Collection essentials #22: Space Invaders (2600)

 

Here’s a big one you maybe saw coming. Space Invaders was easily the biggest video game hit of the 1970s. It’s almost impossible to overstate both the popularity and impact of this game, it’s one of the absolutely top most historically-significant video games ever, if not #1. Space Invaders hit arcades in 1978 and represented many significant “firsts” for video games, such as being the first to give the player multiple lives and the first to have background music. It was also the first big game to come from Japan, which foreshadowed the country’s dominance of the industry that emerged in the mid-’80s. One of the sprites of the invading aliens remains an iconic video game symbol to this day. This Atari version that came out in 1980 was an enormous boon to the success of the console and was its most popular. There are so many other games for the Atari and in arcades that very clearly imitate Space Invaders, and of course others that received more subtle influence.

I do have to confess…I have personally never been a big Space Invaders fan. I am much too young to have been around to have experienced the excitement of its original release, and I find the original arcade version hard to go back to, as I find comparable future games like Namco’s Galaga (released three years later) to be much more fun. However, fortunately, this is a case where, in my opinion, the Atari version improves on the arcade original. There are far fewer aliens in a given wave, which I like because I thought there were too darn many in the original. There are a variety of new gameplay options, too, which I find spice up the experience nicely. And very significantly, you get two-player modes in this version too, which you can play either cooperatively or competitively. So, thankfully, this historic essential is one that I can actually give my time to rather than just leaving it on the shelf as a conversation piece.