Space Monsters

In 1978 Japanese designer Tomohiro Nishikado created what would become one of the most influential video-games ever made: Space Invaders. The game was originally titled Space Monsters, but was changed at the last moment by the marketing team at Taito (if you ever wondered why the arcade cabinet art had some furry creatures, that's why).

What has recently come to light though is that the original prototype for Space Monsters was a very different game, where the player controlled one of the invaders. The game was changed (for the better) because of a simple technical reason: the red invader moving around the screen was impossible to recreate, since the hardware was not powerful enough to display graphics in color, and the final arcade only achieved some color with overlay strips of cellophane, red for the UFO at the top of the screen, and green for the cannon and shields at the bottom.

Now, thanks to the advanced technologies of today that allow the cellophane to be moved with a series of complicated ball bearings that follow the player's input, we were able to recreate Mr. Nishikado's original idea, that we present here as a humble tribute for Mr. Nishikado's monumental creation.

[This game was created for the Week Sauce game jam of May 2022, whose theme was: Imagine a game you love is the sequel to an earlier, previously unknown, but recently rediscovered game. Make that game.]

Controls:

ARROWS/WASD for movement.
SPACE to fire.

Scoring:

To make things more confusing, each "wave" starts with 990 points that get reduced every time one of the invaders is destroyed.