Your birth year
2006
Space Invaders
1978Shooter
Space Invaders is 28 years older than you
It's from 1978, before you were born.
- Developer
- Taito
- Genre
- Fixed shooter
- Debut
- Arcade (1978)
- Designer
- Tomohiro Nishikado
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About
As of 2026, it's 48 years old.
Space Invaders armed you with one laser cannon and pointed it at a relentless grid of aliens that descend, speed up, and absolutely will not stop — and in 1978 it was such a phenomenon that it reportedly caused a coin shortage in Japan. The game was so popular people literally ran out of money to feed it.
Its genius cruelty: the aliens speed up as you shoot them, which was originally a hardware limitation that the designers wisely kept because panic is fun.
Pixelated, merciless, and weirdly tense, Space Invaders invented the idea that a video game could make your heart race over a row of marching blocks.
