Re: Space Invaders For Pc Free Download
Gifford Brickley
Simply click to begin. Use the arrow keys or mouse to steer your spaceship, and the spacebar or mouse click to fire. Your mission: eliminate the alien horde before they land or shoot you down. You have three lives and can track your score in the top left corner.
Space Invaders[b] is a 1978 shoot 'em up arcade video game, developed and released by Taito in Japan and licensed to Midway Manufacturing for overseas distribution. Commonly considered to be one of the most influential video games of all time, Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter and the first video game with endless gameplay (meaning there was no final level or endscreen) and set the template for the genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser cannon to earn as many points as possible.
Space Invaders is considered one of the most influential video games ever made, having ushered in the golden age of arcade video games. It was the inspiration for numerous video games and game designers across different genres, and has been ported and re-released in various forms. The 1980 Atari VCS version quadrupled sales of the VCS, thereby becoming the first killer app for video game consoles. More broadly, the pixelated enemy alien has become a pop culture icon, often representing video games as a whole.
Space Invaders is a fixed shooter in which the player moves a laser cannon horizontally across the bottom of the screen and fires at aliens overhead. The aliens begin as five rows of eleven that move left and right as a group, shifting downward (advancing on the shooter) each time they reach a screen edge. The goal is to eliminate all of the aliens by shooting them. While the player has three lives, the game ends immediately if the invaders reach the bottom of the screen.[17][18][10][19] The aliens attempt to destroy the player's cannon by firing projectiles. The laser cannon is partially protected by stationary defense bunkers which are gradually destroyed from the top by the aliens and, if the player fires when beneath one, the bottom gets destroyed.
As aliens are defeated, their movement and the music both speed up. Defeating all the aliens brings another wave which starts lower, a loop which can continue endlessly.[17][18][10][19] A special "mystery ship" will occasionally move across the top of the screen and award bonus points if destroyed.
Space Invaders was developed by Japanese designer Tomohiro Nishikado, who spent a year designing it and developing the necessary hardware to produce it.[20] The game was a response to Atari's arcade game Breakout (1976). Nishikado wanted to adapt the same sense of achievement and tension from destroying targets one at a time, combining it with elements of target shooting games.[20][21][22] The game uses a similar layout to that of Breakout but with different game mechanics; rather than bounce a ball to attack static objects, players are given the ability to fire projectiles at moving enemies.[23]
Nishikado added several interactive elements that he found lacking in earlier video games, such as the ability for enemies to react to the player's movement and fire back, and a game over triggered by the enemies killing the player (either by getting hit or enemies reaching the bottom of the screen) rather than simply a timer running out.[21] He replaced the timer, typical of arcade games at the time, with descending aliens who effectively served a similar function, where the closer they came, the less time the player had left.[22]
Early enemy designs included tanks, combat planes, and battleships.[20] Nishikado, however, was not satisfied with the enemy movements; technical limitations made it difficult to simulate flying.[20][24] Humans would have been easier to simulate, but the designer considered shooting them immoral.[24][25] After seeing the release of the 1974 anime Space Battleship Yamato in Japan,[26][27] and seeing a magazine feature about Star Wars (1977), he thought of using a space theme.[20][21] Nishikado drew inspiration for the aliens from a novel by H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, and created initial bitmap images after the octopus-like aliens.[20][21][24] Other alien designs were modeled after squids and crabs.[20][24] The game was originally titled Space Monsters after a popular song in Japan at the time, "Monster", but was changed to Space Invaders by the designer's superiors.[20][21]
Nishikado designed his own custom hardware and development tools for Space Invaders.[20][24] It uses an Intel 8080 central processing unit (CPU), displays raster graphics on a CRT monitor using a bitmapped framebuffer, and uses monaural sound hosted by a combination of analog circuitry and a Texas Instruments SN76477 sound chip.[28][25][29] The adoption of a microprocessor was inspired by Gun Fight (1975), Midway's microprocessor adaptation of Nishikado's earlier discrete logic game Western Gun, after the designer was impressed by the improved graphics and smoother animation of Midway's version.[30] Space Invaders also adopted the multi-chip barrel shifter circuit first developed by Midway for Gun Fight, which had been a key part of that game's smoother animation. This circuit allowed the 8080 CPU to shift pictures in the graphics framebuffer faster than it could using only its own native instructions.[31]
Taito released Space Invaders in July 1978.[5] They released both an upright arcade cabinet and a so-called "cocktail-table" cabinet; following its usual practice, Taito named the cocktail version T.T. Space Invaders ("T.T." for "table-top"). Midway released its upright version a few months later and its cocktail version several months after that. The cabinet artwork featured large humanoid monsters not present in the game; Nishikado attributes this to the artist basing the designs on the original title of "Space Monsters", rather than referring to the actual in-game graphics.[20] In the upright cabinets, the graphics are generated on a hidden CRT monitor and reflected toward the player using a semi-transparent mirror, behind which is mounted a plastic cutout of a moon bolted against a painted starry background. The backdrop is visible through the mirror and thus appears "behind" the graphics.[10] Both Taito's and Midway's first Space Invaders versions had black-and-white graphics with a transparent colored overlay using strips of orange and green cellophane over certain portions of the screen to add color to the image. Later Japanese releases used a rainbow-colored cellophane overlay,[10] and these were eventually followed by versions with a color monitor and an electronically generated color overlay.[10]
Despite its simplicity, the music to Space Invaders was revolutionary for the gaming industry of the time. Video game scholar Andrew Schartmann identifies three aspects of the music that had a significant impact on the development of game music:
At the deepest of conceptual levels, one would be hard-pressed to find an arcade game as influential to the early history of video game music as Space Invaders. Its role as a harbinger of the fundamental techniques that would come to shape the industry remains more or less unchallenged. And its blockbuster success ensured the adoption of those innovations by the industry at large.
Next Generation editor Neil West also cited the Space Invaders music as an example of great video game art, commenting on how the simple melody's increasing tempo and synchronization with the enemies' movement chills and excites the player.[33]
Space Invaders initially received mixed responses from within Taito and amusement arcade owners. Nishikado's colleagues praised it, applauding his achievement while queuing up to play, whereas his bosses predicted low sales as games often ended more quickly than other timer-based arcade games at the time. A number of amusement arcade owners initially rejected it, but some pachinko parlors and bowling alleys adopted it; it quickly caught on, with many parlors and alleys clearing space for more Space Invaders cabinets.[41] In the first few months following its release in Japan, Space Invaders became popular,[25] and specialty video arcades opened with nothing but Space Invaders cabinets.[20][25]
The 1980 Atari VCS (Atari 2600) version was the first official licensing of an arcade game for consoles and became the first "killer app" for video game consoles after quadrupling the system's sales.[10][57] It sold over one million units in its first year on sale as a home console game, then over 4.2 million copies by the end of 1981, and over 5.6 million by 1982; it was the best-selling Atari 2600 game up until the Atari version of Pac-Man (1982).[58] Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 had sold 6,091,178 cartridges by 1983,[58] and a further 161,051 between 1986 and 1990,[59] for a total of over 6.25 million cartridges sold by 1990.
Other official conversions were released for the Atari 8-bit computers and Atari 5200 console, while Taito later released it for the Nintendo Famicom in 1985, but only in Japan. By 1982, versions of Space Invaders were available for handheld electronic game devices, tabletop dedicated consoles, home computers, watches and pocket calculators.[9] The Atari VCS conversion was programmed by Richard Maurer,[60] while the Atari 5200 conversion was programmed by Eric Manghise and animated by Marilyn Churchill.[61]
As one of the earliest shooting games, Space Invaders set precedents and helped pave the way for future games and for the shooting genre.[65][66] Space Invaders popularized a more interactive style of gameplay, with the enemies responding to the player-controlled cannon's movement,[21] and was the first video game to popularize the concept of achieving a high score,[17][67][65] being the first to save the player's score.[65] While earlier shooting games allowed the player to shoot at targets, Space Invaders was the first in which multiple enemies could fire back at the player,[68] and in contrast to earlier arcade games which often had a timer, Space Invaders introduced the "concept of going round after round."[69] It was also the first game where players were given multiple lives,[70] had to repel hordes of enemies,[25] could take cover from enemy fire, and use destructible barriers,[71] in addition to being the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple diatonic descending bass notes repeating in a loop, which was dynamic and changed pace during stages,[72] like a heartbeat sound that increases pace as enemies approached.[73]
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