Suds, Laser Cannons, Aliens: Space Invaders Under The Influence
In his third guest installment, the illustrious tech writer Steven Levy explains what it’s like to play arcade Space Invaders while totally shitfaced.
When game historians recall the late ’70s wave of video arcade games, they will correctly identify the major time-wasters, which include Asteroids, Breakout, Missile defence and Space Invaders. (Pong was sort of a brain-damaged predecessor.) But the way it really was, at least in a certain central New Jersey bar, the correct way to describe the arcade video game craze was this way: Space Invaders. Period.
It was like the Beatles of video games. Maybe Space Invaders wasn’t such big news to canonical hackers like those MIT Wizards who played Spacewar on a PDP-1 back in the sixties, but to people for whom computers still meant giant data-processing machines the game was a revelation, something totally different from the physical engagement of a pinball machine, yet icily futuristic. There was also the fact that these weird machines would just appear in a bar one day, without explanation. You’d go out for drinks and there in a dark corner was the future, standing head high in a cheesy enclosure with the monitor just below eye level.
I was hooked, of course, compelled to endure the humiliating learning curve where your laser cannon gets immolated by the relentlessly advancing rows of bug-like creatures. Without access to hints or cheat sheets-no, you couldn’t Google stuff back then-you had to figure out strategy on your own. (Or hang around until someone really good played it, so you could learn his tricks.)
One key aspect of Space Invaders circa 1979: You played it in a bar. This affected game play, strategy and your liver. After playing it for a while, you got into a groove and could ditch your normal thought processes to become an alien-killing machine. Instead of the soundtrack of dread, the cardiac thumping that accompanied the advancing horde would energize you like a Led Zeppelin anthem, as you’d scoot behind the bunkers, wipe out rows of invaders and finally, in the frantic final stages, go into a ruthless, pixel-shredding melee mode. (Not that you knew what a pixel was.) But this Ender-like zone you were entering was counterbalanced by the fact that longer you were in the bar, the drunker you got.
You have to remember that this was new. Space Invaders was the population’s first chance to develop the computer-game chops that are now second nature to a four-year-old. Believe it or not, the heart-stopping mix of bloodlust and panic that sprang up when the “mystery ship” with all its bonus points boogalooed across the top of the screen was a novel experience. (I was about to say that the mystery ship “randomly” appeared but after you played it a long time, you learned exactly when this would happen. Space Invaders might have been a twitchfest, but it was a puzzle as well.)
Should I expound upon the concept that the unforgiving menace of the space aliens tapped subconscious Cold War fears? Nah.
Later on, of course, reasonably faithful simulations of the original appeared first on the Atari 2600 and later on computer software. And now you can play it online, free. But that doesn’t do justice to the original context—where you had one foot in the strange new world of digital simulation and the other foot in beer-soaked sawdust. You just can’t, in this day and age, replicate the feeling when the last murderous wave finally wipes you out and you know that it’s going to cost you another quarter to fight them back.
Steven Levy is a senior writer for Wired, most recently writing about Google’s ad business and the secret of the CIA sculpture. He’s written six books, including Hackers, Artificial Life and The Perfect Thing, about the iPod. In 1979, he had just left his first real job, at a regional magazine called New Jersey Monthly, to become a freelance writer, and had yet to touch a computer.
Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analogue age gave way to the digital, and most of our favourite toys were just being born.
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
LINES!
People would stand in line, quarters in hand, for their turn to play the game. When it first came out there was a small horde of players (not all kids) just hanging around the box, drooling and waiting for their turn.
It is impossible to really describe the impact this game had to those too young to have remembered it.
LeopoldNestor
I hate it when this happens in real life....
loriensleafs
As a young tween I made the mistake of venturing into an arcade after dark, where I got kicked in the face by a drunk cowboy.
I did get a bunch of free tokens though, which I thought was cool.
Space Invaders had color. Actually it had colored gels glued over the monitor so as the aliens moved down, they changed color. Cheap, but it looked better that way. Space Invaders started it all, but it was Pacman that really made video games popular. Too bad kids now missed out on arcades. We would spend hours at arcades. They looked like 80s future spaceports inside. Light paneled floors, "cool" checkerboard laser murals on the walls, seedy, full of creepy guys, they stunk, and they were awesome. If you had $10 you were on top of the world for the next couple hours. And like a junkie looking for a fix, when you ran out of money you would go to each machine checking the coin slot for a forgotten quarter.
I loved arcades. I would spend all my allowance money every week playing Galaga, Moonwalker, Streetfighter, that shitty, shitty hologram game from Sega about time-travel; you name it. When I played Pac Man at 5 years of age, I was hooked. Even now, at 31, when I walk by an arcade, I get the impulse to play.
Aunt_Snowman
I have to say... I've never played Space Invaders.
@OMG! Toesies on the Nosies!: Actually a study that I made up shows that this is the way MOST strategies are conceived (as well as several children).
@tande04: "He's a madman! A madman!"
I remember this one and "Rally X" to the beat of Chicago and Jim Croce at the local pub.
My mom would take us there for dinner because we could walk through the woods to get there.
The Shadyside Inn, if it's still there.
The burgers were always great.
Good times.
Great article. Even people of my age (23) who never got the chance to experience the arcade boom have plenty of adolescent years with the NES or SNES. Going from crude to eeriely real seems like the natural progression.
It makes me wonder if kids are getting screwed by not having to work their way up from NES Mario to Halo 3. Then again maybe they are just going to be agile killing machines because all they know is doulbe-joysticked-shoot-em-in-the-head...>doulbe-joysticked-shoot-em-in-the-head...... action.
Still, when I think back to beating Kirby for the first time it just doesn't compare to beating any of the games that come out now.
Maori_Yelir
Man, I was bad at this game. All those extraterrestials reproducing, shifting, coming down upon me! Aaaah, the terror!
vqro
@tande04: You know when you have an insane craving for something, but you can't get it? I'm sitting here at work, testing ghost images, and I have such an urge to watch futurama.
That's Missile Command, not Missile Defense. I spent many an hour (and quarters) playing MC with my friends at the bar in the late 70's.
encyclia
"Watch, as I fire upwards through our own shields"
tande04
And so, through a haze of Marlboro Light smoke, "Physical Graffiti", and Schlitz beer was the strategy of shooting through one's shield conceived.
video games while being hammered is win.
@strider_mt2k: Rally X is a damn hard game too. You can't win. You just prolong the death.
LastError
@loriensleafs: "Alright! It's Saturday night, I have no date, a two-liter bottle of Shasta and my all-Rush mix tape. Let's rock!"
Yep.. a bar, or if you were in a completely Space Invadered out area, one of the makeshift arcades with a row of a dozen Space Invader machines and some Space Invader cocktails for good measure.
And it was indeed new and you had to learn all the tricks from watching others.. like the counting shots trick or the 'wall of death' (currently referred to on the net as the Nagoya technique.) All that just added to the mystique. Seeing video move on screen you could control and "shoot" at was an amazing thing with so much more depth than the typical Electromechanical games.
I feel fortunate to have been around then.. as I got to experience the excitement of videogames and their entire evolution up to this point. I can more than hold my own in COD4, but I can also play Space Invaders and do every trick in the book to roll it over. It's been a great ride :)
The technical term for the "mystery ship" was "woo-woo". At least as far as my friends and I were concerned.
Although I am old enough to remember the original invasion, the same effect was achieved when Sega's Virtua-Fighter was released into bars. Jaws hit the floor.
LeeMarvinsPants
'Ender-like zone'. Extra points for that one.
LeeMarvinsPants
@dolo54 blows minds and blows engines!: Ms. Pac-Man was hugely successful in the USA -- I remember arcades had 20 or 30 of them in a row -- but Space Invaders was more successful worldwide, it's in the Guinness Book of Records.
@"wall of death" technique they had picked up. My mind was blown.
@tande04 mile island in the sun: and @Xeno: Awesome. Btw, X, your avatar is always making me chuckle always. Just like when I found out a guy in my class could do a perfect Dr. Zoidberg.