Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 46)

Trigger Happy
48
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 space-game praxis—a yearning perhaps connected
with schooldays and the honor or notoriety of having
your name chalked up on the board, white on black.”
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