Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Four: Gobble Gobble
by [redacted]
To bring you up to speed, in 1976 Breakout came along to refocus Pong as a single-player experience, to redefine the videogame in terms of the player’s relationship with the gameworld, and to inject a remedial sense of narrative.
This had profound effects technologically, in terms of design theory, and in terms of the narrative application of videogames. Three threads would arise: the home PC, and two distinct schools of design; one focused more on the the pure theory, and one more on the storytelling potential of the form.
Two years later, Space Invaders reinvented Breakout as a tense battle between the lonely individual and inevitable doom from above. Suddenly players could reach out and touch the targets, and it mattered if they did. Add in a high score table, and a cultural phenomenon was born. Arcades were established just to fill with this one game. The videogame had become a summer blockbuster, its audience’s emotions and impulses carefully orchestrated for word-of-mouth and return visits.
Yet all was not well. Just as Pong had enjoyed several years as the generic videogame, overnight Space Invaders became the only game in town. Every game on the market, from Galaxian to Radar Scope, was an Invaders clone. And yet its appeal was not universal. Somehow, as the young Toru Iwatani observed, those dingy, smoke-filled arcades were filled entirely with socially-inept males. Furthermore, the game’s bleak tone and the mental state it aroused through constant repetition was a bit worrisome.
Clearly there was something wrong with this picture, and Iwatani set to figuring it out.