In 1977 Tomohiro Nishikado, a 33-year-old Japanese computer programmer, was a
company employee, like millions of others. In his spare time he played video
table-tennis, manoeuvring white paddles up and down a black-and-white TV
screen to return a white blob of a ball to his opponent. In the amusement
arcades, he had noticed a new game called Breakout, which involved
moving a paddle from side to side to hit a ball, in order to destroy a
series of blocks at the top of the screen.
One day, Nishikado had an idea. What if the blocks in Breakout could
fire back? “I was absolutely hooked on Breakout,” Nishikado
recalls. “I had already developed some games, so I wanted to make one that
was better than this. I realised that the fun thing about Breakout
was the sense of accomplishment when you finish a stage by clearing a set
number of targets. At the time, we had heard good things about Star Wars,
so I thought it might be a good idea to shoot some aliens.”
It was a great idea, so great that Space Invaders, the game he
invented, is still going strong 30 years later, with a new version Space
Invaders Extreme, released yesterday.
When Space Invaders arrived in Japanese arcades in 1978, it was a
sensation. Entire arcades were given over to the game; at one point, the
Japanese Government was forced to mint extra 100-yen coins because, it is
said, the game’s cash-boxes were removing so many from circulation.
The following year, it reached Britain, and it hooked me right in – my idea of
a perfect Saturday morning as a boy was being given £3 and then seeing how
long I could make it last. The first time I managed to clock the machine
(score so many points that the score counter returns to zero) is as
memorable as my first kiss, but took a lot longer.
Seen from the high-definition flat-screen world of 2008, Space Invaders
is laughably simple. Five rows of white aliens march horizontally across a
screen, descending progressively towards your laser cannon, which is
protected by a series of green buildings. You must destroy all the invaders
before they reach the bottom of the screen. As they descend, the aliens drop
bombs, which you must avoid. You have three lives, then it’s game over.
It’s simple, but hugely addictive, the frustration of being destroyed keeps
you coming back for more. It’s a model of perfect gameplay, but Nishikado
wanted more. “I wasn’t particularly happy with the game,” he says. “The
capacity of the hardware was very low. I wanted to make it faster and more
colourful, but I couldn’t.”
Elsewhere, though, Space Invaders was creating waves. In Kyoto, Japan’s
second city, Shigeru Miyamoto, a young graphic artist and amateur cartoonist
with no real interest in video games, played Space Invadersfor the
first time. Two years out of college, Miyamoto had just landed his first
job, with a local company that specialised in producing playing cards but
had recently branched out into electronic entertainment. The company was
called Nintendo, and over the next 30 years Miyamoto and his team would
transform it into an entertainment giant.
The cast of celebrated characters that Miyamoto has created in the scores of
games he has personally developed for the company – Mario, Zelda, Donkey
Kong – is matched only in the 20th century by Walt Disney. Miyamoto’s most
recent triumph is the best-selling Nintendo Wii console. His lasting legacy,
however, is likely to be the part that he has played in turning a minority
activity into a global business. The Mario games alone have sold nearly 300
million copies, and in a recent report, PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated
that the global sales of video games will be worth $68.3 billion in 2012, up
from $41.9 billion in 2007. For comparison, music industry sales were worth
$11.5 billion last year. And it all started with Space Invaders.
BUT IS IT ART?
Miyamoto is one of the few super-stars of the games industry, and the titles
he has produced during his unusually long tenure at Nintendo offer some
clues as to how his life has developed, in much the same way as an artist’s
canvases do. At the time of Super Mario Bros in the mid1980s, the emphasis
was on fun all the way, bouncing the fat little plumber along to a jaunty
soundtrack. His more recent work, notably Nintendogs (in which you
raise a puppy) and the Wii console, reflects his own fiftysomething status
as a married family man. “Before, I could kind of use my own imagination to
create these worlds or create these games,” he told The New York
Times last month. “I would say that over the last five years I’ve had
more of a tendency to take interests or topics in my life and try to draw
the entertainment out of that.”
We have clearly come a long way since Space Invaders. Improved computer
technology, particularly in the last five years, has allowed those who make
video games to express their imaginations more freely and completely, to the
point where many modern games now match animated feature films in terms of
plot sophistication and character movement. Yet while glorious film
animations such as Pixar’s Finding Nemoand Miyazaki’s Howl’s
Moving Castleare unanimously praised as the work of artists, such
accolades are rarely accorded the teams who make video games.
If you ask a Japanese computer game maker whether they think of themselves as
artists or programmers, they will usually dodge the question with an
embarrassed smile. Only when they are at the top of the tree will they dare
to be more outspoken. Like Nintendo’s Miyamoto, Yuuji Horii is another
fiftysomething video game pioneer, whose work on the multimillion-selling Dragon
Questseries has made him a celebrity in Japan. “Miyazaki creates his own
world in his work, and so do we,” he told me in 2006. “The only difference
with me is that rather than learn to draw stories, I decided to create
things that moved interactively on a TV screen. That doesn’t mean that what
I do is any less artistic.”
Of course, not everyone who can manipulate a pixel is an artist, any more than
the power to raise a paint brush imbues you with creative genius, but there
is a strong case to be made for the most enduring games to share a pedestal
with the most enduring works in other fields of artistic endeavour,
particularly since so many of the films we watch and rave about today use
technology that was first developed for video games.
Games are also starting to become subjects for art in their own right. The
award-winning multimedia artist Toshio Iwai used one of his own artworks in
a proposed video game, Sound Fantasy, and later produced a game for
the Nintendo DS, which invited players to create their own random, swirling
soundscapes. Meanwhile, a French street artist known as Invader has started
fixing ceramic Space Invader figures to buildings in the world’s
major cities. Keep your eyes peeled for strange creatures the next time you
are walking through Manchester or London.
OR IS IT SCIENCE?
Although our visual experience has undoubtedly been enriched by games, the
hand-eye coordination that playing them fosters has other uses, too. Should
you be unfortunate enough to be rushed into hospital for keyhole surgery in
the near future, you’ll no doubt have many questions about the procedure.
Will it hurt? What are my chances? You might also want to ask the surgeon
whether he or she plays video games. In a controlled experiment conducted
last year, and reported in Archives of Surgery, 33 surgeons were
assessed for their accuracy in keyhole surgery at the Beth Israel Medical
Centre, New York.
Those who played or had played video games made between 33 and 42 per cent
fewer errors than their nonplaying counterparts. For the record, the game
that surgeons felt best complemented the requirements of their work was
Sega’s Super Monkey Ball 2, which involves directing a rolling
monkey around and collecting bananas.
The truth is that many of today’s cutting-edge surgical techniques are
borrowing heavily from technology first seen in video games. Remote surgery,
in which a surgeon controls a robot via broadband, is controlled by a pad
not dissimilar to that for a PlayStation 3, while recently a team of
surgeons in Boston successfully operated on a baby's heart while wearing 3-D
glasses first developed for gaming, which allowed them a more realistic view
of the organs within the body.
Whenever you step on a plane, a Tube train or even a bus, the chances are that
the person at the controls has been taught to perform at least part of their
job with video simulation, using graphics and controls that are a direct
descendant of the control stick and fire button that Space Invaders
helped to popularise. Heck, the oil that powers your bus may have been
discovered using 3-D visualisation techniques first developed for video
games.
We’ve come a long way in 30 years. Happy birthday, Space Invaders.
A (VERY) BRIEF HISTORY OF GAMING
1977 Atari releases the 2600, its fi rst game console, and the fi rst
to use cartridges. It sells over 2 million units by the end of 1980.
1978 The golden age of the arcade begins with Space Invaders.
1980 Pac-Man arrives in arcades, the fi rst video game to come
with a named, animated hero.
1981 Donkey-Kong, and Mario (Jump-Man) is born.
1984 Nintendo Famicom, its fi rst home entertainment console.
1986 Launch of NES home console.
1989 Sim City created by Will Wright; Sega launches the
Megadrive.
1990 Launch of SNES.
1994 Sony launches PlayStation. Sega counters with Saturn in 1995.
1996 Lara Croft’s debut; Nintendo 64 offers 3D.
1999 Sega launches Dreamcast.
2000 PS2 launch followed in 2001 by Nintendo GameCube and Gameboy
Advance; Microsoft Xbox. Sega quits console business.
2004 Nintendo PSP in 2005.
2006 Next-gen consoles Xbox 360 and PS3, plus the Nintendo Wii.
Space Invaders Extreme is out on Sony PSP and Nintendo DS
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