Space Invaders/Popular Reaction

The enormous blockbuster success of Space Invaders made the entertainment industry sit up and take notice. Within the first year of its release, the game had generated revenue ranging in the hundreds of millions of dollars—with the majority coming from teenagers and school children, who pumped millions of quarters into the game at a frenzied pace. Video game mania among the youths in the United States was so pervasive that for a time, some children and teenagers were panhandling and begging strangers for quarters so that they could continue playing the game.

This phenomenon led to the first outcries against video games by groups of concerned adults, who felt that the content of video games was a corrupting influence on children. In the case of Space Invaders, the issue was not usually the highly abstract and stylized violence, but with the fact that the game could not be "won" in any familiar sense. As framed by the critics, the player is powerless to do more than to delay an inevitable defeat. They suggested that the game taught an unwholesome life lesson, inculcated defeatism, and possibly was intended to put the United States at a disadvantage in its economic rivalry with Japan by undermining the competitive spirit of American youth.

Space Invaders became very popular in part due to its new style of gameplay. Up until its release, video games were timed to a clock, and once a player's time was up (plus possible bonus time), the game ended. With Space Invaders, the game ended only when the player had exhausted the three allotted "lives": a person could therefore play for as long as their skill level allowed.