Space Invaders: influences, peers and legacy

Every connection with its receipt

Space Invaders was built in roughly a year by Taito engineer Tomohiro Nishikado, who designed the hardware, wrote the code, drew the sprites and made the four-note descending bassline. Its DNA runs from MIT mainframes and Atari's paddle games through H.G. Wells and the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, and out again into Pac-Man and the whole shooter genre. This mix maps that lineage.

The Kynda mix for Space Invaders

• Key Influence · Breakout by Atari (1976). Nishikado has repeatedly described Breakout as the direct spur for Space Invaders: he wanted the satisfaction of clearing a wall of blocks, but with targets that shot back. The five-row grid of aliens is Breakout's brick wall animated and armed, and the single horizontally-sliding laser base is the paddle. Taito's game even keeps the escalating-speed feedback loop as the field empties, the tempo rising as targets vanish.
• Influencia Obscura · Spacewar! by Steve Russell (1962). Written on a PDP-1 at MIT, Spacewar! established the grammar of the space shooter — starfield, player ship, torpedoes — a decade before coin-op existed. It circulated through university computer labs and into the memory of every early arcade engineer via Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space. Space Invaders is the moment that lab experiment is compressed into cheap 8080 hardware and made to run forever on a quarter.
• Local Roots · Gee Bee by Namco (1978). Toru Iwatani's debut, released in Tokyo the same year, is the other side of 1978 Japanese arcade design — a Breakout-derived pinball hybrid from the rival across town. Namco and Taito were both converting Japan's coffee shops and game centres into video arcades at once, and the Space Invaders boom that followed reportedly caused a nationwide shortage of 100-yen coins, reshaping the whole domestic trade.
• Beyond the Medium · The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (1898). Nishikado first sketched human soldiers as targets, found shooting people distasteful, and switched to aliens — basing their silhouettes on Wells's tentacled Martians, which gave him the squid, crab and octopus sprites. The slow inexorable descent of the ranks, speeding up as their numbers thin, is Wells's logic of invasion as an advancing tide rather than a duel, rendered in a 224-by-256 pixel grid.
• Peer · Asteroids by Ed Logg (1979). Atari's reply to the Invaders boom, designed by Logg with Lyle Rains, became America's biggest coin-op hit and borrowed the same escalating-wave structure while swapping the grid for vector physics and 360-degree rotation. Its four-note rising heartbeat soundtrack is a direct descendant of Nishikado's bassline. The two games together defined what an arcade sounded like at the turn of the 1980s.
• Key Collaborator · Gun Fight by Midway Manufacturing (1975). Midway's Dave Nutting Associates rebuilt Nishikado's Western Gun on an Intel 8080, the first arcade game to use a microprocessor. That transatlantic partnership is what put Taito and Midway in business together, and it was Midway that licensed Space Invaders for North America in 1978 and sold tens of thousands of cabinets. The CPU architecture itself travelled back to Tokyo through this collaboration.
• Legacy · Pac-Man by Toru Iwatani (1980). Iwatani designed Pac-Man as a conscious reaction to the Invaders boom: arcades saturated with shooting games aimed at young men, so he built a non-violent maze game about eating, to draw in women and couples. The reference point is explicit in his accounts of the project. Space Invaders defined the market so completely that the decade's other defining game exists as its deliberate negation.

What influenced Space Invaders

• Star Wars by George Lucas (1977). A feature about Star Wars helped prompt the game's space theme. “It was at this time, while I was stuck for an alternative, I chanced upon Star Wars and realised I could use aliens because no one would complain about shooting them.” (The Guardian)
• The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. The novel inspired the game's alien designs. “For the actual design of the aliens, I took inspiration from HG Wells’s octopus-like Martian design.” (The Guardian)
• Breakout by Atari, Inc.. Breakout prompted the design of Space Invaders. “Using Breakout as a base, my first, rough idea was to use the blocks in a different way, for some kind of shooting game.” (Shmuplations)
• Gun Fight by Midway. Gun Fight inspired a hardware choice for Space Invaders. “because the Midway version used a computer, the movement was a lot smoother and game looked better. As an engineer, this was the moment when I knew Taito needed to start using microprocessors from here out. And the first game that I made…” (Shmuplations)
• Galaxian. Galaxian's planner explicitly says its developers took cues from Space Invaders. “It was a tremendous amount of pressure. Naturally, we took a lot of cues from Space Invaders while making Galaxian.” (Shmuplations)
• Jaws by John Williams (1975). Kamei aimed to evoke the Jaws theme in a Space Invaders sound effect. “Aiming to emulate the Jaws shark theme, he added resistors to the circuit in order to lower the effect's pitch.” (Wikipedia)
• Space Battleship Yamato. Space Battleship Yamato helped prompt the game's space theme. “After seeing the release of the 1974 anime Space Battleship Yamato in Japan, [ 37 ] [ 38 ] and seeing a magazine feature about the 1977 Star Wars , he thought of using a space theme.” (Wikipedia)
• Breakout by Atari (1976). Breakout (Atari) — titan for Space Invaders “The game has been ported and re-released in various forms, including the 1980 Atari 2600 version.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss (1896). Also sprach Zarathustra (Richard Strauss) — culture for Space Invaders (musicbrainz.org)
• Space Invasion by Logitec (1972). Space Invasion (Logitec) — titan for Space Invaders
• Spacewar! by Steve Russell (1962). Spacewar! (Steve Russell) — ghost for Space Invaders
• Galaxy Game by Bill Pitts (1971). Galaxy Game (Bill Pitts) — ghost for Space Invaders

Peers and kindred spirits

• Space Invaders II by Tomohiro Nishikado. Nishikado identifies the sequel he made after Space Invaders. “I made Space Invaders II in 1979. I don’t have a lot of good memories of the period after that, though.” (Shmuplations)
• Space Invaders (Atari 2600) by Rick Maurer (1980). Space Invaders (Atari 2600) (Rick Maurer) — collaborator for Space Invaders “Space Invaders just wowed me, especially the sound. So I came back and told people I would do that, they said OK.” (Giant List)
• Gee Bee by Namco (1978). Gee Bee (Namco) — geography for Space Invaders “Scott Osborne of GameSpy noted the derivative design of Namco's 1979 Galaxian and 1981 Galaga games but acknowledged that their innovative changes and refinements made the games very successful in their own right.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Periscope by Sega (1966). Periscope (Sega) — geography for Space Invaders “Outside shooting games, Sega/Gremlin's 1979 Head On adopted the concept of "going round after round" in lieu of a timer after a senior developer from its parent company, Sega, had seen Space Invaders.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Head On by Sega (1979). Head On (Sega) — peer for Space Invaders “Outside shooting games, Sega/Gremlin's 1979 Head On adopted the concept of "going round after round" in lieu of a timer after a senior developer from its parent company, Sega, had seen Space Invaders.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Sheriff. Sheriff (Nintendo) — geography for Space Invaders “Taito released its own version for the Nintendo Famicom in 1985 exclusively in Japan.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Space Invaders (pinball) by Bally (1980). Space Invaders (pinball) (Bally) — collaborator for Space Invaders “Bally released a pinball version in 1980 with no elements of the arcade game present and the aliens resembling the xenomorphs from the film Alien; Bally was successfully sued over the resemblance to H.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Gun Fight by Midway Manufacturing (1975). Gun Fight (Midway Manufacturing) — collaborator for Space Invaders “Taito released it in Japan in July 1978 and overseas through a partnership with Midway Manufacturing later that year.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Asteroids by Ed Logg (1979). Asteroids (Ed Logg) — peer for Space Invaders

Who Space Invaders influenced

• Shigeru Miyamoto. Space Invaders inspired Miyamoto to enter the video game industry. (also via Donkey Kong) “Then, in 1978, Space Invaders came out and it was very popular, and I drew some remixed pixel art versions of those sprites. That was my first time drawing characters.” (game maestro volume 1, translated by shmuplations)
• Donkey Kong by Shigeru Miyamoto (1981). Donkey Kong (Shigeru Miyamoto) — legacy for Space Invaders “When I hear that such an inspiring person was inspired by my game, I feel very honored. And not just him, but I often hear that other creative people in this industry are also inspired by Space Invaders.” (GamesBeat)
• Pac-Man by Toru Iwatani (1980). Pac-Man (Toru Iwatani) — legacy for Space Invaders “All the computer games available at the time were of the violent type—war games and space invader types. There were no games that everyone could enjoy, and especially none for women. I wanted to come up with a “comical” game women could …” (Programmers at Work)
• Pac-Man by Namco (1980). Space Invaders (Taito) — titan for Pac-Man “Pac-Man eventually became very successful in Japan, where it went on to be Japan's highest-grossing arcade game of 1980 according to the annual Game Machine charts, dethroning Taito's Space Invaders (1978) which had topped the annual cha…” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Gradius by Konami (1985). Gradius (Konami) — legacy for Space Invaders
• Nintendo. Space Invaders (Taito) — titan for Nintendo