Arcade Fixed-Screen Shoot 'em up Review: Space Invaders

In 1978, Taito released Space Invaders, the hit video game that established the shoot 'em up genre as a heavy hitter within the video game industry.

I first played Space Invaders in 2000 while working on my arcade emulator, LASER. Unlike Lupin III, I had actually heard of this game before because it was a big-name game. It was and still is being ported to, and getting remakes and clones for, just about every platform imaginable.

Like all games on Taito 8080 hardware, it is a relatively simple game. It is a black and white game, although some arcades placed a color plastic overlay over the monitor to give the allusion that there are red and green colors on certain parts of the screen. There are score and life counters, invading aliens, a ship, and bunkers that can be shot through by the player and enemies alike. Some Japanese versions of the game displayed the color parts of the screen with a rainbow plastic overlay.

The object is simply to pilot a ship at the bottom of the screen, which can only move left and right, and to shoot the invading forces before they shoot you. When all the aliens are shot, the screen refreshes and another fleet of aliens need to be dealt with. With each new fleet, the game gets progressively faster. To paraphrase a quote from Lrrr in the animated television series Futurama, instead of shooting where the ships are you should shoot where they are going to be.

There is also very little sound. There is the whirring sound when a bonus ship floats by the top of the screen that can award extra points, the zap sound that occurs when you shoot, and a simple four-note progression that acts as the music. These simple sounds work very well, however, and even the four simple notes that are played throughout gameplay surprisingly work well and don't become annoying with extended play.

The whole game is incredibly simple, but it is far from being tedious. Like Pac-Man, it is one of the early arcade games that truly stands the test of time. I was not born when the game came out and I didn't get a chance to play this game until decades after its release. However, even decades after my first time playing, I will still play it whenever I get the chance. Anyone interested in video games should try it at least once. It is a true classic.

Final verdict:

4 out of 5