Retronauts - 681: Space Invaders

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Break up with basic browsers. Get Opera GX here: https://operagx.gg/Retronauts Sponsored by Opera GX! Aliens are on the move! Kevin Bunch, Brian Clark, Matt Alt and Diamond Feit talk about 1978’s Space Invaders and its legacy. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Opera GX. This week on Retronauts, Deep Space Squid? Hello and welcome to Retronauts. The only podcast where the height of military strategy is marching back and forth while slowly descending. This time we will be focused on Space Invaders, which explains by extremely bad joke. It's the best I could come up with. I apologize retroactively. And yeah, I'm shocked to discover that this game has never gotten its own episode in this entire run of this podcast, which is wild.

What's wrong with you, people? What's wrong with you people? Right. It's extremely influential, important to the medium, and frankly to Japanese, like, game culture in general. So I'm really excited. But before we continue, I guess we should introduce my guest. Who is that that just spoke up there? It's me, Matt Alt.

It's a me, Matt Alt. It's always a pleasure to be on the podcast. And there's nothing I like talking about more literally than Space Invaders. So this is great. And who is in the same countries, Matt? Hello, this is Diamond Fight, and Kevin, I think the answer is we have, up until now, enforced a boycott because space invaders is a complete misnomer because you do not invade space. So, you know, I understand, I understand, Kevin, you want to break with protocol, you're a rebel. You know, we can't stop you. But let's be honest, it's a terrible title.

Listen, I don't play by the rules, but I get results. And who is our fourth member of this three musketeers? Hello, it's Brian Clark from One Million Power. And I still haven't lost count of my shots. I'm coming up on 14. Any second now. Don't miss that UFO. Don't miss it.

That's 300 points. I know. Well, if I'm on count anyway. That's always the struggle. So to be clear, this is not going to cover the entire series of Space Invaders games because there's a lot of them and there's a lot of sequels and spinoffs and remakes and frankly that could be its own podcast episode at some point. But instead we're going to narrow in, we're going to focus down on the original

1978 game and a few related works, the like immediate sequel and some of the more interesting ports and whatnot that I feel are either interesting or important to discuss. Can I ask a question? Are all of us veterans of the space invaders wars? If so, thank you for your service. I am a veteran. I experienced it in real time. I was about five or six years old when it first came out. How about you? I definitely played it in arcades. I definitely remember the cabinet in arcades, you know, as an American, I remember looking at the, the, again, the monsters on the outside of the, of the cabinet. And then I look up the front, like, oh, that's not what's on the cabinet. All right, but this game is, this game is fun. I'm not going to complain

about it. And then, as we'll get into it, the Atari home port is what I probably spent the most time on because that was in my basement. I didn't have to go anywhere. Oh, just go to the basement and play Space Invaders. Okay. He sold me. It's initial release predated me a bit. I did play it in arcades when I was fairly young, though, but I didn't really get into it, like, get into the scoring and, like, really figuring out how the game ticked until, honestly, like, a few years ago. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was when the Invincible Collection dropped, and you finally got to dig into it. Yeah.

As for me, my primary experience, because I think I'm the youngest one on here, was the 2,600 port, which I played the crap out of. It's one of my first gaming memories is playing that one. I remember seeing the arcade machine around a few times, usually out of order because it was the 90s. But, yeah, I sank a lot of time into it over the years just from like the different home conversions. And whenever I got to see a cab, I would inevitably drop some quarters in. But also when the Invincible Collection came out, I also got a chance to really dig into how it ticks. and it's a really fascinating game. There's a lot of complexity that you wouldn't expect out of a 1978 release.

Well, I think it's kind of emergent complexity. Do you know what I mean? I wonder if even Mr. Nishikato, who created the game, knew how much of a kind of a pull it would have on people. And I think really Space Invaders is the first game to kind of leave the arcades and become a cultural experience, a cultural phenomenon, which I'm sure we're going to be talking about as this goes on. But, I mean, literally, the soundtrack of my youth, which much too much of which was spent in arcades,

is there's so much of that invaders beat going on, that relentless. It was one of the things you could hear kind of in the background of every arcade when you went into in the late 70s, early 80s, that it was just omnipresent. And so it's really intimately kind of associated with my missing. we got in youth. Given that the leading scoring technique is the result

of an unintended bug, I think you're probably on to something with Mr. Nishikato not maybe fully understanding what the game was going to end up turning into.

Look, sometimes, you know, these things happen, like Street Fighter 2 wasn't supposed to have combos, it just did, you know? Yeah, right. Sometimes you revolutionize an entire industry by accident.

Whoopsy. Yeah. Oops. And space invaders really did revolutionize things. I mean, it's hard to imagine, would we be here, all of us, would gaming be here, would everything, would we have gotten to now without space invaders? It seems like an exaggeration, but I really don't think it is. I don't think Japan would still be here.

I think they would have closed down. They would have shut down in the 80s. They would have sold off their assets at some point, you know. Yeah. So we didn't invent the ultimate game. We can just stop. We're just done. We're going to disband. We're over. I'm not sure that Taito would still be here in all, in all honesty, if not for Space Invaders. I think there's a very good chance that they wouldn't still be around.

Certainly they would have cut out of video games, I think, because this was a breakout hit. Yeah. So to speak. So to speak. I mean, Taito is, I'm sure we're going to get into this. But as I'm sure you guys know, Taito is such an interesting story founded by that Ukrainian entrepreneur, you know, escapee of the Russian, like, Jewish pogroms. He's, like, raised in Manchu Kuo, like, under Japanese occupation. It's just this amazing, like, socio-historical link to video gaming. But yes, I think they were, to quote Frank Zappa, they were only in it for the money, and games were where the money was at in the 1970s, that's for sure. Like, I guess before we jump into all the background, for the five people who don't know what space invaders in, but are still listening to this.

This is a shooting game, came out in 78 by Taito, published internationally by Midway. there's 55 aliens that sort of march in a big block left and right on the screen. Every time they hit an edge, they drop down one line, and you have to shoot them all before they touch the ground because if they do that, you lose the game. Occasionally, a UFO goes by. There has a quote-unquote random point bonus if you shoot it, but it's actually... Random. It's not random. They did not have the space on the program for that.

so instead it's based on your shot count so that's something people figured out fairly early on yeah you play until you either run out of lives or the invaders hit the ground unusual for this sorts of games in 78 they shoot back at you

and yeah just having lives is unusual for 78 having multiple waves of invaders coming at you is extremely unusual for 78 if I might add what's also extremely extremely rare for 1978 is having recognizable characters. You know, now every video game has recognizable, merchandisable characters in them, but

Space Invaders was really the first. You know, there's squids and those crabs and those, you know, whatever they are, they were the world-looking little guys. Those were really the first recognizable characters in the video game, Pantheon, I believe. Yeah, and they are still, like, extremely prevalent, you know, I remember when we visited to Tokyo in 2019, Brian, there's a there's still a lot of like little space invaders like iconography all over the place.

Even Taito's own merchandise is still, they're still plentiful. Yeah, Taito still operates some game centers here in Japan, probably not as much as they used to, but they're still open. And usually the signage will have a very large invader on the sign. Indeed, the last time I went to one down in Osaka near Dendantown, I remember I was with my son that day and we went up, we sort of walked around the game center, and they had a space invaders machine on free play just in there.

So I think I'm the only person among us who has done their duty and tried to impart the space invaders' wisdom to the next generation firsthand. Now, he was very young at the time, so I don't know if he was caught on up, I think, but he did shoot off some invaders. So, you know, he's now a veteran, too. He's his veteran as well. It's heritage. It's right.

You've got to pass down that. heritage and that culture. You know, and also we can't, if you're talking about Tokyo, and this isn't actually limited Tokyo, we can't forget the French graffiti artist Invader, whose little tile, it's not even graffiti, it's street art, I guess you'd call it. He makes his little tile sculptures of mosaics of space invaders and puts them up in cities all over the world. It's actually quite fun to walk around Tokyo and look for them. They're hidden, kind of in plain sight, and definitely another inspiration from the game. Mm-hmm. Yeah, God. When my wife and I went to Britain for our honeymoon, they were all over the place in London and a few of the other cities we visited.

It makes sense. He's been banned for life from Japan, unfortunately, after being caught. But, you know, because, you know, he's making invaders instead of fighting them. And so the Japanese government is like, no, no, you have to destroy the invaders. You're out. You're out. Game over. That's so wild. I mean, to think, I've actually been to a Banksy exhibit in Japan. So it's like, I guess if you get too famous before you get caught, it's okay. But if you get caught before you're famous enough, then you get banned, you know? Yes, exactly. Because now, you know, it's funny. I actually heard, and I don't know how true this is, that Shibuya in particular,

is seeing that as a kind of heritage, the street art, the graffiti. And now they're kind of lobbying to get his band lifted so they can come back again. So how times change? Amazing. Yeah. And I think, you know, you mentioned earlier, just the, the beat, the incessant Invader March, like, that's, I feel like that's also become iconic in its own right. I remember hearing about the invader houses, which we'll get to just like the arcades of just space invaders. And they would just like put the speakers out front.

Oh, my God. You just hooked up to a machine, so you just hear the march. Dun, dun, dun, dun, yeah, it's like, it's like primitive EDM. Or, you know what I mean? Or like techno. You can kind of dance to it, I guess. Although it's more, it's kind of relentless. It's designed to make you stressed out, you know?

It's like a whammy. They're trying to put the whammy on you when you're playing. It would be interesting to try playing it without any sound at all. You know, maybe it's actually easier. I've done it in arcades. It's not fun. I also feel like being, like, I have, I will admit, I've never been in an arcade with more than one Space Invaders machine present in it.

Oh, okay. But imagining hearing a kaka of multiple Space Invaders missions, all at different points in the gameplay. So you're just constantly hearing different speeds of the dun-d-d-d-dun-d-d-d-d-d. Seems like it would be a maddening experience. Or like one of those concerts where they perform like, you know, game music, you know, orchestral. We should do that. We should have an orchestra performed this.

Surely that must have happened somewhere by now. Probably. In Japan, it must have, yeah. Undoubtedly. And I know that that beat was used in like different like space. Invaders' parody songs or themed songs. And I also know that, you know, Kauri

Pamu Pommu used it in her song, Invader. Like, just the four-note beat, like, dun, done, dun, done. She even sings it out during the chorus. So, like... We need a vocal version of the Space Invaders game. You know, like,

you just have her saying, done, done, done over and over again. Well, you know, there is... This must have been done, too, in Japan at some point. There is that Game Center CX, uh, Space Invaders thing that Taito made for their anniversary. Was it their game's 30th, I think. I don't remember which

anniversary, but yeah. I think it was the 30th anniversary and they had I don't know do all the sound effects. I don't think he did the done, though. I think he just did like, you know, like little like sound effects like that, like of the shots and things like that. He did do the UFOs. I have to double

check the footage from the TV show. Put it in the show notes. Yep. But actually, I'm glad you brought up Kiari Pima Pama, because I think that's important to realize that, first of all, that is a young contemporary performer. Like, she was, she was not alive during the invader boom. She was, like, I mean, if you do the math, I think she was born in the 90s. I mean, I think she's relatively young now.

I know, like, she just recently had her first child, so. Yeah, I was going to say, born in the 90s ain't young anymore, buddy. Right. I'm just saying young compared to us here, but still, like, she's relatively contemporary. I'm sure, like, once she's done with her return to leave, she'll be back and she'll be doing all the stuff that she does, which is, you know, kind of out there. She's kind of, you know, she's one of the, I want to say otter, obviously not super odd given Japan's legacy of weird acts, but, like, Kyari is definitely on the otter end of the spectrum. So the fact that she would release a song in the 21st century about a video game that was probably almost 40 years old at that point, because we're getting close to 50 at this point. And that was her theme.

And everyone's like, yes, we love it. Yes, thank you. More County. Thank you. It's like, it would be like Lady Gaga issuing a song about Donkey Kong. Yes. Which, you know, if she wants to do it, I'd be fine. I want to see, can Lady Gaga show up in an event just wearing a barrel?

Like, she could do that. Yeah. She could. I think she can. If she showed up in an event wearing a dress made of nothing but stakes sewn sewn together, I'm sure that she could do that. But, I mean, it's really, it's a testament to the cultural impact of Space Invaders There's very few games have this kind of pull.

You know what I mean? It's like, it's beyond. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Wait, wait. Lady Gaga, she's the lady from Donkey Kong. What are we doing here? Oh, my God. Oh, jeez.

It all comes together. Time for a name change. She's going to just lady now. This is a world safe This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Opera GX Hey folks, let's talk about the internet for a minute. We're all on it unless you're currently driving, in which case, pull over, please.

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in the show notes to try Opera GX today thank you to Opera GX for sponsoring this episode so where to begin with this where to even start I mean it's the lore the lore is deep so I want to I want to dig

into like Taito and how like Space Invaders came to be initially, and you all can feel free to chime in as we go through. A lot of these details, Tomihiro Nishado, he had a biography come out, I forget, almost 10 years ago now, by a French historian, Florin Gorgias, I'd probably mangled that because I can never remember how it's pronounced. Gorgére. Gorgé, probably.

It's available in French, and in Japanese, you can find. Tough to find, though. Yeah, a little tough to find. It's an older book, but it's very informative. Also, the Space Invader's Invincible collection, had a lot of details from other folks who worked down the game and contemporary coverage. And Nishikato's done a million interviews over the years. So anyway, you're going to say something. No, I was going to say that to me, isn't, is the, are we going to talk about the game first?

Are we going to talk about Taito first? There's so many angles here. I don't even know where to begin. I want to start with. Taito, because a lot of things between Taito and Midway and, you know, Taito's electromechanical games really lead up to space and majors. It all sort of feeds into that game. Well, they didn't get us. Their start was not in games, is my understanding. You know, Michael Kogan, I believe is his name? The Ukrainian-born, Odessa-born entrepreneur,

fled that area because he was of Jewish descent. get moves to Manchuria, which is not Manchu Quo, because it's invaded by the Japanese, somehow hooks up with the Japanese intelligence services in Manchuria and helps them with this this. This sounds like I'm making this up, Project Fugu, which was a top secret project to resettle Jews in Manchu Quo to help Japan curry favor with the West to get them to stop boycotting Japan for invading Manchuria and China. And, yeah, no, it's like, why is it called Project Fugu? Why, like, imagine this, like, the Jewish Holy Land is suddenly in Manchuria instead of Israel.

It's all of this stuff is just so mind-blowing. But then what happens, the Soviets, of course, advance takeover. And Michael Kogan flees in 1944, not to the West, but he flees to Japan, to Tokyo, which was not a great place to be in 1944, this is 1945. Generally. I'm sorry. It was really bad place. You know, like, you're putting aside the fact that there's shortages of all

kinds, famines, whatever. Then the B-29s came in March of 1944 and leveled huge sections of the city. Obviously, he survived this, but he was like an entrepreneur, right? And he ran his first company in China. Like, it was like a wig and like perfume and like all of these other kinds of

things. And then he moves to Japan and he starts doing like an import-export business. again you know this is not exactly a great time to launch a business in japan like the economy is destroyed all of the infrastructure is destroyed you only have the black markets so like what he's doing and how he's getting his stuff off the ground i don't know but he does it he's a very successful businessman and builds and he launches tito i believe in the early 50s is uh is my understanding of it i'm hit by so many things at once i can't believe i can't believe that there was almost a Jewish homeland in China.

It's like, imagine trading one, one troublesome, you know, can you imagine? One troublesome maelstrom in one part of the world for a completely different troublesome maelstrom in another part of the world. And then the man fled, fled one war zone into another war zone. Oh, my God. Which explains a lot about the design of space invaders, which we'll get to it, because he did have some input into its creation. Yes.

So, you know, maybe he had money to begin with. I mean, he couldn't have been poor because he is interacting with all of these elites of the Japanese, you know, society going on in the invasion, the real invaders, not space invaders, land invaders. He's engaging with them and they're talking to him as somebody who can help them. So, you know, I don't think he is a kind of penniless, you know, a refugee or something like that. He's someone who has some kind of pull and power to help and is able to relocate himself again. So, obviously, he was either very good at business or had a, you know, a good steak or whatever, but Taito launches and starts doing all sorts of stuff. I know there's like, there's Taito vodka. Did you know about this?

I think I knew about vodka. But that's incredible. Yes. Yeah, Kogan, you know, he's of that, you know, that Ukrainian, Russian sort of background. So vodka is, you know, his lifeblood, I'm sorry. And so Taito released, there's a Tito branded vodka. You can see, there's a picture of a bottle. of it on their website. They need to bring that back, like, sell it at like a mega rage in

Mizunokuchi or something where they have the bar and whatnot. You put the invader on the bottle. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And I think they were doing all sorts of import, export stuff, but then they fell into the jukebox, like so many companies that we associate with video games, they fell in, in Japan. They fell into the kind of jukebox industry in Japan. Jukebox repair, jukebox import because jukebox is in that pre-cariochi era where the main source of automated, you know, music in in Japanese cities at the time. So, and those like are real like by, you know, kids, if you've never seen a jukebox, I can't imagine anybody under the age of 60s listening to this podcast, but these were like mechanical monstrosities that played records for like a dime or a quarter or something like that. And they needed a lot of service and repair and stuff like that. So that leads directly to their like electromechanical games and things, right?

Which they were one of the first Japanese companies that I'm aware of that was making electromechanical games. I think it was them and what Casco was another big one. Right. And they were, I think, the first Japanese company to take up making video games. Right. And they started off with like pawn clones and whatnot, of course. Everybody did that. Can't you, can't one make an argument that, I certainly have, that Space Invaders is basically a breakout

clone. It is. It's basically it admitted pretty much at this point. Yeah. Ishikato said as much. The bricks are after you. That's the difference. And that's another interesting connection because of course breakout is Steve Wozniak's

brainchild and Jobs' brainchild. So you have this kind of Apple, this indirect Apple connection going on here. It's just amazing, this web of connections behind the scenes. Yeah. Jeremy and I did a breakout episode a few years ago, which if you want more details on how that, like, came together and how that leads into invaders.

You know, we covered a lot of it. But, yeah, Nishikato, he was one of their electromechanical game designers. He did some really popular early ones, like Skyfighter. And then once they started getting into video games, he started doing a lot of transistor transistor logic work, like he did soccer, which is a pawn clone. He did speed race, which is a very early driving game. And unlike American driving games, which are really focused on simulation and the experience of driving, speed race is really built around speed and the sensation of going really fast.

And that's really an early, I'd say splitting point for racing games between Western and Japanese development. He came up with Western Gun, which was a fun little TTL game of two cowboys shooting in each other. Interceptor, which is a video game version of Skyfighter, and a number of these were released in the U.S. and other parts of the world through Midway, which they had a little partnership with. Yeah, we need to unravel that. Western gun I want to talk about for a second. I believe it was released.

What was it released as an America, gunfight or something like that? So in the U.S., it was gunfight, and it's like a completely different game with the vaguest similarities in that it's two cowboys shooting at each other. Well, I just, I remember being shocked when I went back and looked at Nishikato's version because it's like two super deformed Kawaii mascot

cowboys trying to kill each other. And the American one are these like ugly, ugly giant like sprites. America was focused and this actually I think is another kind of big, that's a big moment in a sense because America was so focused on making

reality in their games and failing at it over and over again. And it was always, like, centered, like, largely on these macho-masculine pursuits, like, driving and shooting and, like, you know, fighting and nuclear war and, like, all sorts of things. Because there's nothing more manly than nuclear war, of course. Absolutely. But, you know, the Japanese quickly, I think, adapted to the fact that the, you know, computers and or transistors of the day, you know, couldn't reproduce reality. And they had to kind of deform it.

They had to stylize it. And there's a very haiku-like nature in the kind of art they made within the limitations of those really, really, by our standards, primitive machines of the era, I think. And I think that's like a big turning point where games started to get cute. And certainly Space Invaders was a big jumping off point for that. Yeah. And Gunfight is actually integral to the Space Invaders tale, which I find absolutely fascinating. because, so Midway licenses Western Gun.

They decide this is too cutesy to release in the West, as you were talking about. So they had a sort of a development studio nearby that they worked with a lot called Dave Nutting Associates. They asked Dave Nutting Associates DNA to rework this into a game that would appeal more to Western audiences in their view. Make it more violent. Make it more like people. Make it more like people killing people. Kids love that. Isn't that what Cowboys do, after all?

So DNA went above and beyond with this. They decided to make this a CPU-based game because that was a technology that they'd been experimenting with with pinball machines. The Intel 8080 was available now. So they decided, let's try using a microprocessor. So Tom McHugh, the programmer, he redesigned this game around a microprocessor.

And it plays very differently. I think is the best way to say it. Nishikato did not like the gunfight changes, shocker. But he felt that this really showed him that microprocessor technology was kind of where they needed to go with video games. It allowed for new types of games and scenarios than what this transistor technology really allowed for. And that sort of feeds into Space Invaders a little bit because this is sort of the tech that he uses. to develop that game. He couldn't get a development system from the U.S.

because it was too expensive. So he just sort of imported all the parts piece by piece and taught himself how it all worked. And then separately, like you talked about breakout and how Space Invaders was very much inspired by it. Right. And that's very salient because breakout, it was popular in the U.S.

It was probably the most popular game since Pong at that point. But it was a massive hit in Japan, where Namco was the distributor. And bootlegger. And bootlegger. They're bootlegging their own game because they couldn't get enough from Atari. Isn't that the story? Yeah. Namco had an agreement with Atari that they could sell the game there, but they had to only take machines that Atari could ship over there.

And because the game was too popular, Atari couldn't keep up with demand. They were getting inundated with clones. There's so many breakout clones in Japan. And we'll see kind of echoes of that later with space invaders, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, they ended up breaking their contract with Atari and just making their own units. Well, Steve Jobs once described the atmosphere at Atari as the, you could, the smell of marijuana wafted freely through the air conditioning system.

So, like, color me unsurprised that they were unable to ship enough a unit. They're probably, like, so high in there trying to, like, just, you know, clear another round of a breakout that they couldn't make enough for Japan. Although, like, I think I wonder, like, it's obvious when I was writing about this for my book, Pure Invention, how Japan made the modern world, I remember being struck by the fact of how, like, nobody really thought of Japan as a market back then for games. Japan was not on the map as a game maker. And it's obvious that the Atari guys just saw this as a totally secondary, like, oh, whatever these little people over there in their little country are going to do, that's fine. Almost a little, because, you know, Atari, even though they're named after a Japanese word, you know, they're the kings of video games at this point in the, like, 77, 78, 78, 79 time frame. And I don't know, it's just interesting how, like, Japan really rose from nothing. Like, it's almost their game, like, you know, coming into their own.

as a game development powerhouse kind of mirrors the Japanese economy coming back after the war as a whole. They had nothing. Suddenly their second largest economy in the world. Like, you know, 70s, they have no video games. Suddenly they're like the second biggest producer or even the biggest producer video games in the world.

It's an interesting thing. You thought I was kidding before. You thought I was kidding. I'm not kidding. I feel like without Space Invaders, Japan might not exist as we know it. But getting back to the breakout thing, I think that's really interesting to me because I was a kid at the time. I would have known breakout. And it's like I never put together the breakout Space Invaders connection until decades later as an adult.

When someone put it out that it's basically the same concept, I was like, I never thought of that. Totally. Totally. I didn't notice at all. Yeah, because, I mean, yeah, breakout. I think breakout is probably the first real hit in Japan, in my opinion, because if you look back, almost every Japanese company that made games at that point tried their hand at some kind of block game or block Kozushi game. I know Nintendo had one that I think, didn't Miyamoto design the case for that one? I think that was one of his early. He might have designed the case, but it was, oh, man, the designer of the, the engineer of the N. ES, Uemura San. Oh, okay. Uemura San is the one who actually designed the game. And he told me, he's like, yeah, we were just knocking off Pong. We're knocking off, you know.

Yeah, the industrial design for the home version was Miyamoto, though, yes. Yeah, the actual physical case. Yeah. I mean, he is like the Johnny Ives of Nintendo of the era. But, like, Nintendo is like the most copycat company on the planet in the late 70s. But also, S&K. S&K also had a very early block game that I don't know if it still exists, but there are flyers for it at the very least. So we know that S&K had a early block-breaking game of some kind, but their first real hit would be Osma Wars, which is get a Space Invaders clone.

Yeah, you know it. Yeah. Yeah. What's fascinating to me about breakout in Japan is that this is what popularized the tabletop cabinet form. right and that's that basically sets the game into a table these were really popular in places that you wouldn't have a stand-up machine like cafes or restaurants or tea shops uh bathhouses etc so oh i love how i love to play some breakout after it rub down at the bath house right so this is extremely relevant for space invaders because uh guess what game really took off in the table top

format in japan space invaders yeah invader rooms there were entire rooms devoted to this space invaders. So, yeah, Breakout was a huge hit. Nishkato, of course, saw it, and he thought it was really interesting because he had seen its antecedent, which was Ramtec's clean sweep. I think Taito might have actually published that in Japan. He thought that one was really boring, because it's like a paddle ball game where you're hitting balls on a screen, like dots, like Pac-Man.

But it's not particularly interesting, he felt. But Breakout, he thought, okay. Okay, you don't need to have, like, fancy graphics. This is an extremely simple-looking game. It's not realistic in the slightest, but it's really compelling, and I can use this. I can noodle on this. Right. And then finally, he also saw Midway Seawolf, which is another microprocessor game,

and that's what sort of was the catalyst of him, like, okay, I'm going to figure out how this works. I'm going to make my own microprocessor game. Also, to make it all about my kids again, I have to say I saw Sea Wool. a few years back at the Seattle Pinball Museum. And once I got my kids of that thing, they could not stop playing Sea Wolf. So that is another all-timer. It's a great game.

Yeah. I feel like it's mostly like overlooked now because there's so many other games, but it's awesome. It's really fun. You're looking through the scope. Love it. Yeah, that's that scope. Yeah. That was actually, I don't know if it inspired it directly, but Battlezone. Remember the tank game? I remember that. The Periscope

kind of thing. So those, you know, back, you still see them today, but those kind of game experiences where they had some immersive element to them, where you felt like you were in it. Like, you know, say it was the master of that in the 80s with like you're on a motorcycle when you're playing super hang on or whatever, but it's, yeah, no, I love those kind of like those sculpted cabinets and things like that. They really, they really harken back to like the electromechanical games. Like, I think Seawolf is on some level a remake of Periscope, which was the big hit of like 1969 or so.

Well, when I was researching for the book, I found this 1947 article about an arcade. I think it was in Chicago where the guy repurposed like B-29 gun turrets and turned them into some kind of like electro-mechanical shooting game in his arcade. Sounds well right. Well, it wasn't even an arcade back then. I don't even know. Did pinball exist in 47? Yeah. I don't know.

I don't remember if it was necessarily like the flipper pinball, but pinball is like a concept. It goes back a long time. Pachinko? American Pachinko, is that what we'll call this? But anyway, yeah, there's like the physicality of those EM games is something I think that early arcade games really had to struggle against. I think a lot of them didn't feel as immersive because they were just on a screen, you know, and until the gameplay and the characters and all of that and the music started to catch up, which they did with Space Invaders, I think, you know, it was really kind of a neck-and-neck sort of thing, a competition. Yeah, also, and I say this as someone who lives here. Chicago to make a game

out of repurposed gun turrets. Who else would do it? That sounds like something Chicago coin would have done. Yeah, exactly. It's the Chicago way. All I want to do is have some deep dish pizza and then go play with my B29. It's all I want to do.

That's what we all do even now. Exactly. So yeah, Nishado, he built his own development system. He had to program everything directly using, like, a chart of hexadecimal code and assembly language, which sounds nightmarish. But this was probably why this game took so long to develop.

So from breakout, he took the screen clearing aspect, the vertical format, and the two-wave design of breakout. It's like, once you finish the second wave, the game's over. He changed that to endless waves, and then he's like, well, players will see who can get furthest in this game, right? That'll be the big point of competition. And then, you know, the paddle became a gun, and the wall became moving targets. It's a shooting gallery, right?

And then the targets start shooting back. Right. Yeah, there's a shooting gallery aspect to it, too. I never really thought about that. And that's actually a really popular sort of game in Japan. It's called Shateki. You'll see it at, like, you know, fairs, festivals, you know, Matsuri, things like that, where there'll be a booth, and you shoot like a cork gun at little, like, objects or

prizes, and if you knock them over, you get to win them. So, you know, Japanese people were very familiar with this, like, shoot at things, you know, win prizes sort of aspect as well, I think. That's an interesting connection. Yeah. And the fact that they were able to shoot back was pretty unusual. If you look at pre-space invaders shooting games, generally they are more like electromechanical or more physical shooting game, where they just sort of hang around and maybe move around a bit,

but they don't really fight back. And if they do fight back in one of these early video games, all they really cost you is time because there's no real concept of lives at that point. Well, they say time is the fourth dimension. So, you know, that is a big thing to lose. That's true. So this did originally have a military theme,

like Nishado's Interceptor and Skyfighter. But he was having trouble figuring out, okay, what can we put in here that you shoot at, like, I can't make things move, like, very smoothly with this, uh, with this tech. They sort of move jerkily. So tanks don't really look good. Uh, neither do planes and ships. Uh, isn't it true that Michael Kogan was, was not, he, he did not want to see military themes, you know, probably for the very reason that he was fleeing the military, militaries of various kinds from much of his early life and not even not.

so early, like well into his 20s. I can imagine not wanting to put military themes in games. I think it was explicitly people shooting people and not necessarily like military themes in general is how I remember it, but I could be a little off on that. Cowboys aren't people. Yeah, I was thinking back to the cowboy thing. I was like, but how did they do that? So, I mean, I don't know.

Maybe there are holes or maybe there are games he didn't see or something. I think in that case, they're like very cartoony. Yeah, yeah. It looks like it's like dig, dug with guns. Yeah. You know, not Pokemon with guns. It's dig-dug with guns. Don't they look like that?

I thought they did. Yeah, Kogan, from what I understand, was the specific person who was like, no, we're not going to have soldiers marching around because I don't want you shooting troops, which is funny because this is the same company that would, you know, a few years later, at least like, Frontline, where you are a soldier shooting a bunch of other soldiers. That game, that, oh, my God, I've got to dump so many quarters into that. It's kind of the prototype for Akari Warriors, I guess. Yeah, and Commando and that whole genre.

I mean, you had the rotary controller, which is the vein of my existence for emulation these days, because you really can't play those games without a rotary controller. Somebody finally released one. I've heard mixed things about it, and I've not gotten one myself yet, but yeah, I plan to experiment with that. Because, yeah, that was the thing for so long, right? It's like, I can't accurately do this. Like, you can play it as a twin stick game in some capabilities. but like you lose something in doing that like it's it's it's maybe an acceptable substitute but

it's not quite right yeah yeah um so yeah cogan cogan went back on his word i guess you know when the money starts coming right you know although actually wait a second what's it because cogan died very young he he died in his early 60s on a business trip to the united states he was he had a heart attack like it was completely unexpected i mean i don't know if anybody i think he lasted longer than Frontline, but I could be wrong about that. Frontline, I think, is like 82 or something. 84 is when he passed away. Yes, he passed away in 84 and his son, his son took over. And that's another whole story because he was involved in all of this crazy, crazy stuff running Taito Brazil. And ended up fleeing the country after a kidnapping extortion attempt. Wow. Just wild, wild stuff down there.

Too much of that Tito vodka. Yeah, too much of that Tito. So he takes over the company in name only, actually, like a Japanese exec, much older in his 60s, ends up running Taito for the 80s. And he, I think his name was Abraham. Abraham leaves, or he was already in Brazil at the time, running Taito, Brazil, which was doing a huge business in supplying Central America, South America, with pinball games, early arcade games, and things like that. There's famously actually a large Japanese population or Japanese descent population in Brazil, but he gets extorted and like kidnapped and extorted like by his own employees, like two of his own executives or something like that, manages to escape and flees back.

And now he fled basically to Monaco where he lives now. He lives in Monaco where he collects and races vintage like Ferraris and things like that. I was like, wow, how do I get a chunk of this Taito fortune? What a life. But like, what a life, literally. And he's still around. We should track him down, like, if we can catch him in one of those, like, super speedy little, like, Ferrari things. But he's still around.

And anyway, yes. But so the passing, I'm sure the passing of Kogan in 84 changed things at Taito. I'd probably put it, like, pretty firmly into Japanese hands at that point, you know, if it hadn't been already. Do you know what I mean? Like being run that way. So, I mean, wow, that was way off. That was way off. Sorry, we went, we went from space invaders to extortions, armed robberies, Monaco Car Racing. This is the Taito story, man. Well, the title, there's a book to be written here for sure. If you could find, if you could pull the people together. I mean, it's basically like Tokyo Vice, but with pinball games and vodka.

And space invaders. And space invaders. Yes, little squid-like aliens. Anyway, you know, already like 45 minutes into this and we haven't even touched on the like the social cultural phenomenon like what a huge thing space invaders was in japan it really was a game changer if i might say mm-hmm you could say that so i'll run through a few things here so the space theme it came from him seeing star wars advertising posters in 78 not star wars he saw the advertising yeah he didn't he didn't watch the movie yeah we have to emphasize this we have to emphasize this just for you know it's a very different era it took over a year for

Star Wars to make the journey from America to Japan. It opened in June 1978, which by all accounts, Space Invaders is already playable and out by the time the movie opened. So he based his Star Wars impressions on, like, magazine covers and advertisements. It's like, oh, Star Wars, that sounds interesting. Like, he had no idea what the movie was about or what was in it. Just like, well, outer space, I guess that's important. So I just find that so hilarious because, you know, at this point in time, anything Star Wars is a global simultaneous release. You know, it is available digitally, the very same second at every country.

But when this happened, it was like, no, no, no. You know, a full year, a child could be conceived and born in the time it took from Star Wars to get open in May to open in June. And knockoff movies were being made based on what people assumed Star Wars was like. You had these like Toksatsu live action films. You had like message from space, Patrick Macias' favorite movie of all time. my partner in crime from the Pure Tokyo podcast. You had Star Wolf

endlessly parodied on MST3K and other shows like these really, really like bargain basement like kind of knockoffs of Star Wars. And I think, you know, people always kind of assumed that Space Invaders was a knockoff, but I don't, I don't see it as a knockoff of Star Wars.

I see it as very much inspired by cut from the same cloth as that kind of global, whatever you want to call it, wavelength that was happening at that time. Yeah, he was like, oh, Space Thief, great, I'll do that. And then, you know, the aliens, they were just like little sea creatures because he saw Japan. Because Japan. And, you know, he saw War of the World when he was a kid and was like, oh, hey, that's a cool idea. Yeah, I was so surprised to hear that because I just recently saw that movie for the first time, the 50s movie, I should say.

Obviously, that story has been adapted many times. But specifically the 50s version, which was a color film, obviously it got a lot of play in many countries. So to hear that Nishikato saw that movie when he was a kid and is stuck with him, because you don't really get to. to see the aliens that much of that movie. It's mostly about their spaceships, but you do see some tentacles at the end when they're all dying from the disease, spoilers. And, you know, what? I still haven't seen it, man. I've been waiting. I've been waiting 60 years. And you finally screwed me upon this guide. Okay, sorry, continue. But yeah, I can see that, I can see that lasting in someone's mind. Like, oh, my God, what if squids came from space? And he said, okay, what if the squids come from space? But this time, you shoot them down before they land.

I have a gun. I have a gun. I can shoot these space squids. I have organ. What is it? What is it? This is the big question. That gun platform at the bottom. It's like a rectangle with like a little triangle on top. It's like a little turret, right? Is it a spaceship? There's a, you know, there's a European band called Roy Scop. And they have a song called Happy Up Here, where they recreate space invaders on the streets of whatever European city it is. And they're using a car, like, with lights all over it that's driving back and forth with a gun on its roof. And, like, shooting at these, like, it's obviously CG, these, like, these invaders that are coming down. I was like, yeah, man, it's a sedan. It's a car. That's what it is. And we'll have to link to it. It's actually a great video. It's a great song. But it's, it's 100% Space Invaders influenced. Roy Scop. I believe in the, in the infamous Futurama interpretation of Space Invaders, I believe it's like a tank that's got. that treads going back and forth and he's like fries inside of it shooting upwards with his

with his Walkman and his soda. I think that's what they did with some of the later sequels to the game and they had more fidelity. Right. It's funny you say Walkman though because it came out the year before the Walkman did. So like these are like two intertwined phenomenon. I mean, look, we're still wearing headphones today. You know what I mean?

If I'm ever fighting the aliens, I'm definitely going to be using like a Walkman style thing when I'm doing it. Yeah, you got to listen to your rush. So, yeah, he's programming this really for the first time, and he's looking for different shortcuts. So, like, he designs the game around the invaders speeding up as they go through. He doesn't have to program that. He just, like, okay, well, the processor can't move this many invaders all that quick.

I'll just use that to my advantage and not have to waste time writing code. The UFOs, like we talked about, they're not randomly scored. It's just, it's based on your shot count because that was something you could do really easily. And because of this, this is one of the factors that leads to this becoming like a real high score chasing game, as well as the decision to, you know, take from Seawolf the idea of like a high score being shown at the top of the screen. He added some barriers to block shots, make it a little more difficult. Was this the first game where you really like, you know, the competition was. was kind of against the machine for the highest score, you know, as opposed to like just trying

to kick your friend's ass at Pong and having like more, you know, scores against them. I feel like it's one of the first. I don't remember Seawolf well enough to know if that's like a good comparison point. But considering this one doesn't have a time limit and you just keep going until you die. I'd say that, yeah, this is probably the first real score chasing competition game. Which I mean also explains why it blew up the way it did as far as like. having entire you know early arcades dedicated to it right like if that had been a real well established thing beforehand would it have had quite that effect so there is an amazing amazing I don't know if it's been subtitled it probably should be a vintage Japanese TV special

like the equivalent of 60 minutes and it's called like noisy invaders are attacking Japanese cities. And it's all, that's the, the rough translation of the title. And, you know, you have this, this, you know, your reporter in a trench go, I'm heading out into the city at these invader rooms. The thing that was really interesting about this, this piece, and I think adds some context to this, is that it was, space invaders was specifically explained in this news piece, mass media news piece, as being a rival, not to video games, but to Pachinko. And it was taking the 100 yen coins that should have been going into Pachinko and putting them into these game things instead, which Pachinko, as you may or may not know, is intimately associated with organized crime in Japan. And they were not particularly happy about this.

And when you're talking about Pichinko or you're talking about video games, you're basically talking about a real estate business. It's where do you put this piece of machinery in a place where it's going to get the most powerful. buy, the most users, the most players. So the, you know, obviously as they see their revenues decreasing in this one vice, they take an interest in this other one. And so there's this whole, you know, there's a lot of those invader rooms were in places like the Red Light District, Kabuki Show and places like that, Shinjuku, things like that. And it's a really interesting sort of, you see these crossing of all sorts of cultural streams in Japanese society because this game is so addictive and simple and fun and anybody can do it. But it was very much an adult experience.

You and I, you know, Diamond and I were talking about playing it as little kids. No kids played Space Invaders in 1978 or 1979. And like, the only kids who did were like delinquents who were like sneaking into these really, really skeevy establishments where your mom, your PTA, your youth pastor, your Shinto youth pastor, did not want you, did not want you, there aren't Shinto youth pastors. I just made that up. I just didn't want you in there. And actually, there were, in a lot of places, the PTAs would actually try to intercept kids going into those. Yeah, that's sort of what led to the end of that invader boom.

We're jumping ahead a little bit. Sorry, I keep blowing up your narrative. I'm sorry. I keep talking about extortions, yakuza, vodka. It's all good. But this is perfect, Matt, because honestly, what we're really now, what we need now is the yakuza minus zero or minus one, I guess. So find out what were they doing, Kubukicho in, like, 1970? and have a side quest where you have to either, you know, break up an invader room or search your own invader room.

And then, of course, you know, if you pay titles of money, you can play Space Invaders inside the Yakuza game, which is where it should be. Well, not naming any names. This is actually one of the big problems with writing histories of the Japanese game industry, circa late 70s, 80s, up until about the 90s. So many of the companies that we associate with beloved children's franchises today had one or perhaps both feet and maybe arms and body and head. to in the underworld and we're getting money from the underworld and we're making money from the underworld and giving kickbacks to the underworld and so video game I'm not going to like literally I was warned do not do not look too deeply into this when I started prying into the

backgrounds of certain games I'm not talking space I don't think tito was one of these but you know when you're in a quarter based a cash based business real estate based business it's going to 80s, Japan, I mean, like, every company, that's why they have these rules now in Japan where literally, even a small company like mine, you have to sign these affidavits that say you aren't doing business with the organized crime. You don't have any organized crime ties. And I always laugh when I'm signing these. I'm like, you know, Matt Alt, known Yakuza Associate, you know, it's like, but it was a really,

really big problem in the 80s where even, like, respected companies would have to do business with these guys. And I don't know how respected the video game business was back then. So, like, they're not really respected business. So that's another aspect of this whole thing. Yeah, with the, I mean, I'll jump ahead real quick, since I know you have to go soon. There is this whole thing. The invader boom really ended in June 79, very abruptly, because the All Japan Amusement Park Association, which is the industry trade organization for, you know,

coin op games and whatnot, they realized that if they didn't rein this game in with all of the seedy stuff going on, the government would start issuing new laws and regulations that would do it for them. And they didn't want that. So we put it up happening. It did eventually happen. Years later. Yeah. So they bought some time like six years or so. But they had a directive that limited invader games to locations in areas that had an attendant and parental accompaniment for anyone under 15 that was playing the game. And if you were under 18, you could not enter those game centers anyway. So in that, in that same, that was being talked about in that same news story that I was talking about. But one of the best, one of the, the single most shining

moment in that is where they start interviewing people who are knocking off space invaders. Because there's a lot, as I'm sure we're going to get into this, there's a lot of, it's a pretty simple thing. Once you see how it's done, there's a bunch of companies who are making these not even, they're just, some of them were just pure knockoffs, like they copy the transistor layouts and things like that. Those are in Japan known as dead copy games. And it was a problem for all sorts of games up through the 80s and stuff like that. Others took a little bit more of a creative approach. One of those was a company called Nintendo. Nintendo. And Nintendo's, did I say that or just thinking, Nintendo's then-president, Mr. Yamauchi,

goes on this program and makes this passioned speech about how video game mechanics should not be patentable or copyrightable because a rising tide lifts all ships. When one game company makes an awesome game mechanic, we should all be free to copy it and use it because that's democracy, man. That's what it's all. all about, you know, record scratch, fast forward to, like, Nintendo's first lawsuit against

somebody for, like, you know, coaching when we can. But that's on, it's on tape. It's probably actually on film. I, you know, it's like, this is like a 1978 interview, but he's like, he's in this all-white suit. He looks like Bob Guccione from Penthouse magazine. He's got these, like, kind of semi-tinted glasses, and he's like, yeah, game mechanics. Who could patent something like that? It's the world's heritage. It's the game industry's heritage. It's funny because, you know, up until about 82, that was the legal argument. Like, there was no copyright protection in Japan for video games until a court case ruling came down in 82 that said in December, I think.

That was like, no, video games are subject to copyright protections, and therefore you cannot have an unlicensed clone. That is illegal. Also, I'm pretty sure Yamauchi didn't even understand what a game mechanic. Manic-wise. There's also that. Yeah, no, I'm sure he's like got his, like the penguin. He's got his cigarette and it's holder. He's like, games, the futures and games, that's what they tell me.

Games, mechanics, I don't understand these things. Shogi's in there, right? I'm sure Yamuchi's head when he thinks game mechanic, he thinks about Gunpa Yo-Koi, the guy who fixes all his games. That's the game of kids. Yes, exactly. He thinks that Gunei-Yolko is like, you know, loony tunes. What is that extendable arm thing, the ultra-hand?

What a game. Actually, I think Yamauchi's idea of a game. is the game of Go. A bunch of stones on a piece of wood. You definitely understood the mechanics of that. I'm just picturing him, like, you know, mentally picturing the, like, the song Powerhouse and someone in a factory, like, fixing these EM machines. Oh, man.

I actually, I remember when I interviewed, when I interviewed, um, Nintendo's, uh, oh my God, I'm blanking on his name, the engineer who made the, the, uh, the, uh, Uemura. Yes. When I interviewed Uwe-Mura, he told me that Nintendo purchased a bunch of Space Invader game cabinets and brought them into the offices so that they could study them with the purpose, obviously, of copying them. And, you know, Ui-Mura said that it infected the company for several weeks were like, no, everybody was playing the game, nobody's taking notes, nobody's doing anything to the point where, like, they had to, like, actually unplug. the damn things because they were like they were messing up Nintendo at the time and that's what Iromor is like, there's something

to this, you know? He was actually, I think he said he was just mad that he hadn't come up with it or they hadn't come up with it. That was like the idea, but like invaders invaded Nintendo circa 1978, nine. Sorry, I'm off topic again, sorry. I do have to give credit to

the soundscape of space invaders because that was not done by Nishado. That was done by Michiuki Kame who had recently graduated university. He has said that he wanted to harken back to the Jaws theme to create tension. I think

did a good job with there. I also want to note that the name came from Kazunari Tajima, who worked in Taito's export division. Nishkato does not like the Space Invaders theme. He still doesn't like the name.

He wanted to call it Space Monster. An awesome name. Which is an awesome. some name, but not as, I don't think it has the pull of space invaders. But it's more thematic with the art on the cabinet, which you have to give it that, which was done by Kazuo Nakagawa, who, uh, he believed, he envisioned this as like a battle on the moon as a last stand against the invaders. It's kind of cool. Interestingly, apparently the game initially also included a tilt sensor similar to like a pinball machine so that if you

got too mad and like shoved it around, it would cost to your entire game. You're trying to tilt those pixels. Like, if you can tilt the game, like, your shot or arc. It's wild. I don't think, I don't think people realize these, like, there was obviously a subset of people who probably didn't realize these things were happening inside a TV. You know what I mean? Maybe. Like, these things, they probably thought there was some kind of electromechanical thing going on. Is this a portal to another world? Exactly. And it's really funny, like, we've talked about how this game was like a huge exploded hit and a cultural icon. And nobody says, saw it coming, because when they first debuted this on June 16th, 78, at a, at a distributor show,

they showed it alongside Blue Shark, which was another game that no one remembers or cares about. I love this. And nobody there thought it was going to be much of a hit. They're like, Blue Shark, that's going to be the big hit, right? That was the winner. It's got like a time-based game. It's like what we're used to. Space Invaders, this is life-based.

it's too hard. No one's going to be able to play this. No one's going to want to spend money on it. So they only sold 500 units at that distributor show, mostly to its own locations and longstanding distributors who were just like, well, we want to keep a good relationship with Taito. So we'll buy your game. That's probably going to completely bomb.

The dark secret, this is actually just an example of this, like one of many. Nobody knows what's going to be a hit. Like looking back, you're like, Like, yeah, space invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, yeah. Nobody has any idea. Frogger. Even the people, I've interviewed these people. I've interviewed them.

Like, Uwe-Mura thought the NES was going to be a, the Fani Khan was going to be a failure. Everybody, everybody has no idea. Nobody has any idea. It's just, it's pure, it's not luck because there's some kind of, like, mojo happening where, like, you get this kind of, you know, organic traction going on. but anybody who says they can predict it is trying to sell you something, that's for sure. And my favorite part of this story is that Nishkato remembered that

the moment that he realized, oh, this game's actually going to take off is whence it started hitting like cafes and other kinds of venues. And he had to go out, or not he had to go out. They sent a technician, like they weren't going to send him to do this. But someone had a cabinet that was busted

after like a little under a month. And they went to go open. it up, only to find that the coinbox it overflowed. Similar to, you know, how Atari's like Pong story of the prototype broke because... And that happened with Donkey Kong later too. They're like, oh, we have

a hit. So, by September, this game was a runaway success. They could not keep up with production to meet the demand, which is why you got so many frigging clones. And I guess I want to put these numbers out there because they are insane.

So breakout. That was a huge hit for Atari, right? That sold around 11,000, 15,000 units in the U.S. Taito sold, by the end of 78, 100,000 space invaders cabinets just in Japan. And, like, most coin-out machines do not have that kind of production run. And that wasn't even the whole production run for this game. I think it wound up somewhere closer to, I think the estimate number is somewhere between 230 and 280,000 in Japan, just Japan, and 200,000 or so was just Taito and the companies that

officially licensed with them to make clones or production. Yeah, Diamond, go ahead. I want to think, like, all of us are old enough to remember Street Fighter 2. Think about how many places used to a Street Fighter 2. I'm pretty sure Street Fighter 2 maxed out at about 50,000 cabs, maybe 60, like that was a massive hit. that completely refreshed arcades. But this is in the 70s, late 70s, in one country, 100,000 machines where they're packing them in everywhere, wherever you, you know, any place you can get, a table where you can serve

drinks and two seats, put it in there. Physical distribution, not digital. Like you had to make these things. You had to ship them around and stuff like that. And I'm sure we're also going to touch on the fact that there was a shortage of 100 yen coins. That did happen. At the time, it did have.

You know, I had a first thing. thought, so like, that was taken as, as, it was, it was a rumor going around that the Japanese mint had to like make more 100 yen coins because they're all getting sucked into these machines. Later, I heard that was an exaggeration. And then later after that, I heard, nope, it wasn't an exaggeration. It really did have. It makes sense. I mean, it's tough for Americans to understand, I think, how much this just obsessed Japanese society at the time. And, you know, and it got 100 yen was a lot of money at the time. It's way more than a quarter. It was like, you know, now it's like a it's well now it's gotten cheaper again because the yen is so weak against the dollar but it's that was I remember the first time I came to Japan in 1990 I was like a hundred yen why can I why can't it win 25 yen on a game it is a lot it is a lot which is yes yeah the the the Japanese diet like their legislators had to negotiate directly with tito to get these coins back into circulation more quickly than they like otherwise would have which is wild and yeah they had to

increased production for a couple of months in 79. So, yeah, so Taito can't keep up with demand. They've licensed out to a few different companies because there's so many other companies making bootlegs. You've got Sega, you've got Nintendo, Data East, Konami, Universal, Osaka World Vending, a company that did not survive the invaders shakeout. That's the first time I've heard that one. They had world invaders.

And they got completely destroyed once they, The bottom fell out of this. The licensed companies include S&K, Sammy, Logitech, IPM, which later rebranded his Irum. I think it's a different logic. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hope it's a different Logitech. Because I think that's why today when you buy, you know, mouse or keyboard or whatever in Japan, it's called Logic Cool.

Because I think that's a different logic is something else. I didn't even realize that. I think so. I think that's what that happened, yeah. And what was the other company, Jatra? Yeah. Jatra Invaders, or whatever the heck it was called. So those were all, like, licensed officially through Taito.

See, S&K, they boot, like, the heck out of breakout, but, you know, space invaders, they were, they were doing you a solid. Until they made Osma Wars. Until they made Osmo Wars. Well, you know, that was the other fun thing, is that once this game, like, once the bottom fell out of the invader market, you had all of these boards, what were you going to do with them? You were going to have to come up with other games that used that hard. And so you get Osmo Wars. Yeah. And Brian, you have you have an anecdote in here.

Yeah. This was actually, I think, from the book that came with the Space Invaders' Invincible collection. So this was from a direct Nishikato interview. His mother ran a Dagashia, which is you can, you could probably talk for a while about what a Dagashia actually is, but it's like a small candy stores that you see a lot in maybe not exclusively, but in more kind of like slightly more rural areas. I feel like you associate them with mostly that sell like sort of cheap candy. There's one of my neighborhood.

It's kind of like a Degashia slash convenience store. Yeah, these days they've probably quote unquote evolved a little bit from like your classic image of them. But this is in Kishiwada City and the Osaka area. And she asked if Nishikato could get her one for the store. And Nishikato went to the executive director of sales at Taito to see if they were. would sell him one directly.

But, of course, at this time, like, cabinets were insanely hard to get. This was during a massive shortage where they couldn't even keep up with, you know, demand from everyone. But because, presumably because he was the man who created the game, the director made a special exception for him and let Nishikato's mother put it in the store. And what ended up happening is that they were so hard to get that people would see it and complain wondering how in the world some tiny little store got. a cabinet when no one else could. I hope she put up a big sign saying,

my son made this. Fuck off. And then they'd be like, sure. Okay. Of course he did, lady. I assume that she absolutely, like, bragged about this. The entire time this game was booming.

And I remember him saying, like, when they were talking to her about it, like she would kind of like rag me a little being like, but you made the game. You have to be able to get one. me dark force is cold and unseen oh my hip pocket nerve is aching again i must go back in and find that up to the end space and crazy ass

We talked about the score chasing aspect of people, and like, there was chasing scores in this game. And, like, there was a lot of coverage of people chasing scores in this, even in the U.S., like, some of the earliest coverage of coin-up game spaces were of players, like, trying to get the high score on Space Invaders. There's like, oh man, I should have put his name in here. There's this Hawaiian player who was super good in the late 70s at Space Invaders. And he's been dubbed as one of the early pro gamers, quote unquote, even though I don't think he ever made a dive. And he went for like hours and hours, didn't he? In like a straight session.

I'm going to say at least an hour. Yeah. You definitely rolled the score a few times, which is admittedly something you could do in what, 10, 15 minutes. Yeah. If you're, I mean, as someone who's rolled the score over a couple of times myself, like, it is not impossible. Yeah.

And it doesn't take a super, super long time. I actually looked it up. So at this point, the official record, at least via Twin Galaxies, is 218,870 points by an Australian guy, John Tannahill. And that sounds right. According to the records, it took him three hours and 48 minutes. to get that score. He's the guy I was thinking of, I think. That is extremely, it's a hard, it's a hard enough to crash.

Right. And obviously that's the official line via Twin Galaxies. If you go on YouTube, you can see longer play-throughs that go to even higher scores, which are emulated, which are not included in the official records. But yeah, there are people out there who can play this game for many, many hours at a time to get even higher scores above the official high score. But yeah, that's the numbers we're talking about here. It's funny because Nishkato programmed in eight distinct waves, and each new wave, the invaders start a lower down one line. No one in testing could get past the fifth wave.

So he's like, okay, well, this isn't going to be a big deal. We'll have the high score, but it's not like it's going to roll or anything. And then, you know, not too long after the game came out, the Nagoya attack methodology was discovered. And in the U.S., it's known by the much darker names, like Wall of Death or execution method. The concept here is that there's a bug in the game where if the invaders are on the very last row, like right above your cannon, their shots will just go through you. There's no hitbox. And because of this, you can carve open a window in their ranks and just hunt UFOs.

And once you know that the UFOs are on a shot counter, you can always time it so that, When they fly by, it's a 300-point UFO. So you can score a lot of points, and all you have to do is make sure you keep the invaders in check and are really good at hitting that last one that's going really fast. I personally love this story because I feel like to this day, this is like one of the very few things that Nagoya is famous for. So I really, I'm glad they have this, you know, they deserve it. Well, the funny thing is there are, I mean, based on obviously, there are slight variation. Like there's a Kyoto Uchi, for example. It's like, it's not super, super different from the Nagoya Uchi, but it's like, oh, no, you put the whole here instead of here or whatever.

And it's like, presumably wherever the person who came up with it is from is where they named it after. Right. But Kyoto has so much, Brian. Oh, Kyoto has a lot. Yeah. Nagoya needs a win. You could go to Kyoto. You could go to Kyoto and spend an entire week there, and you wouldn't be tired of all the stuff.

Nagoya is the one that people remember in this case, is the important part. They needed that love. They needed it. Yes. They should be like the epicenter of space invaders competitions today. That could be their new claim to fame. They could be the East Sports. Their official prefectural mascot.

It's a space invader now. Like you've got the East Sports World Cup in Saudi Arabia. This could be the Space Invaders World Cup in Nagoya. Just saying, throwing that out there. Make it happen, guys. I'll travel to Naguya for that. There you go. So Nishano really thought he was going to get in trouble for this pug because they did not find it

until the game was already out and popular. But since people thought it was cool and it was still making a crap load of money, his bosses were like, eh, it's fine. Let's roll with it. And I would argue, like, would the score chasing for that game even have become what it was if that bug hadn't existed? I would actually say no, because it's like, it really gives you a way. Like, if you practice, you can reliably reproduce results because of it.

Do we have any record of who thought up the idea of shooting through the shield, because I feel like that was also, like, when I found out about that, I was, like, way past the era of actually playing Space Invaders, but, like, when I heard about that, I was like, oh, wow, I never thought to do that. I mean, obviously, it's Philip J. Frye. Oh, yeah, that's fair. Yeah, I have no idea if that's been recorded anywhere. And, yeah, like, this game got its own strategy guys.

It's the first game that had a strategy guide. In the U.S., it was released a year later as how to win its Space Invaders. But in 79, it was released as a how-to-and-tack Invaders with the Japanese title that I'm not going to bother trying to read. There's a really famous British novelist who wrote that Space Invaders guide. Martin Amos? It's a separate guide. The British one did exist too. And let me tell you, that came up so many times when I was trying to buy this copy.

Well, it's funny because Amos is like one of the, he's like one of the kind of leading lights of the British literary scene of that era. And he kind of disavowed this book. It was called Invasion of the Space Invaders and Addicts Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores, and the Best Machines. And it's actually a really amazing portrait of what the invaders craze was like in Britain at that time. Much recommended. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good perspective to take into this case. I know it was huge in Europe, because Midway did a lot of business over there with it. But you know, you mostly hear about it from Japan's perspective.

Not even more Americas. Yeah, the U.S. But yeah, it was big in Britain, huge in Britain. Another terrible title, though, invasion of the invaders. Get the fuck out of here. That is pretty bad. Sorry. I'm sorry. Excuse my French. But come on. Come on. If you're in England especially, you gave us English. Do work harder. Use a synonym. But like, yeah, we talked a little bit about with Osmo Wars when the invader hangover hit and they let all this hardware stock, like the games they made to use that. Yeah, some of these were actually pretty interesting games that used the similar hardware. Like, Konami made Astro Invader, which I think Stern licensed in the U.S. I think it was their first video game. Stern of Berserk fame.

That's right. And like Astro Invader, pretty cool game. Taito made Lupon the Third, which that's right. And we're not talking about that like Laserdisc game. No, this is like not really a maze, Chase. game, but it's kind of that. There's also, like, Luter Rescue, Polaris. What's the other one? Space Cyclone, I think, uses the invader hardware.

Like, they had a lot of space invaders stock to work through. Can we also, can we also pour out on the curb, so to speak, for those, all of those little handheld knockoffs and things like that. Epoch, all of these companies made a little, like, LCD invader games and things like that. In fact, I played probably as much on a little, I don't know what the company was. It was just like a little space invader clone. like battery-powered standalone LCD game that I did in the arcades. I mean, it was a very easy, it was a, it was a game mechanic, oh, there's that word that

Yamauchi loves so much, it was, it was a game mechanic that was, that was easy to copy, and it was easy to replicate in non-c, you know, I don't know, I say non-CPU, but non-video style form. I don't know, what am I trying to say here? Not drawn on a TV screen, but actually like an LCD screen or something, or even like plastic there were all of these like tomy i think was making these kind of physical space invader kind of games that were almost like there was a sort of electro mechanical sort of field to it yeah um this game did get a lot of uh interesting like clones and uh and ports to like portable ones

i know uh epic had the tv vader that was that was their uh their console version and as far as I'm aware. This was like the first home console version of space invaders in Japan, except for maybe the Atari one, which we'll get to a little later. And that thing is, it's interesting. It's got 48 invaders, but you only see eight at a time because the hardware is not very good. You only see the bottom most ones in all the columns. And the other problem, I mean, this is maybe making too broad of a statement, but like if you get into this, this game for the score, you will very quickly find that most of the knockoffs don't observe any of those same rules at all. And so, like, if you're doing things like Nagoya Uchi or whatever, you often can't do them

in a lot of the clone. So, like, you've got to play it straight, whatever that means. People approach this with such rigor. Do you know what I mean? Like, they were so serious about it. Like, this is life and death, this battle against the invaders. Oh, man, here's the one I had N-Tex. N-Tex's super space invaders.

Oh, yeah. N-Tex was great. I have their galaxian one, and that one's a great piece of work. It sounds like some kind of like sanitary hygienic product, but N-Tex, they did produce quite a few games of my youth. I will say this for TV Vader. They did actually have a shot counter set up for the UFO. Since it wasn't random. It wasn't like a set.

It also doesn't match the TV-Vader. shot counter of the arcade game But if you look at the manual It does tell you like the point values for each shot So you still have You still have the experience It's just not the same experience I think it's not the same experience

I thinkeran It's sure Kerelde Uso's not No, Uso's not No really

It's all It's all You are just a little bit of the I'm a little to-o-o-o-dok-a-kidat-tok-o-you-all-you-can I just add, and you can I just add, and you can feel free to cut this in wherever you want. There's actually a place in Tokyo where you can experience. experience a retro style invader room now. It's in Nakano Broadway. Oh, really? And it is a, it was a little coffee shop. And about a year and a half ago or so, it's run by the company, Kai Kiki, which is the

company that manages all of super flat, Takashi Murakami's art stuff. And they replicated it down to, like, they had linoleum printed that has that kind of the floral pattern that was on the rugs of these places. They put in, like, all of that dark wood paneling, the light fixtures and things like that. It's not all invader games, but it is probably the closest thing in atmosphere to an invader room, minus the carcinogenic cigarette smoke that was, I'm sure, hanging in every, it's not smoking. How long has this been there for, approximately? I opened maybe a year and a half ago, and it's, it's cool. The coffee is really good. I'm just always, I'm not a huge fan of Takashi Murakami, but he's, he's earned his, you know, way into

heaven for putting a good coffee shop and knock on a Broadway, because there weren't a lot of them until then. The only problem with it is, is that all of the game, and they use the cocktail cabinet style cabinets, but they're all emulations, which is fun, but they charge 500 yen a game, which is not. It's like, what, what? Like, I can literally play this thing on my iPhone if I want. And it's mainly aimed at tourists.

You don't have to play the games to sit there and enjoy it. But it is, what is it called? It's called Bar Zingalo, I think, or something like that. Or it was, I don't know what it's called now, but it's right there and second floor, not going to Broadway. Tell them Matt sent you. I'm a little surprised that they're using emulation. Well, they knock the game prices down to 300 yen instead of 500 if I tell them you sent me.

Yeah, please. I would like them to knock it down to 100 yen. They'd still be making money off of this stuff. I don't know what the thinking is there, but the coffee is very good. It used to be run by a Scandinavian company called Fuggan. I don't know if it's still them, but the coffee is great.

So, good place to rest after you have been stocking up on all of your otaku things from a knock on a Broadway. That's funny that they went with emulation. I feel like for a game that had a production run in the, you know, 200 to 300,000 units,

They probably could have sourced original boards that were not too expensively here. I don't think many of those old machines still exist. Either they got gutted and new things got put in, but Japan is very much like, you know, especially in the big cities, there's not a lot of space. And so big things like that get just junked, they get thrown away. True, but you can still find invader boards on like Yonu auctions. Pretty cheap, though. I've looked it up because I've thought about getting one here.

Well, the hero move, the hero move would have been filling this place with all, like, every kind of clone of space invas. Oh, man. That's true. That would probably be a little more trick, difficult. It would be pretty bad ass. He has the money. He can do it. That would actually be performance art, I would appreciate. There we go. Do you remember if the cabinets that they had there, because to my recollection, the original Japanese cabinets used a joystick for movement, whereas, as we'll probably get into in a moment, the U.S. counterparts had buttons for movement. Do you recall if they... These are joystick. These are all modern. These are modern. The cabinets are emulated too. I see. Okay. I didn't know how closely they tried to like reproduce like, okay, they just didn't care about that. All right. It's, it's very much like a standard definition version. It's not high definition to get my drift. It's close enough. It's close enough. I'm just glad there's no smoking in there because speaking as somebody who spent a lot of time in Japan, like even the first time I came here was during the bubble era. It was a smoky, smoky country.

Yeah, we kind of haven't said that out loud, but up to this point, yeah, imagine all these invader rooms packed with machines and almost every person inside is having a cigarette, almost. Absolutely reeking. Every photo you see has like an overflowing ashtray on it from that era. It's just, it's filthy. It's horrible. So, yeah, we talked, we alluded to the American release, and we'll let's pop into that real quick. So, you know, Midway got the license to it because Taito had originally intended to bring this out themselves. they had a small American branch.

Once this game exploded in Japan, they're like, okay, there's no way we're going to possibly be able to keep this up. We have this good relationship with Midway. They have the production capacity to manage this. Let's let them handle it. Midway first showed it off in November at the industry trade so, the AMOA. There was a lot of interest, but not a lot of orders. But by February in 79, the game had blown up.

did not blow up to the same extent as Japan, but they still ended up selling somewhere around 65,000 units. Which is a lot for the U.S. Those are Street Fighter 2 numbers. You know what I think? Like that's what we're talking about. Yeah, their failure is like a huge success. Yeah, Midway was not unhappy about this.

Yes. But what I find really fascinating about the Western, like, release of this is Hawaii, you know, that was located off the mainland, you know, partway towards Japan. They kind of got Space Invaders hooks in them before the mainland did. And they would be importing machines from Japan and bring in the domestic ones from the U.S. as well. So it's sort of a real mix and match. Like, all right, is this machine one that has a joystick or one with buttons? Right.

Take your pick. I always get shocked when I see the old American machines with the buttons on them. Because somehow, even though that's how I played it as a kid, I remember it as a joystick. Yeah. I mean, I would play me. the joystick. Yeah. I would probably blame the Atari version because obviously when I played at a home with the Atari

had a joystick. Right. But yeah, it makes sense if, because I definitely played the arcade version and I just, you know, I completely, you know, like Mandela effect. Like, what do you mean? Buttons, it's joystick. Yeah. So here's a question, and this might be a little bit too philosophical for this group.

But I don't mean that as a, as a slam or anything like that. This is just the kind of thing I think about way too much. I, whenever I encountered Space Invaders. or Pac-Man or whatever. They always had the Midway logo on them. And I never linked these things to Japan. It was much, much, much later that I ever made that connection. And I wonder if that was deliberate. You know, this was an era when Japan bashing was in full force. And a lot of companies went out of their way to hide the Japanese origins of the products they were selling. Like, Hasbro is another one. Like, you could be forgiven for, like, having grown up in the 80s and not realizing the Transformers were a Japanese total. line, you know, because there's a Marvel comic. They're all, like, they have, like, Western names, you know, they have Western voice actors and stuff. Um, I, Nintendo was actually kind of a real trailblazer because they're like coming in with like middle fingers extended. We're Japanese, you know? We, they were owning it. Like, they never made any, uh, they never hid

the fact they were Japanese and all. And actually, I remember talking to one of the people who was involved in marketing the NES back in 85. And he's like, oh, yeah, no, we didn't, we didn't bother hiding it was Japanese. In fact, we said these are the cutting-edge games from Japan or something like that. But space invaders, Pac-Man, you know, like, I didn't realize they were Japanese until much later. I always assumed it was deliberate. Right. Yeah, I would figure as much. Yeah. I mean, there's like still like a lot of like, remember pro harbor like people back around then, you know? It's like, I would have our kids play Japanese games. I was say it's only a few decades since the war ended at that point. Lots of people were still alive from the war. Oh, people were smashing

Japanese cars with sledgehammers. They were, they were like smashing Japanese radios with sledgehammers. Like, people, like, ostensible adults were doing this. While I was a kid, like, playing with my Transformers and Shogun Warriors and, you know, reading manga and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, when you came up around

Detroit, like, you didn't drive around a Japanese car unless you wanted someone to smash it or key it. There was a while there where that was 100% true. And, like, even from a business perspective, too, like, I assume, even if it wasn't, you know, necessarily, like, anti-Japan sentiment. It would have been, well, we're Midway, we're publishing this. We want

people to think of Midway when they think of Space and Thiggers. Why do we want them to think of Taito? Who cares about Taito? You know, we paid them their licensing fee already. Which is extra funny to me because Midway, which was owned by Bally, and they had a home system, the Bally Professional Arcade, and they had a Space Invaders home version in like late 79, December 79 is the good one, I think it was when it came out. And then the next. Next month, Atari announced that they had made a deal with Taito directly to have a console exclusive for Space Invaders. So Midway or Bally had to just rapidly change the name of the game on all the labels from Space Invaders. But Atari's was a licensed portrayal.

Is that what a port? It was the first outside licensed video game that any company had done that I'm aware of. of they'd done like a licensed Superman game but that was super easy because Border owned DC and Atari so that's really in house. Space invaders moved a lot of 2,600s

is my impression. I mean that's one of the most common cartridges. I remember that was the big thing. My dad, I remember my parents were like wow, space invaders at home. Yes. This home version like this was the game that set off the American video game boom.

I'd argue it's just as important as the arcade game, at least in the U.S. This one... Bigger than E.T.? Really? This game sold... So, okay, I'll put this into perspective. The 2,600 version... So it's 2,600 between 77 and 79.

They sold about 1 million consoles, right? Space Invaders comes out in, I believe, it was March 1980, and then all of a sudden, they sold 1,000-2600s in that year. alone and even more in the subsequent years until it ends its run at what like 20 or 30 million units and space invaders sold I think we know somewhere around six and a half million or 6.2 million units. Was it a pack-in? I don't remember that. It was not a pack-in until

1982 when Sears made it a pack-in to replace air-sea battle. But for Atari branded stuff, it was never a pack-in title. This was always its own thing. It wasn't a particularly faithful rendition, but it was a satisfying one as compared to, say, 2600 Pac-Man, which I remember. That was one of the first true disappointments in adult culture that I ever... Wow, grown-ups

made this and it sucks this bad. Yeah, I think there's a key difference there, because Pac-Man was made by someone who did not really like Pac-Man and as such didn't really know what people liked about Pac-Man to try and pull in. Whereas Space Invaders, it was done by Rick Moorer, who was an Atari programmer who just come to the company from Fairchild, where he made games for the Channel F.

He loved Space Invaders. And so even though they didn't have like the license to it or anything at that point, he's like, I'm going to make my own Space Invaders game based on what I can do with this system and what I've noticed just playing it at the arcade. Smart thinking. You know, whenever I want a job done, I hire somebody who has to be. hates doing that job with all of their heart. It's the way to do it. You always get the best results that way. Yes.

A feeling of power comes over your hand. Row by row your end command. There's one last devil moving real fast. One single shot. Got him at last. Space invader. Hey, why you can't. Space and danger.

So, like, he worked on this for, like, four or five months, and he was having a hard time making it run on the 2600 because the machine is not built to play Space Invaders. So he put it down and, like, started working on another game, May's Cray's. And then, um, he picked it back up a few months later because Warner's CEO, Mani Gerard, uh, was, like, leaning on Atari to get the Space Invaders license because he had noticed just how many, like, people in general and Atari employees in particular were suddenly really into space invaders. And, like, separately, Epoch, who had been distributing the 2,600 in Japan, I don't remember their name for it. I'm sure if Jeremy were here, he'd know it off the top of his head. But they were having trouble, like, moving units.

And they're like, hey, can you get space invaders on this thing? Because people will buy space invaders. So. Well, they actually had, like, big space invaders competitions. I remember that, like, champion. ships, like around America. Yeah. Becky Heideman, the game developer, won one. That was her claim to fame

originally. Yes, yes. What was she when I was speaking to her for pure invention, not to keep plugging this book, although I will, she was talking, I was talking to her about like Game Boy games and later kind of things like that. She was actually a big source of information about how Americans developers saw the Game Boy back then. But what was she really known for?

in the 80s. What is her big title? Titles... Oh, God. Bards' Tale? I think she's involved in Bards Tale. Like, it was PC games, I think, mainly. I don't remember off the top of my head. I wasn't really playing too many computer games in the 80s.

I know she had an interview Retronaut, so maybe go check that out. I'm fired. I didn't watch that. Sorry. Well, I can think about it's your story about the trying to port doomed to the 3DO and how terrible I do remember that story. where they just like gave her the PC going like,

yeah, you just plug this into the 3DO and it'll work, right? Oh, God. That's how porting work, sure. Yeah. So a couple of fun little anecdotes from its development. So it does not have the Nagoya shot strategy.

UFOs are always 200 points. Oh. But to make up for it, he threw in 112 game variations. Oh, yeah, geez. Because those old game systems had that. That was, like, the solution to every problem at that point was more, more variations. His reasoning is like, well, okay, if one of these is bad, then there's a bunch of other ones that people can try out, and they might like one of them.

So, like, you've got invisible invaders. You've got the barriers moving around. They've got shots that, like, move erratically. You've got fast shots. It's like a bunch of different two-player variations. I know one of the simpler switches, it might have just been difficulty switch, just made your turret, like, three times as well. The difficulty switches just make you huge. Yeah, so it just made it more challenging because you're now a huge target, but you still have, you're still only firing the one shot, and the invaders are the same size, but they can hit you way more easily than they can hit you.

And I remember playing with as a kid, you know, after a couple hours, like, okay, let's try this version, you know? Yeah, right. He actually had to design the invaders themselves because he was trying to get like an artist, like an actual professional dot artist to do it. and no one was available, or at least no one told him that when anyone was available. I believe they were called pixel mongers back then. So he had to do that. You know, it's a good, it's a good term. I'm going to start using that now.

I like the Atari creatures. They're cute little creatures, you know? They are very cute. Yeah, yeah. They're iconic in their own way. Your base looks better. Your base actually looks like a kind of like space arc or something like that, as I recall. It's like a little like.

See, I always thought it looked like a Christmas tree when I was. Yeah, yeah, well, you know. When it gets big, when he turn to that difficulty on high end, it gets wide, it definitely looks like half a UFO or something. Yeah, and I appreciate this. He apparently spent several days trying to, like, tune the audio just

right, because he's like, okay, the biggest part of the arcade game is the sound scape. I can't emulate that on the 2600 because the sound chip is not great, but I could do my best, spent several days, spent several days, just on the sound. I think what you mean is he took a deep, he took a

deep in hell. Let me think about it. I got to, oh, that, that, yeah, okay. It just felt like several days. You know, I don't honestly know if he was one of the stoners on the staff at that point, because, you know, this is, this is post-warner and they were sort of trying to get a handle on that. He tried it, but he didn't inhale, I believe.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know where Morer is now. No one has had any contact with him since, like, the late 2000s. but everyone was like this guy is awesome he was a great developer apparently he was the reason why they started getting royalties at Atari

because he only got a $3,000 bonus for this game and because that pissed him off and pissed off a bunch of other people eventually people started leaving to start their own companies and the Atari's like okay how about we give you real royalties

for making these games instead which is why Todd Fry made millions off of Pac-Man even though he hated the game. We should all be so lucky. Right. And, you know, I think it's also fascinating because according to Moore in like these early interviews than he did before he disappeared is that there was a big debate within Atari

at the time. It's like, oh, should we do original games on the console? Because like there are a console, we can do like not arcade stuff. Or should we just port arcade games? And because Space Invaders exploded beyond, you know, any other game. on the platform. I think it was like the second bestseller after Pac-Man. That sort of answered the question for management. Like, no, start making more arcade ports.

And that sort of just became the red and butter eventually. And I would say, you know, we brought up E.T. earlier and Pac-Man, I think the success of Space Invaders probably informed those debacles because the executives looked at Space Invaders and like, oh, we sold this many units. Well, now we can have, you know, Pac-Man is a huge hit. sell this many more units and oh, ET is the biggest, you know, is the highest grossing movie of all time. I'm sure if we make that into a game, we can sell

even more units. But listeners, I'm moving my hand up every time to give a visual key here, but like all they did was the, you know, line, line, they moved, line up and eventually they're, you know, I think at the end they were planning to sell more units than they had consoles because they literally couldn't stop

visioning more lines. It's like, no, it doesn't work at all. It doesn't work at all. It's really funny. Like, it's a slight tangent. So, like, a lot of the crash is because Atari couldn't keep up with demand, especially after Space Invaders came out. You know, Atari dominated the console space. Sort of like, okay, as a modern example, take the Switch and the PS5, or maybe the Switch and the Xbox series, whatever. And I'm like, okay, this is the big one. This is the one that's sold, you know, millions and millions of units. Here's one that sold, like, maybe a

million, maybe two, if you're lucky, in comparison. So that's sort of the situation you were looking at. And Atari could not keep up with demand. They had to scale up their company so fast after Space Invaders exploded. Like, they did not expect this to be as big a hit it was. And it went so well for them over the long run. Oh, yeah, it went great. They couldn't supply enough games and consoles to distributors and stores in 1980 and 81.

So they started ordering. more than they wanted because they knew like, okay, well, if we order double what we want, we'll get the exact amount we want. That'll not bite us in the butt or anything. And then 82, that's how we finally caught up

to orders. And suddenly everyone had more stuff than they wanted, and that just brought the whole system down. So Space Invaders gave us the video game boom, and it gave us the video game crash indirectly. So it is.

and it take it the way. It is the destroyer of worlds in the U.S. It's the video game equivalent. The original land of contrasts. We're going to serve me for the rest of my days. The jada-ta-ta-ta-ha-ha-love the poor and humble.

You love the man who walks in a humble way. So going over some of the, like, little Space Invaders clones, we have Space Invaders part two, released in the U.S.'s Deluxe Space Invaders. I hate that they change the naming like this. It's really stupid. Yeah. It makes you, someone could be forgiven for thinking that this is just a slightly enhanced version of the original Space Invaders. and I guess maybe you can argue that it is,

but like it turns the scoring strategies on their heads kind of because they have just enough differences to kind of muck up your shot counting. Mm-hmm. Yeah, this game didn't take off quite to the same extent, probably because of the, you know, crushing of the invader boom in Japan. But like it does some interesting things. It has like cute little cutscenes, which I don't think, I can't think of too many examples before that point.

Oh, the first, I mean, I don't think so, because, I mean, Pac-Man is, what, 80, so this is definitely first, so before Pac-Man anyway. And they're cute, like, they're calling for backup. And they do some, like, other interesting twists on the formula that make it less fun to try and get a high score in. I wish they wouldn't call for backup. up, like, spawn invaders into other invaders, which is really what screws up your shot count. And, like, depending on when they do it, if it's too close to the end of the line, like, you're kind of screwed. Yeah. There might be ways around that.

I haven't really delved in deep to try to figure out, like, how you can modify the strategy for space invaders part two. But, like, also less people seem to care about that in general. Like, I think people would rather just play the first space invaders versus part two. slash deluxe. Yeah, this one, you really have to more, you have to play it more straight, I feel like. So, like, yeah, you have the invaders that can, like, split apart. When you shoot them, they're the ones that, like, expand in really weird ways when they're, like, stopping around.

The mystery ship can drop off extra UFOs. And also, sometimes you get a different mystery ship that just sort of blinks and is really, really annoying to try and hit. Yeah, extremely. And, like, if you're going, like, you can still use, you know, know, the shot counting stuff all still works. You just have to be really prepared to, for the game to cause you to miss your count. And, like, you can't find yourself in a position where it's like, okay, I missed it. Now I lost my count.

Now I'm all screwed up. Like, this game will help you, like, recover from failure, basically. Yeah. But I will give it this much. So there was a rumor going around when Space Invaders came out. So there was a bug in the game where you, uh, if it will, the last. A lot of the last invaders on the screen is one of the little bottom ones. Like, I don't know.

Why are they supposed to be octopus or something? If you shoot that one last, or if you leave one of those last, it'll leave like a little trail on the screen as it goes back and forth. And there was a rumor that if you did that for like a whole row of them, something would happen. And in this game, they made that into something real. Nishkato did. If you destroy one of those invaders last, you get a little graphical rainbow and it gives you a bunch of bonus points, which is cute. I've done that a few times.

It's not as much fun as, you know, Nagoya attacking them, but... But what is really? But I think as fascinating is that this game came out in September in Japan, the same time that Galaxian came out in Japan. And guess which one did a lot better? Yeah, I can kind of understand why, too. Yeah. But, uh, and, you know, we've been talking about Taito's arcades and, uh,

I believe, I think this might have been one of their first ones, or at least it was a big one. They opened an arcade in Kabuki Cho in August 79, and that included Space Invaders Part 2, like a month early. But it was a special, and it was Space Invaders Jumbo, which I've really only seen references to a few times. These were just like cabinets with massive screens running Space Invaders Part 2. But they were like 200 yen a pop, which that's double the price. of a normal machine, and the boom had already ended, so, like, they didn't really make very many.

It's, it's a game. It's worth checking out, but you're not going to get super stoked about it, I feel like. Be warned, when you see that deluxe label, some of your stuff might not work if you're playing for score. The big screen, the big screen version reminds me of a version I've seen, like, recently, where it's like...

Gigamax? Yeah, like, they've repurposed the Space Invaders icon to sort of, like, be almost like a, a, a... sit-down shooter with big-ass guns and the invaders come down. But, like, the screen is huge. I played that with my son a couple years ago, like, in Florida. And, like, we just, you know, it's obviously a very different game because it plays differently. But the iconography and all the characters are still there.

And to put the size of it, it reminds me of this concept. Like, hey, if you like Space Invaders, look at this giant Space Invaders machine. Come on. Come on. In the U.S., you can find it in pretty much any Dave and Busters or. similarly like family friendly kind of place that you know still may have some uh redemption style like arcade games or whatever for like kids to win tickets for prizes or whatever yeah we were in a mall we were in a mall shopping or uh mall arcades yeah that would make that would be where they

keep it yeah but it is cool that they like reused space invaders for that and kind of like reinvented it a little bit for you know ostensibly a new generation but yes i can tell you that the Nagoyuchi does not work in that version of the game. I tried. As much as we wish it would. Yeah. Think of all the tickets you'd give that. You could get anything you want out of the counter. What would Michael Kogan think? An actual gun! Brian, do you just try the Nagoya strategy on every game you play? Like, when you play Final Fight, do you try to go his strategy? No.

Maybe. I mean, what if it worked in Final Fight three? We wouldn't know unless you try. You don't know until you try, do you? Um, here's a game I've never really tried it for. So, you know how Midway made a bunch of, like, Pac-Ban sequels and whatnot? Well, they did kind of the same thing with Space Invaders. Uh, they made GORF, uh, by Jamie Fenton. She developed it at a Dave Nutting Associates.

Um, so this is like a five-stage, uh, shooting game. And the first stage is Space Invaders. Uh, and the third stage is Galaxied, because they had the rights to that as well. Um, there's a few differences. Like, there's different types of UFOs. You can move up and down. Your shots can be canceled and refired. It's weird.

It's a weird take on Space Invaders. It's supposed to be very, like, slight. So I've never bothered trying to play it in the traditional scoring sense. But, like, it's there. It's cool. If you see Gorf, you can have some fun with the booming audio. It's a different sound chip than Space Invaders, but it's very loud. Thank you, Kevin, for putting it.

this in the notes because honestly, that was probably, it's like unlocked a 40-year-old memory in my brain because I had Gorf for the Commodore 64, and I absolutely played it a lot because it was one of the, you know, one of the early Coms 64 games that we had, and it made sense to me because I had played a lot of Space Invaders, and I don't know if I actually thought hard about the name, because looking at it now, I wonder if it's just, is it just frog backwards? It could be Frog backwards. It was just Frog backwards. Yeah, okay. And then, And, you know, Bally also released a Space Invaders pinball machine, which has absolutely nothing to do with Space Invaders other than using the sound effects. But that was enough to make like 11,000 of these things, which is a pretty good production number for pinball.

They had to stop production early because their backglass art looked too close to unused art for Alien. Oh. done by H.R. Geiger. So I don't know how they thought they were going to get away with that one. But Godspeed. God bless him. I'm staring directly. Brian, does the Goya strategy work in the pinball game? I've not actually played the pinball game, believe it or not. I admit I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around how you would even try it in pinball.

You know, I was at an arcade over the weekend that had the pinball. machine and I did not have any coinage for it so I got I got screwed out of playing it you may have to confirm that for us uh being probably the closest person to one I'm not I don't visit galloping ghosts pinball building too much I mostly stick to the video games but I there's also a chance that they may have it too maybe I mean 11000 units that's quite a few for pinballs I'm sure there's quite a few floating around still um then the last one I wanted to bring up this is invaders Revenge and I'm bringing it up because it is so beyond like what you'd expect out of a

Space Invaders clone. So this was developed by a British company called Zenitone in released January 81. I saw it described once as it is to Space Invaders what dokey dokey panic is to Super Mario Brothers. Basically it runs on Space Invaders hardware with an extra soundboard

with like A.Y. 8910 chips to produce like sound and music, like it has actual music in it. And it's sort of like a weird mashup of space invaders, Galaxian, Donkey Kong 3, and Sega's Astroblaster. So, like, these invaders are coming out in different formations and patterns. They're floating around. They're going to try and steal, like, blocks of fuel from the bottom of the screen and

carry them back up to the UFO at the top. If you destroy all the invaders in a wave, you'll go to a screen where you have to dock with your mother ship to get more fuel. You should look up YouTube videos of this because it is honestly wild that it's running on the same hardware

as the original game. Can we please briefly mention Pepsi Invaders? I think it's worth mentioning Pepsi Invaders. This is a rendition of the 2600 Space Invaders game

that was developed as a promotional item for a Coca-Cola sales convention in 1983 That's the twist. That's the twist. You hear the words Pepsi invaders like, oh, it's like a Pepsi branded Space Invaders to sell more Pepsi. No.

No, it was made by Coke because they hate Pepsi. They only made 125 of these. And they, you know, gave them out to company executives. The ROM has been dumped since the 90s. So by all means, take a look at it. It's really funny. Like, you cannot lose because Coke cannot lose against Pepsi. It says Coke wins.

the end of every single level every time, which for the longest time I thought the game was called Coke wins. But you can be forgiven for making that mistake because Coke always wins. It's the... It's true. It's the video game equivalent of putting your rival's face on a dartboard.

It's so funny. It is. It's so funny. Oh, see, how come Capcom and S&K never quite did that? Right. You have Dan Hebeki, but he's not just straight up Robert Garcia. Right. So I think that's, uh, that's So I think that's, uh, that's space invaders,

Does anyone else have anything they want to talk about? Any final thoughts on how this game sort of impacted everything? Yeah, I mean, stating the obvious, there's a strong argument for it to be made of, like, giving birth to the schmup genre. I mean, it's a pretty far cry from what those games would turn into, like, even a small handful of years later. But, like, I don't know that we would have had even, like, a Gradius or anything. without space invaders existing. Like, you put them next to each other, and it may be hard to recognize the similarities

if you don't know what you're looking for, but I'm pretty sure none of that would have happened if space invaders hadn't brought them to life. I would argue it is probably one of the most important video games ever made, if not the most important from Japan's perspective. And then below that large claim, It's like, yeah, I think it absolutely invented the shooter genre as we know it.

And I think it's the main reason that shooter games continue to succeed, at least in Japan, to this day. I think now with the internet being the way it is, I think you're getting more shooter fans overseas. And thanks to Steam, the fact that you can make, you know, a hobbyist or whatever can make, oh, like a Dojin shooter that has lots of weird characters in it, but it's still scrolling up and you're shooting lots of enemies, which makes it like the grandchild of Space Invaders. And you can put that on Steam. And if, you know, if you work it on yourself, maybe you sell a thousand copies and that you break even. You know, like there's a whole world out there of people who maybe if they never played Space Invaders are making and loving games that are directly descended from Space Invaders. So I really don't think you can undersell the impact. Again, I made a joke at the start of this podcast.

I really don't think I was joking. I really feel like without Space Invaders, Japan as a nation, as a society. does not exist in the same way that it exists today, really doesn't. The economy, I mean, the fact that it literally impacted the economy, like the number of coins that were circulation, that's not a small feat. You know, Street Fighter 2 never did that. That's true. And, you know, you think about it, games like Donkey Kong.

Donkey Kong exists because Nintendo had a bunch of Radar Scope machines that they needed to sell. Radar scope was a offshoot of Space Invaders, a game design. design. Same with Galaxian, which was Namco's big breakout here. Kevin, I just wrote about this in my weekly column, which is available to all Patreon backers at $5 or more, I just wrote about this weekly column when I talked about Twinby, Twinby turned 40. And Twinby is absolutely a response. I mean, Twins is more of a Zevius, but still that is the Qomup, and the Qomup, and the Qomup derives from the Shootimup, and we still have Qomps today because we have shoot-'ups the first place. It's all connected. And I talked

about the fact that, yes, Space Invaders was so popular. Even a failed Space Invaders clone gave us Donkey Kong which basically invented Nintendo as we know it. Like, it's all connected. Picture me on that board, like Charlie Day in it's always sunny. Like, it's all connected.

I find it really funny to think that, okay, if you trace it back the entire, like, shooter genre goes back to Pong to break out to Space Invaders and not to Space War, which you would think it would be Space War. Not computer It's a shooting game. Not computer space. No. Computer space? No, it's Pong. Cracks me up. And now that's probably going to sit with everyone who's listening to this in horrifying ways. Yeah, anything else? I think we're good. Yeah, this has been Retronauts. This is a Patreon-supported show. If you are a Patreon, or if you are a patron already, that's fantastic. If you're not, what are you doing with your life? You could be supporting us.

At patreon.com slash retronauts, $3 level, get each episode one week early and at a higher bit rate. $5 level, you get the aforementioned weekly columns by Diamond, and Friday bonus episodes. So you should check it out. You should subscribe if you're not. And where can we find you, Diamond? Well, beyond my Retronaut's work, which I should also mention includes a monthly community podcast, which I usually host, and our Discord access, which we're doing a lot of stuff in there all the time. That's all a $5 level.

But beyond my retro work, you can find me around the Internet by looking for Fight Club. F-E-I-T, it's my last name, C-L-U-B. That is a business that might contain Invader Games. We don't know what's going on inside those closed doors. It's a private club. I also website, which is FightClub. Dot me. I made it myself.

It looks very old because I don't really know a lot about HTML because I learned it, like, 30 years ago. But, you know, it works enough for me. Yeah, Matt, where can we find you? Well, you can find me all over the internet. I'm on Instagram at Alt-Mat-Alt. I have a newsletter, the pure invention newsletter, blog.com.com and I'm on YouTube. There's a channel. Lookup Matt Alt, Japan. But it's always great being on here. I love talking about, I like talking about things other than Space Invaders, too. There's another game, I think, or maybe even a couple more games out there besides that one. So let's do this again sometime soon. Yeah.

Well, we're being right for Custer's Revenge. I know you've been gunning for that one. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. Or Gigolo? What was it called? Oh, God. The other one, isn't that 2,600 Gigolo? I should... That is a game on there. I'll probably have to cover it someday. It's your fate.

It is my fate. And Brian, where can we find you? Sure. I'm on Blue Sky's B. Clark O.M.P., and I run One Million Power.com, where you can find translations on a lot of Japanese game and music related articles on stuff that tends to be a little bit less mainstream. YouTube.com

slash B. Clarco MP where I do videos on a lot of things but most featured I guess is scrolling down the belt, a series that goes through games in the beat-em-up genre and mostly chronological order. And relevant to this episode, I did a video on how you, yes, you can learn how to get a high score in space

invaders. So check that out if you're interested in learning some of the stuff that I alluded to. There's a Patreon for all of that if you like what you see at patreon.com slash one million power. And finally, I have a book that's been out for a little while, gameplay harmonies, Japanese recording artists and the video games about them, which you can buy at limited rungames.com or also Amazon. And as for myself, that was good to do in a couple of breaths.

You can find me on Blue Sky at Atari Archive.org, which is my website, and I have a book available through Limited Run. Amazon, also Atari Archive, Volume 1. It covers 1977 and 1978 of the Atari 2600's life. It's a spinoff, an offshoot, if you will, of the video series I've been doing on YouTube since 2017. Geez. Oh, my God, it's been that long. It has been that long. Wow. And I did cover Space Invaders for the 2600 there. If you have not heard me talk about it enough, you can do that there.

And you can support me as well through Patreon at Atari Archive. And with that, I bid you adieu and keep watching the skis. I mean, skies. The day's tongue, so you, he gets high on you, and the space of you invade gets by on you. You know, I'm going to be. Good night, good night, good night, good night, good night, good night. I'm not going to stop, you have to stop me.

There, you were stopped.