A closer look
Space Invaders was originally designed with human enemies, but Taito changed them to aliens to avoid moral outrage from a society that apparently thought shooting digital blobs of pixels would turn the youth into sociopaths. Developer Tomohiro Nishikado decided that obliterating extraterrestrial life forms was a much safer bet for a 1978 arcade release, paving the way for decades of guilt-free alien genocide in gaming. It is genuinely hilarious to think that the same people pearl-clutching over crude white squares shooting at other crude white squares would eventually have to deal with the hyper-realistic gore of Mortal Kombat just a decade later. Today, we shoot everything from infected zombies to heavily armed toddlers in modern battle royales, but thank goodness Nishikado protected the fragile morality of the 1970s arcade-goer by making those 8-bit invaders from space instead of the neighboring town
