The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 76: Introducing The Winner’s Book Of Video Games
The Winner’s Book Of Video Games had this to say about Space Invaders:
“Space Invaders. Space Invaders. Space Invaders. It is the Muhammad Ali of the video game world. It is the Greatest. The biggest seller in the history of the world. The best game ever for the year it was introduced. The game that revitalized the industry and changed it forever. The game that made the industry the monster it is today…” And on and on in that vein.
The Winner’s Book Of Video Games is an odd duck. Published in 1982, it hasn’t aged well – the author, Craig Kubey, has a bizarrely limited video vocabulary even for the times, seemingly unable to gravitate away from the notion of ship vs ship combat, high score as the be-all and end-all of gameplay and a weirdly American history of gaming that centres around the small town of Davis, California, home of the greatest Pac-Man players in the world, a trio of what would now be called nerdish freaks who studied the game so obsessively that they could play for whole days at a stretch.
At that point you have to ask what you’re playing for.
Anyway, here’s another salient point from this forgotten tome:
“Space Invaders drove an entire nation mad. You may think the last sentence refers to the United States… But if the United States was an eight on the scale of video craziness, Japan was an eleven. Space Invaders created a national shortage of the hundred-yen coin. Coffee shops replaced all their tables with cocktail table versions of the game. One kind of business after another converted overnight to a Space Invaders arcade: first the arcades, then the Pachinko parlours, then the tearooms, then anything – vegetable stores, garages, you name it. And they didn’t just become pinball and video arcades, or video arcades with a mix of machines. All they had were wall-to-wall Space Invaders, Space Invaders, Space Invaders. Outside they bolted speakers to the roofs and broadcast the seductive, addictive, heartbeat thump-thump-thump of the machines.”
Makes you think, eh?
