Tag: Space Invaders

Long-Defunct Flux Magazine Picked “The Top 100 Video Games” All the Way Back in 1995

With the 2021 Update to the Video Game Canon just around the corner, I thought it would fun to look at one of the historical lists I plan to add to the calculation in Version 5.0… Flux Magazine’s “The Top 100 Video Games” from 1995.

Proudly featuring the tagline “The most dangerous video game & comic ‘zine” along the top of each issue, Flux Magazine launched in 1994 as a more adult alternative to GamePro and Wizard. The magazine folded a year later after publishing just seven issues, though not before creating one of the first Best Games lists to cover the full spectrum of games available at the time (arcade cabinets, consoles, PC platforms, and handhelds).

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Bite-Sized Game History: Mastering Space Invaders, Serial Killers in The Sims, and SimCity’s Miyamoto Connection

Most games won’t keep track of your High Score anymore, but the desire to climb the local leaderboard was once a huge draw to arcade players the world over.

This edition of Bite-Sized Game History looks back at one of those competitors and their complete mastery of Space Invaders, as well as the sinister shenanigans that were almost included in The Sims, and Shigeru Miyamoto’s influence on the original SimCity.

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A Brief History of Video Games – Space Invaders

The latest VGC Essay looks at the simple, yet addicting, tricks that Taito used to create Space Invaders. Here’s a teaser…

“Drop down, increase speed, and reverse direction!”

Somehow, the writers of Futurama found a way to sum up the essence of Space Invaders (in 2002’s “Anthology of Interest II”) with a single succinct sentence. And yet, in the days and years after its release in 1978, the game was considered something of a phenomenon. Even today, an oft-repeated urban legend claims that obsessive Space Invaders fans caused a shortage of the 100 yen coin in Japan.

Obviously, dropping a coin into an arcade slot will keep it in circulation, so it would have been impossible for Space Invaders to be the cause of any shortage. Though one thing those obsessive fans did do was raise the profile of the game’s titular aliens so that now they’re something of a mascot for all video games.

But it all started with, “Drop down, increase speed, and reverse direction!” Which as a formula was later refined and improved upon by Namco when they created Galaxian and Galaga.

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