Blast from the Past

"Here you find my articles, directly from the past!"

Invaders from outer space

Space Invaders is one of the most famous videogames of all the times. It was designed in 1978 by Japanese programmer Toshihiro Nishikado and produced by Taito.

- Legend of a dream -

Legend says that Toshihiro had the idea after waking up one morning in 1977. He had a strange dream that night: it was the night before Christmas and a group of Japanese youngsters were awake, awaiting to see Santa Claus appearing in the Hokkaido sky.

But oh no, it wasn't him to appear! A fleet of Venusian aliens, aligned in many rows, were moving forwards to Earth slowly but implacably.

Youngsters immediately figured the terrible menace represented by those invaders, so they built a laser cannon using wheels, electrical wires and battery coming from a parked car beside them. They used the cannon by moving it back and forth and shooting repeatedly! They had to fight four waves of aliens back before the invasion ended.

All of the humans in the world were really grateful to the the guys, so they were presented with a sweet dish (the "figgy pudding") and many other gifts... well it was Christmas after all!

At this point, the dream ended and the programming phase begun!

The sweet presented to the Earth's heroes. Click here to read how to prepare it.

- Invadersmania -

Space Invaders was often defined as the first true mass-videogame (slogans said "everything started here!")... it addicted so many people that it even caused the lack of coins in the Bank offices: the Japanese Government had to quadruplicate coins production in order to afford such a equest for coins!

Within a very few months, hundreds of shops and locals "turned" into arcades in order to have coin-op cabinets inside!

In 1979, Midway acquired license from Taito and imported the videogame in the United States of America.

The game achieved an incredible success in USA too, but the videogames phenomenon wasn't fully accepted (that often happened in those years). A group of people even assured that Space Invaders would cause youngsters become insane (sigh!).

- Blasting aliens from your sofa -

It was converted to the home console VCS 2600 by Atari programmers in 1980, then it was ported to many other consoles and home computers: Taito recently reported that the Space Invaders business scored over US$ 500.000.000 over the years! Congratulations, Toshihiro Nishikado! There are still plenty of Space Invaders fans today: meet the craziest ones at this site!

IlTimido.