Galaxian’s immensely popular sequel, Galaga (1980) honed the format by using Namco’s 8-bit board with built-in sound chips to render more detailed alien design, bonus rounds, and elaborate audio. And by noting onscreen how many increasingly difficult rounds a player had completed, Galaxian birthed the concept of reaching levels as a mark of achievement, just as important as point scores.
What’s your technique – hide in the corners or aggressively fire from the centre? These kinds of questions started to forge a new language of skill and strategy for late 70’s gamers. Transforming the faceless, uniform wall of alien clones into an RGB colour-coded cast of characters, Galaxian’s field of opponents each expressed unique behaviours, including dive bombers which leapt out of formation for direct attacks on the lone hero starfighter. Using Space Invaders as the blueprint, Japanese developer Namco added major personality to the fixed shooter in Galaxian (1979). And by saving past players’ point totals, Space Invaders also invented a little tradition called the “high score.” Fixed Shooters Burst Into Colour Orange and green cellophane stuck right to the screen added colour. The steadily quickening pace of the attack was a happy accident of the render limitations of the game’s 2 MHz Intel processor, which designers exploited by adding a thumping sound design to amp up the tension. In this first major fixed shooter, players could steer their laser cannon avatar left-to-right while hammering a fire button upon a wall of alien foot soldiers. The minimalist 2D raster graphics depicting an ever-advancing formation of squid-like aliens may be archaic by today’s standards, but it’s hard to overstate the massive popularity and social impact of this game when it debuted, grossing a billion dollars in its first three years. Nearly 20 years later and an ocean away, Japan’s Taito launched the golden age for the stand-up arcade game with the global blockbuster Space Invaders (1978). The Alien Invasion That Inspired a Revolution Little did they know their simple game would fire the opening shots in a 100-billion dollar business and spark the imaginations of gamers worldwide. Against a primitive vector starfield, students controlled 2 skeletal spaceships, firing upon one another while getting sucked into the gravitational field of a blazing sun.
Their creation, Spacewar!, is now regarded as the original shoot ‘em up. campus in 1961, where students commandeered the first user-oriented computer, the PDP-1, to design something the world had never seen: a computer game. It all began in a musty computer lab on the M.I.T. Yet over thirty years later, the simple shoot ‘em up, or “shmup” as it’s casually called among fans, has evolved into countless, wildly creative forms. In the classic version of this beloved format, a solo player mounts a defence against hordes of opponents with nothing more than a spaceship, a laser gun, and a joystick. But in shoot ‘em ups, the original and most popular video game genre, the right ammo and a couple of extra lives just might get you to the end. an entire alien army and the odds aren’t looking too good.