history/legacy: Space Invaders is credited with a whole bunch of historicity on Wikipedia: ending the 1977 videogame crash, beginning a Japanese yen shortage, heralding in “the golden age” of arcade gaming, and popularizing the arcade scene in North America. Its first home version even quadrupled sales of the Atari 2600, cementing that console’s place in the market of the early ‘80s; which makes for an interesting parallel if you consider the non-hostile extraterrestrial credited with liquefying that position.
Its gameplay is perhaps the earliest introduction of a mechanic that thrives today—shooting. This could be the subject of an essay on itself (not this essay). Reorient your point of view, and there is an obvious lineage from Space Invaders to Wolfenstein 3D to the host of modern first- and third-person shooters. I mean, if the Half-Life universe is our Ludo Sapiens and Doom the Ludo Erectus, then Space Invaders is basically the Australudopithecus of our evolutionary history. Regarding narrative (almost all of which is only implied regarding Space Invaders), it upped the stakes like nothing before. The world is under attack. This is not just a game of Pong (although I suppose if you want, you can pretend that the Pong ball is a planet-ending thingy and the paddles stalwart offensidefenders; you’d just have to ignore the fact that game is called Pong, and this implies a table tennis-based narrative).
Much of the sensation is positional. The fixed screen and vertical orientation of gameplay place me firmly on the ground. What is at the bottom of the screen, below my turret? My homeworld, the charge under my protection (unpictured, but entirely felt). What is then below Earth, below the border of the screen itself? I am: my control panel, my hands, myself and my sneakers planted just as firmly as my little scrolling tank. We identify with each other positionally, the tank and I, forming a metonym of spatial contiguity—a special word to show just how closely related we are. Geographically, we are uninterrupted. Granted, it’s not a first-person perspective; but it’s close, and asks much less roleplaying than, say, a Gordon Freeman simulator. The tank and I are both earthbound, our connection is unimpeded, and—in a very meta-moment—I am leaning forward into this enclosed arcade cabinet just the same as the unseen gunner into their turret.
(If you want to leave roughly 50% of humanity out of the experience, you can even consider the little phallic turret synechdochic—that is, a part standing in for a human whole as in the phrase “all hands on deck”—but let’s not go there. Phallus-spotting is a simplistic, phallocentric, never-ending task that unlocks no secret knowledge in most situations. Better to presume the presence of oblong shapes as unavoidable, ignoring any coincidental link they might have to the shape of a boner.)
From the screen’s opposite end—from above, the unknowable void atop the arcade cabinet, dusty and unvisited as the star-forming depths of space—come the invaders. The collective Other. Their very mode of existence is unfamiliar to me, for not only do they float; they descend. From my lived experience, feet rooted vertically against the tug of Earth, floating is already farfetched; but that descent is unimaginable. And they are many, whereas I am one. Their gaunt “faces” are a mockery, copy+pasted holes of unpixel.
Mirroring them is the flocking horde of spectators over my shoulder, intensifying and densifying as I progress. All of which are human, but none of which are me—the moment’s lone defender. I begin to achieve a form of hyper-humanity, then. As player, I am momentarily closer to the game’s paradigmatic humanness than any spectator. And in this way, the role of Other is reversed. I am outnumbered on all sides, by invaders and spectators. What once was Us & Them now consists of Them & Them & depluralized Me.
The invaders and I share only one thing: the capacity to destroy one another. I’m not sure what to make of this. There are a lot of philosophical things to be aside about the destructive nature of life, if I can extend such a concept to the invaders (and I’m not entirely convinced I can).
I can absolutely learn from the absences of opportunity, though. With a focus on shooting, the game is utterly unwelcoming for pacifists. There is no diplomacy option in Space Invaders. There is no fleeing the invasion. There is no espionage, no economic warfare, no allies to invoke. It adheres to a Darwinian perspective of existence, spurring violence as the only means of survival (and even then, just a pseudo-survival—the prolongation of me as an unfortunately finite individual). This, too, makes a primal point about the struggle of life in the event that all other options are exhausted. If Bill or Ted or I brought Thomas Hobbes to 1978 via time machine, the life of his first quarter would surely be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
There are barriers to cower behind, sure. The shields are just there, from the beginning. They are destroyed slowly by the invaders, but I also have the option of shooting through them at will—or by accident. Over time, the things defending my existence fade—even if I’m just talking about the wear and tear of age in linear time. Like the shields, these things do not refresh. With or without the presence of the shields, the gameplay is functionally the same; but they do add another thin layer of interpretability to this emblematic human experience.
The same can be said for the music; that it is nonessential, but not meaningless. Atop everything is a sour quartet of descending notes that loops over and over and over. Even though music is a separate form invited under the umbrella of a videogame, the music in Space Invaders is linked to the gameplay. As the invaders grow nearer and faster, the music speeds up. It mirrors the heartrate of the player, dark and quick and frantic. Simple enough, and effective. The heart pumping in my ears might be my own, or it might be the illusions of the minimalist composer. Eventually, the heartbeat will calm (the end of a wave of attackers) or cease entirely (game over). But levels deeper into the game begin at an advanced stage, with ships lower from the get-go and the tempo appropriately rushed. Eventually, the slow and sobering notes of a brand new game are buried by a more sustained pulse that never slows down to where it originally was.
You know what else never slows down to where it originally was? Yeah, the descent rate of the invaders. A vignettisode of Futurama grants the character Fry’s wish of a world based on videogames. He is chosen as humanity’s turreteer against the impending Space Invaders, but fails to eliminate all but one. When the last invader lands, pilot Lrrr taunts Fry by declaring, “You are defeated! Instead of shooting where I was, you should have shot at where I was going to be!” Because the invaders dance left and right along the x-axis and my missile travels up along the y, my shots can both miss and be dodged. So each moment of the game asks me to see my immediate future and measure it. Act accordingly.
My reward for seeing that future is another onslaught. The sky refills with menace, coming faster than before, and the music’s dark heartbeat retains some of its elevation—but I am still alive, for the moment. If I look too far ahead, I remember that the game can only end with my failure. Eventually, the invaders will get too fast or I will get too tired. The key is to linger in the sweetspot of prescience—a little bit into the future, but not so far as to submit myself to this overbearing fatalism. I must plan my next move without glimpsing the ultimate futility that awaits.
This brings me to the game’s ultimate message: I am finite, and the invaders are not. I eventually extinguish, be it from a lack of skill or quarters, the closing of the arcade or the administration of a curfew. So perhaps Space Invaders is a Darwinian atheists definition of what it ultimately means to be human (as opposed to, you know, spacey). Or perhaps the annals of the High Scores could grant me an exclusive eternity, albeit codified to J I M.
If there’s still any doubt as to just how universal Space Invaders can be, I present the paper “Audio space invaders” by professors R J McCrindle and D Symons of the University of Reading’s Department of Computer Science. The authors set forth parameters for their “ambisonic” version of the classic game scenario, fully playable by people who are blind or visually impaired. Thus, a game that represents the human condition to this extent is accessible by nearly all. Even if you hate my reading of the game, this—what McCrindle and Symons have done—is incredible by itself.
Playing Space Invaders also constitutes these three things, unabashedly. A smattering of other elements (music, barriers, spectators) adds to the similarity in lesser degrees.
So Space Invaders is about the struggle of being a human being.
Maybe that’s why the game was so popular.
