Glitches That Surprisingly Made Video Games Better

Space Invaders

When we think of old arcade video games, Space Invaders is one that instantly comes to mind. Countless generations of gamers have all played this hit classic, but it wouldn’t be what it was today if the creator didn’t leave a glitch within the system. Space Invaders was developed by one man, Tomohiro Nishikado. During development, he had planned for all the aliens to move at the same speed but what he found was that all the characters on the screen was too much for the hardware to process. At first, Space Invaders is slow and gamers can easily take out the aliens on the screen. Although, once more of those alien creatures were destroyed, the hardware started to process the game at its intended speed.

Tomohiro Nishikado loved the effect so much that he decided to keep the glitch. Essentially, the glitch is all because of the hardware not being powerful enough to run at intended speed when the developer made the game back in 1978. Developer Tomohiro made the right decision as countless quarters were fed into arcade cabinets all over the world.