First Successful Video Arcade Games
After a brief period of decline, the arcade industry entered its greatest period of creativity and popularity in 1978 to begin what has commonly been dubbed the "Golden Age of Arcade Games". Fueling this new growth were two very different games from companies Atari and Taito. Toshihiro Nishikado was supposedly inspired by a dream in his creation of Space Invaders, but whatever the origin, the game created a new craze with its simple, yet addictive game play in which the player controlled a gun battery at the bottom of the screen and had to destroy aliens advancing down the screen in rows one line at a time. While the player could never "win" the game, as destroying all the aliens led to the game starting over at greater difficulty until the player finally died, Space Invaders introduced the high score, providing a new social dimension to the video game as players tried to top each others' performances (Space Invaders did not, however, allow the player to enter his initials next to his score; this practice began with the 1979 Exidy game Star Fire). A slow seller at first in Japan, the game eventually sold over 100,000 units and caused a phenomenon as small stores switched to housing rows of Space Invader cabinets and a shortage of the 100 Yen coins required to play the game resulted in the Japanese government having to increase production of the coin. Taito released the game through Midway in the United States, where the game sold 60,000 units within a year and cemented the place of the shoot 'em up genre in video games. At the same time, Atari released a revolutionary new sports game, Atari Football, that was both the first sports game to feature a smooth-scrolling screen and the first game of any type to feature the trackball as a controller. Released initially in a two-player version and followed up with a four-player model, Atari Football required the player on offense to spin the trackball to advance his runner down the field while the defender attempted to tackle him and nearly matched Space Invaders quarter for quarter in the United States until early 1979 when the football season ended.
After the success of Space Invaders, a large number of established coin-op companies that had avoided video games altogether or pulled out after releasing a Pong clone or two chose to fully embrace the new medium including pinball giants Williams and Gottlieb and Japanese coin-op companies such as Konami (est. 1969 as a jukebox rental and repair business) and Namco (est. 1955 as a mechanical rocking-horse manufacturer and operator). Several newer companies also entered the field such as Irem (est. 1974), SNK (est. 1978), and Technos Japan Corporation (est. 1981). Space shooters, whether fixed like Space Invaders or multi-directional like Spacewar!, remained the hottest arcade genre into 1980 and continued to be popular long after that, with important golden age games including Namco’s Galaxian (1979, a Space Invaders clone that was the first game with true three-channel RGB color graphics) and its sequel, Galaga (1981), SNK's Ozma Wars (1979, the first shoot 'em up with multiple stages or levels), Williams' Defender (1980 by Eugene Jarvis, a complex game that required the player to rescue astronauts being snatched by aliens that sold 55,000 units and was the first scrolling shoot 'em up), Amstar’s Phoenix (1980, another Space Invaders clone that was the first arcade game to include a final boss fight), Konami’s Scramble (1981, a horizontally-scrolling shooter that established what became the basic parameters of the scrolling shoot 'em up in which the player is propelled though several stages while dodging obstacles and dispatching enemies), Namco's Xevious (1982, the first vertically-scrolling shoot 'em up), and Sega’s Zaxxon (1982, a scrolling shooter that was the first video game of any genre to make use of the isometric perspective). The genre was also expanded to include games using vehicles rather than space ships such as Irem's shooter Moon Patrol (1982, the first game to feature parallax scrolling)and games involving characters rather than vehicles in single-screen games like Jarvis's Robotron: 2084 (1982) and vertically-scrolling games like Taito's Front Line (1982), innovative as being one of the earliest military-themed games and the earliest in which the player kills actual humans rather than spaceships, robots, aliens, etc.
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