5 facts you didn’t know about Space Invaders

In 1978 Taito developer Tomohiro Nishikado created Space Invaders and – unbeknownst to him or Taito – changed the face of video games forever. The iconic characters have seeped into pop culture, art, even emoji – showing just how influential the series has become over the last 45 years.

To mark this momentous impact and the release of Taito’s first augmented-reality entry with Space Invaders: World Defense, we take a look back at some weird and wonderful trivia tidbits you may not know about this groundbreaking arcade series.

You may not look at PUBG or Call of Duty and think of Space Invaders, but if it weren’t for Nishikado’s alien-invasion game they may not have existed.

Space Invaders didn’t just invent the shooter genre, it also had destructible environments and different enemy types to contend with. This meant you couldn’t stay put in cover for too long or use the same strategy on enemies to win.

While this may seem surprising given Space Invaders wasn’t the first arcade game on the scene, it was the first game to save player high scores between games. Not only did this completely change how people played arcade games, it paved the way for almost all competitive and arcade games since.

Said to have been inspired by Jaws, Space Invaders’ four-note soundtrack wormed its way into players’ minds. One groundbreaking feature was that it ran continuously during the in-game action as your shots and hits fizzed and buzzed.

But the real hook that drove people into a frenzy was how it responded to how you played thanks to a quirk of the game’s programming. As you defeated enemies they’d begin to march faster down the screen toward you, and the music sped up to match, inadvertently piling on the pressure as you played.

To celebrate the series’ 30th anniversary, Taito released a special version of Space Invaders where you could play as the invading alien force. Putting a fresh spin on the series, Space Invaders Get Even moved away from its shooter roots, instead favoring tactical action gameplay where you issued orders to a swarm of alien forces to fight back against Earth’s military might.

Continuing its history of innovation, Space Invaders World Defense brings the invasion into the real world. Fight back against the Invader forces wherever you are as they literally take over your neighborhood thanks to AR gameplay powered by Google’s AR technology to project the Invaders floating down your street and lurking in your local park.