8 Video Games That Changed The World

5. Space Invaders - Inventing The Difficulty Curve

It's taken decades for things like roguelikes to truly play with the concept of death and checkpoints in video games, as the very idea of challenge largely came from the arcades.

Making a game harder will result in more tries and more money, but why is this even a thing? Why is challenge so inherently connected to video games in the first place?

Well, years before the arcade boom of the early 80s, coder Tomohiro Nishikado was hard at work creating Space Invaders.

Obviously iconic and a staple part of any gamer's diet, the most fascinating part of this game's development came from Nishikado stumbling into the idea of difficulty curves.

Coming from the fact he had to create custom hardware using imported microprocessors from the U.S., when creating the movements of the aliens, Tomohiro noticed the processor would ease up and render more of them faster, the quicker they were destroyed.

The duplication glitch was down to how he was trialling a frame refresh rate, and it combined to create what we'd now refer to as a difficulty curve - where the screen fills up with more enemies to shoot, the more you attempt to keep at bay.

Needless to say, difficulty is a core tenet of gaming as a medium, and it makes you wonder about an entire landscape of tech demos and interact-able elements, without the necessary challenge to really make them memorable.