10 Simple Facts Most Gamers Don't Know
6. Space Invaders' Core Gameplay Mechanic Was An Accident
You won't find many video games more iconic or identifiable to even non-gamers than Space Invaders - perhaps Pac-Man, but that's about it.
Everyone, gamer or no, knows the gist of Space Invaders - fire tank rounds into the sky to destroy an army of descending aliens before they reach the button and cause a Game Over. Simple.
The game's genius central conceit is that the aliens will move faster the more of them you kill, which rather than a devious feat of intentional engineering was actually a total happy accident during development.
Space Invaders' designer Tomohiro Nishikado discovered that the processor he chose to design the game on could render each alien's movement animations faster when there were fewer aliens on screen, resulting in faster alien movement as the player killed them.
Though at first Nishikado considered implementing a means to compensate for the speed increase, he ultimately - and rightly - surmised that it made gameplay more interesting and challenging, so kept it.
Over four decades later, it's one of the game's most defining elements, and such a seemingly inspired design choice that few would even consider the possibility it wasn't intentional.