Facing Vaders is a 1978 arcade game created by Tomahiro Nishikado. It was manufactured and sold by Tato in Japan and licensed in the United States by the Midway Division of Bali. Within the shooter genre, Facing Vaders was the first fixed shooter and set the template for the shooter-muk genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens, with a horizontally moving laser to earn as many points as possible. Tomahiro Nishikado spent a year designing the game and developing the necessary hardware to produce it. The game's inspiration is reported to have come from varying sources, including an adaptation of the mechanical game's space monsters released by Tato in 1972 and a dream about Japanese school children who were waiting for Santa Claus when they were attacked by invading aliens. Nishikado himself has cited Atari's arcade game Breakout as his inspiration. He came to create a shooting game that featured the same sense of achievement from completing stages and destroying targets, but with more complex graphics. The game uses a similar layout to that of Breakout, but has altered game mechanics. Rather than bounce a ball to attack static objects, players are given the ability to fire projectiles at moving enemies. Early enemy designs for the game included tanks, combat planes and battleships. Nishikado however was not satisfied with the enemy movements, technical limitations made it difficult to simulate flying. Humans would have been easier to simulate, but the designer considered shooting them immoral. After the release of the 1974 anime Space Battleship Yamato in Japan and seeing a magazine feature about Star Wars, he thought about using a space theme. Nishikado due inspiration from the aliens from HG Wells is the War of the Worlds and created initial bitmap images after the octopus like aliens. Other alien designs were modeled after squids and crabs. The game was originally titled Space Monsters after a popular song in Japan at the time Monster, but was changed to Space Invaders by Tato Management. Because computers in Japan were not powerful enough at the time to perform the complex tasks involved in designing and programming Space Invaders, Nishikado had to design his own custom hardware and develop tools for the game. He created the arcade board using the latest CPU from the United States, the Intel AT-80, and sound from the Texas Instruments SN7647 Soundchip. The adoption of the microprocessor was inspired by gunfight midways microprocessor adaptation of Nishikado's earlier discrete logic game Western Gun. Despite the specifically developed hardware, Nishikado was unable to program the game as he wanted. The control program board wasn't powerful enough to display the graphics in colour or move the enemies faster, and he ended up considering the development of the game's hardware the most difficult part of the whole process. While programming the game, Nishikado discovered that the processor was able to render each frame of the alien's animation graphics faster when there were fewer aliens on the screen. Since the aliens positions updated after each frame, this caused the aliens to move across the screen at an increasing speed as more and more destroyed. Rather than designing compensation for the speed increase, he decided to keep it as a challenging game-playing mechanism. Space Invaders was first released in a cocktail table format arcade cabinet with black and white graphics, while midway released the Western version with an upright cabinet. It used strips of orange and green cellophane across the screen to simulate colour graphics. The graphics are reflected on a painted backdrop of a moon against the starry background. Later Japanese releases used rainbow coloured cellophane, such as TT Space Invaders in 1978, and were eventually followed by a version with a full colour display. The cabinet artwork features large humanoid monsters not present in the game. Nishikado attributes this to the artist basing the designs on the original title of Space Monsters, rather than referring to the actual in-game graphics. In the first few months following its release in Japan, Space Invaders became a very popular game. Specialty arcades opened with nothing but Space Invader cabinets, and by the end of 1978, Tato had installed over 100,000 machines and grossed over $600 million in Japan alone. By 1980, Tato had sold over 300,000 Space Invaders machines in Japan and 60,000 in the United States. By 1982, Space Invaders had grossed $2 billion in quarters, equivalent to almost $8 billion in 2020. This made it the best-selling video game and highest grossing entertainment product of its time, with comparisons made to the then highest grossing film Star Wars, which had grossed $486 million with a net profit of 175 million. Space Invaders earned Tato profits of over $500 million. The 1980 Atari 2600 version was the first official licensing of an arcade game for consoles, became the first killer app for video game consoles after quadrupling the system's sales. It sold over 2 million units in its first year on sale as a home console game, making it the first title to sell over a million cartridges. Other official ports were released for the Atari 8-bit home computer line and Atari 5200 console, while Tato laid to release it for the Nintendo Famicom in 1985, but just in Japan. Numerous unofficial clones were made. Technology journalist Jason Whitaker credited the game with ending the video game Crash of 1977, caused by polling clones flooding the market and beginning the golden age of video arcade games. IGN attributed the launch of the arcade phenomenon in North America in part to Space Invaders. Game Informer considered it along with Pac-Man, one of the most popular arcade games. It tapped into popular culture and generated excitement during the golden age of arcades. As one of the earlier shooting games, Space Invaders set precedence and helped pave the way for future titles and for the shooting genre. Space Invaders popularised a more interactive style of gameplay, with the enemies responding to the player-controlled cannons movement, and was the first video game to popularise the concept of achieving a high score, being the first to save the player's score. While earlier shooting games allowed the player to shoot at targets, Space Invaders was the first in which targets could fire back at the player. It was also the first game where players were given multiple lives and had to repel hordes of enemies. In addition to being the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple diatonic descending base notes repeated in a loop, which was dynamic and changed pace during stages by a heartbeat sound that increased pace as enemies approached. If you like these videos and want to see more, then feel free to subscribe. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video.