Later Atari would port the game over to their Atari 2600 console where that game alone propelled the system to heights well above the competitors.Īs expected the success of Space Invaders meant that arcades would also be hit with a deluge of clones, bootlegs and other similar alien shooting games. In some ways, this marks the time where the “Golden Age” of arcade gaming really started as people became captivated by a title they could only find in those venues and the amount of attention generated for arcades by this game alone boosted everything else. In some areas, if a venue didn’t have a Space Invaders machine they were shunned by customers and the huge demand caused Taito to temporarily stop producing anything but SI machines. Once introduced to the public, the game became a gigantic hit in both Japan and the US(Midway handled the game on the US side), drawing in people who had never played video games before. The game quickly became a quarter-cruncher as it introduced a new kind of game to the public where enemies fought back and they were animated. The interest would continue to hold benefits for both movies and video games and the fever expanded when in 1978 Taito released Space Invaders. The space craze was just getting started around this time as the public found more entertainment in space with big movies like Star Wars. Space War was reportedly the best selling game of the year and the technology behind would eventually create a subset of vector based arcade machines. Space War marked the introduction of the vector monitor into the coin-op marketplace of the time different games had used vector monitors previously but they were generally experimental games that saw very little publicity and this also was a new design. Shortly after that another company jumped into the realm with Space War (Cinematronics/Vectorbeam). It used a yoke controller (which would later be improved for Star Wars) and it reflected the screen off of an angled piece of glass to create a depth effect(used in Asteroids Deluxe). Starship 1 was a straightforward, first person shooter that was loosely based upon Star Trek that would employ a couple of ideas that were used in later Atari space titles. Space games wouldn’t start making waves until 1976 when Atari gave it another shot with Starship 1. It was a big flop, even more so than Computer Space and has been all but forgotten to the gaming community. After Atari produced Pong they gave the space genre another shot with Space Race. Computer Space didn’t start a revolution in video games – it would take Pong to achieve that the next year. Computer Space was essentially Space War, which would later become the first vector arcade game available to the public in 1976 (which also was one of the best selling arcade titles that year). The very first coin-operated arcade game carried the theme in both it’s name and the game itself: Computer Space(pictured right, KLOV image). Perhaps the decline of interest in space games can coincide with a general decline of interest in space overall but it’s really hard to nail that down without solid polling. Why even bring up space games? I suppose they hold a special place for me as I grew up playing so many of them on top of that I enjoy shows like Star Trek so personally my interest in such things hasn’t waned although it has in public. In the coming days I may add a little bit more to this as well. UPDATE#2 (6/13/11): I realized that there were some big gaps in the history so I updated that. I may still update this article a little more over the next day or so but for the most part it’s complete. Unfortunately not much has changed with space games since I wrote this in 2008 (there still is a dearth of good space games in the console arena as well) but I still hold out some hope. UPDATE (12/4/10): We’ve had a lot of people looking this article up lately so I’ve decided to go back and expand greatly upon what I wrote originally. Sure those are all great genres that work great in arcades but to think that they are the only ones that can do well on the arcade scene is ridiculous. Where these genres were once a proud part of an arcade line-up, they have all taken a back seat to the current primary genres of the arcade industry (and in some cases they’ve been all but forgotten in the console world) which include: 1-on-1 fighters, light gun games, racers and dancing titles. Over the next little while I am going to run a feature every now and then where I discuss genres which have been “lost” to arcades.
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