The Gaming Canon: Space Invaders
Which was the first game where players truly felt like a hero? Other arcade ‘hits’ of the time had you drive a car, shoot at sharks, play baseball, and bat a ball about ad nauseum, but what other game had you battling against all the odds for the future of mankind? Another popular game in 1978, Clowns, had you bouncing little stick men off springboards to hit bricks – hardly likely to hit the right buttons at a sub-conscious level. At the time videogames generally still existed in a surreal space, pitched somewhere between board games and electronic novelty products, and given about the same consideration as a well-designed milk carton.
But Space Invaders, in its own simple terms, offered a new kind of narrative – what milk carton could compete? The protagonist a rather blocky spaceship/tank/missile launcher at the bottom of the screen. A cast of protagonists – the invaders themselves, very simply animated sprites shuffling from left to right but slowly advancing on your position. The motivation – you are defending the Earth, and mankind’s future, its very survival, its way of life, is on your shoulders. The threat is obvious, your motivations clear – such narrative clarity that Aristotle himself would have applauded.
And in its own way, SI plays out like any classic drama, with subtle rising tension. The monotonous musical beats that accompany the movements of the aliens become more and more dramatic as the enemies speed up. And their approach is unstoppable – they will not flinch, there is never any question that they will not stop until you or they are destroyed. And as they creep towards you with increasing speed, the drama reaches its own climax. The lack of any payoff at the end is perhaps a weakness, but as a new and slower wave appears you at least are given a period of relative calm before the terror begins to ramp up once again.
At the time it was hard to perhaps appreciate the subtler elements of SI’s design from a distance – all the older generation would have seen in 1978 is a bunch of addicted young men hunched over a television display mashing a fire button. Like so many games, the actual beauty of the thing comes from the playing – it’s how a game responds to your control, the way in which your control decisions change through experience and revelation. Playing these games is an experience closer to learning to ride a horse than watching a movie or reading a book – this is the main reason that the art-form remains in a kind of critical limbo, dismissed for most of its history by the establishment who simply fail to understand it.
The key to playing Space Invaders is the classic conflict of risk versus reward. As you hide behind from the hail of bullets, the game is perpetually daring you to slip out of cover and pick off the nearest invaders. The longer you leave the task, the harder it becomes as the invaders move nearer. It’s the equivalent of the attacking gambit in chess, the tricky iron shot to the green over the lake. Except those two decisions are cerebral – you have time to think. In SI the decisions come so thick and fast they can develop into a kind of instinctive dance among the bullets – it’s more comparable to a mazy dribble in football, those tiny decisions about how to move your feet in comparison to the ball and your defender, that become a kind of second nature to the experienced player.
And with experience of the game comes skill, with addictive skill eventually comes mastery. We are invited to understand the simple tactics required – learning the general pattern of the enemy shots, and particularly the speed of your own shots, which require a built-in allowance for the movement of the enemies. A bonus ship that occasionally patrols across the top of the screen is the ultimate test of this skill, the moment with which to show off your chops to any watching fans. There are even questions of strategy within what is ostensibly a simple set-up – do you pick off the invaders from the sides, thus increasing the time it takes them to progress, but at the potential cost of leaving the closest invaders as tougher kills later on? This is certainly one of the earlier games to leave room for stylistic differences in play.
All that said, there’s no doubt that SI endures these days as more of a design classic than a gameplay essential. Hardly surprising that the game has aged – the gameplay basics it pioneered have become the basic building blocks of games ever since – we know that the wheel was invented at some point, but our desire or ability to relive that experience is extremely limited. We’ve been shooting at alien invaders for 30 years now, and it’s a name you’re more likely to have printed on your shirt or on the cover of a magazine or book than in your gaming collection.
As one of the defining visual motifs of early videogames it has few peers. More precisely it’s the dominant alien sprites that still survive, along with the clean lines of their attack wave. Perhaps it is their slightly organic features that make them attractive, even as blocky sprites – they look like alien crabs or sealife, primal animals rather than intelligent life. It’s all too easy to imagine the blockier aliens at the bottom of the pack as the alien grunts, and the smaller, headcrab style aliens at the back as the trickier brains of the operation – after all it is these criminal masterminds that are often left speeding across the screen when the rest of the group have been eliminated.
The other legacy that Space Invaders leaves is its meme – the peculiar niche it carved out for videogames among (almost exclusively) young men that lasted almost to the present day. It came from the world of comic books – sci-fi and fantasy rather than any grand literary or artistic tradition. And the gaming industry was happy to dwell in that niche for decades to come, reluctant to even attempt to attract the very young or old, or more importantly the females among its potential audience. The frantic shooting of aliens/monsters became the raison d’etre for perhaps way too long, a preoccupation that still exists, though the advent of Nintendo’s Wii as a genre-busting family console may have finally changed that attitude forever. Perhaps Space Invaders true place in history is as the ultimate rites-of-passage game for all boys of a certain age.
[rating: 5]
If my memory serves me correctly the enemy speeds up because of a bug in the code, but after testing it the designer decided it was better the with the bug than without.
Good article!
Thanks. I didn’t know that. With so little memory space to deal with I think a lot of features in early games must have come about as happy accidents rather than deliberately designed things. Actually I might do a post about that!