History
Tomohiro Nishikado designed Space Invaders for Taito in 1978; Midway licensed it for North America. Its descending formation, destructible shelters and four-note marching rhythm established a durable template for the fixed shooter. The game became an international arcade phenomenon, and the 1980 Atari VCS conversion was an important early example of a home console selling on the strength of a licensed arcade game.
Controls
| 1 / 2 | Start a one- or two-player game; credits are supplied automatically |
| C | Service coin input (normally unnecessary) |
| Left / Right | Move the missile base |
| Space | Fire |
| Horizontal Switch Joy-Con | Stick moves; right-hand button starts or fires. With two connected, either controls the active player. |
| T | Tilt input |
Objective
Destroy the descending invaders before they reach the missile base. The mystery saucer crossing the top of the screen awards a variable score.
Each load or reset starts with 99 credits. One-player start spends one credit; two-player start spends two. Start does not insert coins. Press C to insert a coin.
Hardware
This port executes a literal address-specialized translation of the original four 8080 ROMs. It retains the original 59.541985 Hz raw timing, dual scanline interrupts, shift-register hardware, memory-mapped framebuffer, input ports, gel color regions, and sound-latch timing.
The original boot sequence runs visibly at maximum speed, then normal timing resumes.