Space Invaders ARCADE

Space Invaders is Tomohiro Nishikado’s 1978 arcade shooter for Taito, one of the earliest fixed shooters and widely credited with helping trigger the arcade industry’s first big commercial boom in Japan and, via Midway’s licensed US release, in North America. You move a laser cannon along the bottom of the screen, picking off descending rows of alien invaders before they reach you, while their formation speeds up as their numbers thin out.

Nishikado built much of the game’s custom hardware himself, since no existing arcade board could handle what he wanted; the result was one of the first games to save a high score and one of the first widely popular examples of a shooter with persistent, escalating difficulty. Its commercial success is often cited as a direct influence on the wave of shoot-’em-ups that followed throughout the early 1980s.