Trigger Happy
Space Invaders was the first game to feature animated characters. The serried ranks of aliens waggled their brutish tentacles across the screen; the movement, for the time, was so realistically ugly that it was all the more pleasurable to blast the critters away. Space Invaders was also the first game to feature a “high score” facility. The current highest score was constantly displayed on your game screen, sneering at your puny efforts, or encouraging you to develop your own strategies to ever greater heights. As Martin Amis put it in an early and engagingly enthusiastic book on videogames, Invasion of the Space Invaders: “To appear on the Great Score sheet is a powerful incentive in
It was also the first “endless” game. Previously, videogames had stopped when a certain score was reached, or restarted; Taito’s classic, on the other hand, just kept getting harder and harder, the aliens becoming a terrifying blur as they whipped across the screen raining bombs and hurtled ever closer to ground zero. Therein lies the game’s special tension: it is unwinnable. The player’s task is to fight a heroically doomed rearguard action, to stave off defeat for as
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