Hello its blogging time once again and this time I'm going to talk about another interesting side note in video game history.
BOOP BOOP BOOP BOOP!
There are many landmark titles in video game history Pong, Pacman, Wolfenstein 3D, and one of those titles is Space Invaders. Released in 1978, Space Invaders brought many innovative elements into the video game industry, introduced many game design legends to the field, and had popularized the idea of space shooters and zapping evil descending aliens in video games.
But did you know that they weren't originally supposed to be aliens? In fact it was one memory of a classic movie, based on a classic book that influenced the design and inclusion of aliens in the game. This is the story of How a classic novel inspired the design Space Invaders.
The story begins long before the invention of video games, all the way back in 1895 in the town of Woking Surrey, England, the then home of classic British science fiction novelist, H.G. Wells.
H.G. Wells during his studies in London (Circa 1890)
Born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866, Wells grew up in a finically struggling family and as a result took his first job as a draper at the young age of 14. In 1884, He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, which became part of Imperial College London), where he studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley. after earning a degree in Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from the University of London External Programme in 1890, he spent the next 3 years as a teacher.
By 1895, Wells had married Catherine Robbins, one of his former students, and moved with her to Woking in Surrey. There, he would spend his mornings walking or cycling in the countryside, and his afternoons writing. During one of those morning walks with his brother, an idea emerged when pondering on what it might be like if alien beings were suddenly to descend on the scene. Wells took this concept and refined it into a story of an alien invasion told from an unnamed protagonist. The story was titled The War of the Worlds, and was first serialised in Pearson's Magazine in 1897, and pubblished as full hardcover novel by William Heinemann a year later in 1898.
The first hardcover edition of The War of the Worlds (1898)
The story was an immediate success and did even better when published in hardcover. inspiring many similar alien invasion stories years afterward, providing many themes open to interpretation such as evolution, religion, and science, and even inspiring scientist Robert H. Goddard to develop both the liquid-fuelled rocket and multistage rocket, which resulted in the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
The story was eventually adapted into other forms. In 1938, it was adapted into a radio drama directed by Orson Welles, it was done in the style of a live news broadcast and was aired at night so people that tuned in late, thought it was real and caused a mass hysteria panic.
Orson Welles rehearsing for “The Mercury Theater on the Air,” the radio show behind the “War of the Worlds” broadcast (1938)
Around the same time, atempts to bring the book to the silver screen were well under way. Paramount Pictures had purchased the film rights for the book from Welles in 1925, and assigned producer-director Cecil B. DeMille to film it. Roy Pomerey prepared an outline for DeMille, but the project was eventually shelved. In the late 30's, Paramount assigned Sergei Eisenstein to direct an adaptation of the novel under his contract with the studio, but that failed as well.
It wasnt until 1951 that the film finally began moving into production when Paramount assigned the project to Hungarian American producer George Pal.
George Pal in 1979
Pal was already working with Paramount on When Worlds Collide, which had already wrapped up production and was getting ready for its release that November, he agreed to the project, becoming its producer, and the directors chair was assigned to Byron Haskin. The film was released in theaters on April 3, 1953 in London, and in North America on August 26, 1953.
The Original poster for War of the Worlds (1953)
The film makes many changes from the book. It changes the setting from 1898 England, to present day 1953 California, The Martians use hovering spacecrafts rather than the Tripod War machines, and instead of the protagonist searching for his wife after the invasion destroyed society, the protagonist meets and falls in love with a woman. Most of these changes, including the romantic subplot were requested by Paramount Pictures production head Don Hartman, which Pal agreed to do.
Despite the changes, the basic plot remains the same. The film centers around atomic scientist Clayton Forrester (played by Gene Barry), who witnesses a meteorite crash along with USC library science instructor Sylvia Van Buren (played by Ann Robinson) and her uncle, Pastor Matthew Collins (played by Lewis Martin). It turns out the meteorite was actually an alien war machine emerges and begins killing at random, including Pastor Collins. The Marines are called in and attempt to intervene, but nothing seems to work. With the world at stake, It's up to Forrester and Van Buren to find the aliens weakness before its too late.
The films production quality is pretty top notch for the time. the martian war machines, while not the tripod deathray walkers from the book, do have a fantastic visual design insted of the cliched flying saucers. The film's also in color as opposed to most films in the 1950s which were in black and white. In fact the films poster proudly proclaims it was made in the classic Technicolor system. The sound effects are also great, they even sound a bit like video games lasers, long before games like that would even exist.
The film has some great suspense moments too, You rarely see the aliens, you only see a few glimpses and never see their whole body.
Much like the book, the film was a commercial success as it grossed $2,000,000 at the box office as well as critical success both at the time of release and today. In fact today, it's considered to be one of the best science fiction films of the 1950s.
But this isn't the films only legacy. On September 1st, 1953 the film made it's way to Japan where it would be seen by a young boy named Tomohiro Nishikado.
Tomohiro Nishikado (2011)
Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1944, Nishikado grew up with a love for science and technology. When he was in junior high, he built radios and amplifiers in his spare time. After graduating from with an engineering degree from Tokyo Denki University in 1967, he look around various electronics companies for a job. He originally wanted to work at Sony, but failed the final round of the company's testing process. So he joined an audio engineering company called Takt, But after completing training, he wasn't put in the development department, so he quit and looked for a new job, eventually landing a job offer from a communications company. But before beginning, he met an old colleague at a train station who told him about the work he was doing at Taito, and were desperately searching for new engineers. Interested, Nishikado decided to turn down the job offer for the communications company, and joined Pacific Industries Ltd, a subsidiary of Taito, in 1968.
He began working on arcade electro-mechanical games, his first game was Sky Fighter, a aircraft shooting game in 1971. It used mirrors to project images of model planes in front of a moving sky-blue background from a film canister on a rotating drum. The game was a hit, being followed by a scaled-down version, Sky Fighter II, since it was too large for most locations. Sky Fighter II was also a hit, selling 3,000 units.
Sky Fighter (1971)
In 1972, he began working on video games after Taito imported Atari's Pong and sold their own version in Japan known as ElePong. He spent months analyzing the game's circuit board to understand how it operated so he could make a similar game and in 1973, it payed off. He created his own pong like game called Soccer, Soccer was a ball-and-paddle game like Pong, but with a green background to simulate a soccer field, and had two buttons on the cabinet to adjust the size of the players paddles on screen. Nishikado considers Soccer to be Japan's first original domestically produced video game and it proved to be a big hit. There was also a 4 player version called Davis Cup.
Soccer and Davis Cup (1973)
Nishikado would work on other games such as Speed Race (A racing game inspired by Kasco's Mini Drive EM racing game), Tv Basketball (A Pong like Basketball game with early human sprites), and Interceptor (a first-person combat flight simulator with early pseudo 3D).
Left to right: Speed Race (1974) Tv Basketball (1974) Interceptor (1976)
But it was seeing a new game from Atari in 1976 that gave Nishikado the inspiration for his biggest breakthrough, and that game was Breakout.
Breakout (1976)
he liked the progression mechanics where the game wouldn't advance until the entire row of blocks were cleared as well as how the games difficulty and speed increased as the game progresses. Inspired, he wanted to make a game with similar mechanics but with better visuals. He eventually settled on a shooting game, where the player would need to shoot targets one at a time similar to a carnival shooting gallery.
One big problem that came to Nishikado was what the enemies would be. He tried tanks, combat planes, and battleships, but was unsatisfied with the enemy movements and technical limitations made it difficult to simulate flying. He considered using humans, but felt that it would be too immoral and violent.
But inspiration came soon enough. Inspiration struck one day he looked at a magazine feature about Star Wars. Suddenly, a lightbulb went off, What if he gave the game a space theme and let the enemies be aliens?
With that idea, Nishikado thought of the designs for the aliens. Inspired by the 1953 War of the Worlds film from his childhood, and other illustrations of the aliens in the book, he made the aliens resemble undersea life such as crabs and squids.
The original design sketches of the Space Invaders aliens
It took him 9 to 10 months to finish programing the game. He wanted to make the game run on a microprocessor instead of TTL logic. The influence for this was when he played Midways Gun Fight, a Microprocessor based version of his game Western Gun. While he though his version was better, he was impressed by Gun Fights better graphics and smoother animation. So, he adopted the hardware, translated the needed information, and built his own tools to develop the game.
Left: Wester Gun Right: Gun Fight (1975)
When the game was finished, he called his game, Space Monsters. But when he showed the game to management, they requested he change monsters to invaders. Nishikado agreed and the game was named Space Invaders. Space Invaders was released in April, 1978 in Japan, and November, 1978 in North America. The game was a critical commercial success. By the end of 1979, an estimated 750,000 Space Invaders machines were sold worldwide and became the arcade game industry's all-time best-seller.
Space Invaders (1978)
The game made history as the first game to save the player's score, the first to introduce rounds, the first game where players were given multiple lives, the first where players had to repel hordes of enemies, take cover from enemy fire, and use destructible barriers, and the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple diatonic descending bass notes repeating in a loop that changed pace during stages, like a heartbeat sound that increases pace as enemies approached. The game was also many game designers introduction to video games such as Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri, and Wolfenstein 3D and Doom creators John Romero and John Carmack.
Today, the game is celebrated as one of the greatest games of all time and the aliens are video game icons, and it all traced back to a classic author and work that got adapted into a movie that inspired a game that sparked a video gaming revolution.