Old Skool Blog

I can still remember the first time I ever saw a Space Invaders machine. It would have been 1979 and my father had taken me to Melbourne for a day trip and while we were there, we went into one of the new “video arcades” to kill a bit of time. Pong, Breakout, Sprint 2 and a smal handful of other games had already become quite popular, but on this day there was a new machine that caught our eyes - Space Invaders! Within minutes we were hooked, although we both sucked at the game.

One of the novel features was the way the invaders sped up throughout the game, which meant your skills had to be spot on or you would soon be wiped out or over-run. Back in the early days, it wasn’t possible to play video games all day, so I had not quite developed the hand-eye coordination required to even clear a single level on that first day.

In the months that followed, more and more games started to appear in the arcades, but Space Invaders always had a special place in my heart.

If you ever played Space Invaders, you might enjoy this video. I found a link to the creator of the video, but the site is in French…

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 1:08 am and is filed under OldSkoolComputing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.