The 1970’s. The decade that’s considered to be the “Pivot of change”. World views were changing, increases in political awareness, and the growing economic liberty of women, and the first video game!

Just kidding, the first video game was thought to be created in 1958 by a physicist named William Higinbotham, extremely similar to pong. But the 1970’s is when video games started to become popular.

The first release of 1970 was a game called “Highnoon”. I believe we discussed this game in class. 1 year later “The Oregon Trail” was created by Bill Heine- A bunch of guys who wanted to teach school children about how life was in the 19^th century. Nowadays it’s worshiped by GADs.

Another year passed and the game that most people believe is the ‘first video game ever’ was finally released, “Pong”.  Pong was amazing because you no longer had to step foot in the outside world to play tennis. This is (to my understanding) the game that started the popularization of video games.

Within the next 7 years after Pong’s release, many extremely popular and influential games were released, such as Space Race, Spasim (Which I’ll refrain from going into detail about because my presentation is about it), Death Race, Zork, Space Invaders (Which I’ll be going into more detail about), and Asteroids.

Space invaders stands out on that list for many reasons, the main being that it is claimed to have caused a massive coin shortage due to its popularity as an arcade game. Many people believe that to be a myth, but even so, the game was… a ‘game-changer’.

Developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, Space invaders was released in 1978 in Japan. Nishikado is said to have drawn inspiration from popular media, such as star wars, and even had to design custom hardware and development tools. By 1982 the game had made 3.8 Billion dollars.

The game is said to have helped expand the video games into a global industry (as opposed to a novelty one), and is claimed to have brought video games to their “Golden Age”. There have been countless games that gained inspiration from Space Invaders, and the game itself has many recreations on ‘newer’ consoles such as Playstaion.

The last known recreation of the game was seen in 2006, in Taito Legends 2, which is essentially a compilation of older games.

As for today, Space Invaders can be seen everywhere. It has given inspiration to thousands of aspiring artists and game developers. The space ship from the game is used as a logo for the “Electronic Gaming Monthly” Magazine.

The game is also referenced commonly in T.V shows such as “That 70’s Show”, “Scrubs”, and “Robot Chicken”, “Futurama”, and appeared in the movie “Pixels”.

It honestly amazes me that over 30 years after the game’s release, it still has its title as one of the best and most influential games ever created. The fact that one video game can have such a large impact on the world really makes you wonder what potential we have in the gaming industry.