The Space Invaders Creator Reveals the Game’s Origin Story
The titular space invaders in Taito’s 1978 arcade classic have a look that’s among the most iconic in video games. During development, they almost took forms as mundane as human figures or tanks. But chance occurrences gave them designs that became synonymous with video games.
Invaders today adorn T-shirts and posters. Open your emoji keyboard and an approximation lurks within, dubbed “alien monster.” An iPhone will suggest said critter when you type in “game.” It’s a tacit understanding of the unbreakable link between those few pixels and the entire games industry, even for people who’ve never played Space Invaders.
Tomohiro Nishikado, creator of Space Invaders.
But the fact that the game exists at all is down to the remarkable achievements of creator Tomohiro Nishikado. His work reimagined and elevated an industry, defined and popularized key concepts that are still used decades later, and spawned a cultural and technological phenomenon.
It all started with Atari’s Breakout. “I was hooked on it,” Nishikado told WIRED. When Taito management asked him to make something that would surpass Atari’s brick-basher, Nishikado was already deep in thought about how to achieve this. “I decided to plan a shooting game, which was my forte. But until then, shooting games were mainly time-based—players defeated as many targets as possible within a set period. So I decided to make a game with a lives system, and interactive gameplay in which multiple enemies would attack the player.”
His initial design had you shoot at tanks, but Nishikado remembers that their shape and movement “didn’t feel right.” The team tried fighter planes and battleships, but those didn’t work any better with the limited technology of the day. “I then tried a solider
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