also consider Nishikado's involvement in his high school magic club, or how overqualified he was at Taito in the first place, doing mechanical and electrical engineering (then computer science) at a level none could match.

All of this tells me Space Invaders had a sheer presence of genius behind it from Day 1. The clones, successors, and paradigm shifters building from it would have their day in the sun, but the Invaders Boom lasted much longer than anyone could have anticipated. As said with Pong, it's like talking about air—you can't breathe without it. Between the game's primal hide-and-seek appeal, the Nagoya & Rainbow strategies, and urban myths about it persisting through today, playing it now still feels like an experience, not just a digital toy. Everything came together at the right time & place, using the right microprocessor technology, all within the era of Star Wars and pulp science-fantasy going through a popular revival.

Playing on an original North American or Japanese cabinet today is only going to become more difficult. I can make do with MAME, and we've all played some form of this game through cultural osmosis at the least. But there's more to it than nostalgia. The people's history of Space Invaders, from garish Flynn's Arcade near the bar, to smoky late-night hours on cocktail cabs in Tokyo—and all other variations—has never stopped, never reached a fabled end. It lives on at barcades, gaming conventions, online streams, and awards shows. The alien specter looms over everyone in some welcoming way, as if to say video games are here to stay. Galaxian might give me more to sink my teeth into, but it'll struggle to fascinate the way Nishikado's game can.

I'm not going to pretend my 4-star rating isn't a little biased, especially for a game I talk about more than I play. But it'd be weird to knock it down a peg just because other developers made better works off its foundation over time. Fact is, the game held its own for nearly three years, only dethroned internationally the likes of Scramble, Xevious, Star Force, and Gradius. And all their creators cited Invaders as the one to beat, of course. If Pong & Breakout proved that video games could work in an era of electromechanical hegemony, then Invaders showed what videos games could evoke beyond mere amusement. Its level of challenge, economy of action, and framing of conflict shattered so many expectations across the industry. Whole clubs, fanzines, and publications sprouted up around it like the beginnings of a religion. The game's reality distortion field is strong to this day, enough to surpass its own design qualities. What else can I say?

Space Invaders é um clássico e provavelmente não existe nenhuma pessoa que não conheça e não sabe como ele funciona, até porque é extremamente simples; alienígenas estão invadindo, atire neles antes que eles alcancem o chão, e se necessário, use as paredes como proteção. Porém, mesmo sendo simples, é um dos jogos mais importantes e mais revolucionários já criados, além de ter sido um grande sucesso na época que lançou pelo seu loop divertido. Basicamente, o que Space Invaders fez para ser tão aclamado, foi trazer ideias de game design que já haviam sido trabalhadas previamente, e aperfeiçoá-las, por exemplo, o loop fica progressivamente mais difícil, algo que já acontecia em Pong, mas aplica isso em um contexto diferente; enquanto Pong ficava mais difícil de "se proteger", no caso, bater na bola e não deixá-la passar, aqui fica mais difícil atacar, os inimigos são mais difíceis de se acertar pois ficam cada vez mais rápidos e mais próximos de você, trazendo aquele sentimento de urgência e desespero já apresentado no Pong, mas intensificando-o ainda mais, já que agora são vários alienígenas, que também atiram em você, logo na sua cara. Além disso, esse jogo serviu como base pra diversos gêneros de ação modernos com a adição da simples, porém interessantíssima mecânica de cover, oferecendo os jogadores zonas onde eles estariam seguros dos ataques inimigos, incentivando a jogar mais defensivamente, mas nunca fugindo da ideia de invasão alienígena iminente, já que além dos inimigos estarem constantemente se aproximando de você, eles podem destruir sua proteção, assim, incentivando que você misture sua defesa e sua ofensiva.

I love how the enemies get faster when you kill some of 'em. In fact, it shouldn't be like that. That happens because the Atari's microprocessor can run the game faster as some enemies disappear. It was an awesome way of using the console limitations to make something even better.

Sempre adorei como os inimigos ficam mais rápidos quando você os mata. Isso não foi proposital, pois esse processo de aceleração só ocorre pelo fato do Atari poder processar o jogo mais rapidamente a medida em que há menos elementos na tela. Uma ótima forma que os desenvolvedores tiveram de aliar a limitação da época para algo incrível.