Design lessons from Space Invaders
<p>I remember the first time I saw <em>Space Invaders</em>.</p>
<p>It was 1978, and my friend and I cycled over to a local mall, where it sat moodily aglow in the back of the dank arcade.</p>
<p>We craned our necks over the crowd of teens gathered around. It was spellbinding. I’d played a lot of arcade games before, like <em>Breakout</em>, <em>Pong</em>, or racing games like <em>Night Driver</em>. Those were aesthetically pretty crude affairs — the graphics mostly simple glowing blocks, the sound effects beeps and boops.</p>
<p>But <em>Space Invaders</em>? It had <em>style</em>. The aliens were little masterpieces of pixel-art — extraterrestrial menace rendered vaguely cute, vaporizing into a blip when you shot one. The sound effects had the precision of plucked strings on a violin, the <em>pew pew pew</em> evoking the soundscape of <em>Star Wars</em> (recently released back then too). And best of all was the ominously looming background music, a four-toned thud-thud that radiated sinister martial vibes.</p>
<p>The game felt liberating — like it had blown open the doors to show what a video game could be. The designer, Tomohiro Nishikado, seemed like a force of raw creativity.</p>
<p><a href="https://clivethompson.medium.com/design-lessons-from-space-invaders-5bef75fe8f03"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>