History of Game Design. Part 1: Space Invaders | Design Icons

This is the history of game design. In this new video series, I'll take a look at the most important, influential, and disruptive games of the past 40 years. In each video, I'll highlight one iconic one, get to know where it came from, talk about its most revolutionary features, and determine its impact on the games that came out after.

They are pioneering games that set trends and define genres. They are Design Icons. In the summer of 1978, there was an invasion. A new game from Taito, Space Invaders, has been released on arcade machines all over Japan. The game depicts an army of formidable aliens swiftly descending across the screen in a military formation.

As a lone soldier defending the Earth, you have to shoot a laser beam at an impending alien threat, at the same time protruding from the destroyed shelters. There is also a UFO floating along the top of the screen and giving you a random number of points when hit.

It's a simple concept, but surprisingly plenty of room for strategy. For example, it was one of the first shooters where opponents were firing back, so dodging was as necessary as attacking. And you can adjust the game space to suit you, because if you kill the aliens in the bottom row of the formation, your opponents will have to go a longer way, which will now take them longer to get to the bottom of the screen.

Space Invaders was definitely one of the first. It was the first arcade game to record your high score, and thus add an element of competition, where players could compete and see who will last longer. That was until the following year, when Star Fire came out, in which players could add initials to their record, and it was also the first game with a soundtrack to play continuously during gameplay.

Of course, it was the usual dull heartbeat, but it gave the game an incredible sense of impending threat. It was one of the first games that really set the mood in the player, but the most influential design in Space Invaders was far more fundamental.

However, he quickly realized that the technology was not powerful enough to render an entire army of alien invaders moving at the intended speed, so the aliens slowly crawled across the playing field. But, every time the player killed an alien, the processor had to draw one sprite less, and this additional processing time meant a faster speed of the rest of the army.

By the time there were only a couple of aliens on the screen, they were already moving towards the player quickly and aggressively ... Nishikado didn't plan anything like that, but realized that it actually added an interesting twist to the game: the better you did, the more difficult the game became, and instead of fixing a bug, he implemented it in the final build of the game.

It even sped up the music, giving the game a prototype dynamic soundtrack. Now, Space Invaders wasn’t the first game to have a hard increase in relation to your success. You see, Nishikado was impressed by Atari's block-breaking, Pong-inspired game Breakout released in 1976, and one of the things he liked the most about Breakout was how the game gradually got more difficult, in part because that the last block was very difficult to knock out, and also because of Atari, who programmed the ball to periodically accelerate.

But here's the thing: Breakout has only two levels, and they're identical. Space Invaders, on the other hand, has several levels, and Nishikado made it so that each level was more difficult than the previous one, since each level began with aliens a row closer to the bottom of the screen.

And together - the acceleration of the aliens, and the complicated initial conditions - these two ideas gave the game a vivid structure, where the difficulty of the game grew throughout the 1st level, and then decreased to something more digestible for the beginning of the 2nd level - before playing again gets harder, and so on.

This weird wagging line is what Space Invaders brought to game design: the difficulty curve. It's a curve that keeps players interested by increasing difficulty, matching their skill level, but also providing time to navigate and learn new mechanics, and it's a curve that sets a great rhythm by increasing tension and then relieving.

This difficulty curve, coupled with the highscore system, made Space Invaders incredibly addictive and probably the first gaming phenomenon. Long before kids danced Fortnite's bizarre dances at weddings and people found dead bodies while searching for Geoduds in Pokemon GO, there were stories of addiction to Space Invaders in the news.

Plus, the game grossed billions of dollars in its first few years, and arcade rooms sometimes called "Invader Houses". And don't believe the story that there was a shortage of 100 yen coins in Japan because of the game - it's almost completely nonsense.

But most importantly, the huge success of Space Invaders inspired more companies to go into games. Mario's creator Shigeru Miyamoto said, “About a year or two after I joined Nintendo, Space Invaders came out and was a big hit, and Nintendo decided to join.

And Atari struggled to push its Atari 2600 console until it was licensed to port Space Invaders in 1980 - which doubled console sales to over two million units, and popularized the system with both developers and gamers. " She is interesting! But I personally think the idea of ​​creatures from outer space is a bit far-fetched.

”Most of the games that surfaced during the dominance of Space Invaders were, of course, sci-fi space shooters. Games like Galaxian from Namco, Defender from Williams Electronics Atari's Asteroids, Data East's Astro Fighter, Midway's Gorf, Konami's Astro Invader, SNK's Ozma Wars, and Nintendo's Radar Scope all hoped to cash in on this interstellar fun, and that of course led to the shoot 'em up a genre that we know today.

And it's a genre that Space Invaders itself is still a part of, with modern developments like the exciting relaunch, Space Invaders Extreme, and the ever-changing Space Invaders Infinity Gene, so I think Space Invaders is the perfect game to kick off this cinematic series.

While far from the first game in history, it has made a number of incredibly important investments in game design that will fundamentally change game development. From high scores to destructible hideouts, to a fast-paced soundtrack, to a whole shoot 'em up genre, and this oh-so-important difficulty curve, it's clear to me that Nishikado's Space Invaders was truly an icon in game design.

Design Icons will be an ongoing series that takes us from the earliest arcade games to today's trendsetters. To make sure you never miss a new episode, subscribe to Game Maker's Toolkit on YouTube - and hit the bell and you'll be alerted whenever new episodes are released.