Design lessons from Space Invaders

A case study in how constraints can spur creativity

I remember the first time I saw Space Invaders.

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.

We craned our necks over the crowd of teens gathered around. It was spellbinding. I’d played a lot of arcade games before, like Breakout, Pong, or racing games like Night Driver. Those were aesthetically pretty crude affairs — the graphics mostly simple glowing blocks, the sound effects beeps and boops.

But Space Invaders? It had style. 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 pew pew pew evoking the soundscape of Star Wars (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.

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.

And he was! Except when you dig into the story of how Nishikado designed Space Invaders, it also…