👾 Invaders — play the 1978 classic free online

Space Invaders was created in 1978 by Tomohiro Nishikado at Taito in Japan — and remarkably, he did almost everything himself: the concept, the artwork, the sounds, the programming, and even the custom hardware it ran on. Midway licensed it for the United States, where it detonated just as hard as it had in Japan: it kicked off the golden age of arcades and became one of the highest-earning entertainment products of its era.

Its most famous quirk was an accident. The cabinet's Intel 8080 CPU redrew each alien one at a time, so as you destroyed aliens there was less to draw and the survivors marched faster — an emergent difficulty curve Nishikado decided to keep. Our version reproduces the same one-alien-per-tick ripple march, so "the fewer, the faster" happens for the authentic reason, not a scripted speed table.

The details here follow the ROM disassembly: the real sprite bitmaps, the wave start-height cycle, the three bomb types with their reload tables, and the saucer's scoring trick — its value is decided by your shot count (old-timers know the 23rd-shot rule; it works here).

Move with ← → (or A/D) and fire with Space — one shot on screen at a time, so every miss costs you. Bunkers absorb fire from both sides (your own shots chew your cover too), aliens erase whatever they march through, and if the swarm reaches your row it's over regardless of lives. Extra cannon at 1,500 points. On a phone, touch buttons appear automatically — and the portrait playfield fits your screen perfectly.

Thin the columns at the edges first to slow the swarm's descent cycle, keep one bunker pristine for the endgame, and count your shots if you want the 300-point saucer. The last alien moves faster left than right — another original hardware quirk we kept.