#34 (tie) – Space Invaders
29 Points, 2 Lists, Top Vote: #7 Stethacantus Production Date: 1978
Manufacturer: Taito (licensed by Bally/Midway in the US)
It's Space Invaders. You know how Space Invaders works. On to the MANY fun facts:
Space Invaders was developed over the course of an entire year, by one person: Tomohiro Nishikado. The reason it took so long was because Nishikado not only designed and programmed the game, he developed the hardware necessary to run the game. In fact, according to Nishikado himself, developing the hardware was by far the hardest part of creating the game. He designed a custom circuit board, with an Intel 8080 main processor and a Texas Instruments sound chip.
The game is monochrome because there was no available processor capable of rendering that many sprites in color. A deluxe version of the game came with a colored cellophane overlay that made different rows appear different colors.
You know how the game speeds up as there are fewer and fewer Invaders left on screen? That wasn't by design. That was a consequence of the limitations of the processor. As the number of sprites on screen decreased, the time it took to redraw what was left decreased. Nishikado had originally intended to program in some form of speed compensation to keep the Invaders moving at a fixed speed. However it turned out people actually liked that it got faster.
Initial sales of the game were very low, and Taito didn't think the game would be successful. However the few units that were produced ended up raking it huge amounts of money. As word of mouth spread, demand for the machines skyrocketed. Over 100K units were sold in Japan alone, far more than any other game. At least another 60K were sold in the US.
Japan actually suffered a coin shortage thanks to the success of the game, and the Japanese Mint had to drastically increase coin production to compensate.
There were numerous accounts of theft and juvenile delinquency attributed to the game. One 12 year old tried to hold up a bank, demanding only coins, not paper currency.
Eric Furrer holds the record for the longest uninterrupted game of Space Invaders. He played the game non-stop for 38 hours and 37 minutes, rolling over the score 111 times.
The game was originally supposed to have planes, not aliens, but Nishikado thought the movement of the planes just didn't look right. Star Wars was all the rage at the time, so he changed them to aliens.
https://www.youtube.com/v/waY3svOHGGIUp next, quite possibly the first "boss fight" in video gaming.