In 1977, video game development in Japan faced a serious problem: existing microprocessors were too weak for complex games. Taito engineer Tomohiro Nishikado had a vision, but no hardware to run it on. So, he decided to build his own. Nishikado imported the powerful Intel 8080 central processing unit from the United States and got to work. For over a year, he painstakingly soldered circuit boards and created his own custom development tools entirely by hand. His new system ran at a clock speed of 2 megahertz, a technical feat for the time. This custom computer was the first step in creating a game that would take over the world. The only question was what kind of game it would be.
Space Invaders
Space Invaders, Taito's 1978 arcade game: how Tomohiro Nishikado built it, why the aliens speed up, the coin-shortage myth, and how it made home consoles a mass market.
Chapter 1
The One-Man Project
0:49
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the aliens in Space Invaders speed up as the game went on?
This iconic feature was an unintentional hardware limitation. The game's processor had fewer alien graphics to render as they were destroyed, allowing it to complete its processing loop faster. Developer Tomohiro Nishikado realized this 'glitch' created a natural difficulty curve and chose to keep it as a feature.
Did Space Invaders really cause a 100-yen coin shortage in Japan?
This is a widespread legend, but official data from the Japan Mint shows it to be an exaggeration. In fact, the production of 100-yen coins actually decreased in 1978, the year of the game's release. The perception of a shortage was likely due to local circulation issues and was used as great marketing by the game's publisher.
What was the first 'killer app' for a home video game console?
The 1980 port of Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 is widely considered the first 'killer app'. It was the first console title to sell over a million cartridges, and its release caused sales of the Atari 2600 console itself to quadruple, proving that home systems could deliver arcade-level success.
Learn more
To continue the story, download the Chunks Microlearning app
Or get it straight away:
Download on iOS
Download on Android