The first arcade I ever walked into had an Astro Invader machine. I have to write a little about this game, because it seems full of contradictions.
Astro Invader was the first video game from Stern Electronics, and it was clearly an attempt to cash in on the Space Invaders craze. The name alone told you that, right? But here's the problem. . . In some ways it seemed like an even less advanced game than Space Invaders, because the aliens simply dropped through vertical slots clearly marked on the screen. The premise didn't even make sense: since when does the sky have vertical slots? The aliens didn't even shoot at you, they just tried to drop on you. Nor did they respond in any way to the player's actions, aside from dying when shot.
This might have been forgivable. . . except that Galaxians had already come out the year before. The multi-colored Galaxians swooping down in formation, while firing, in front of a scrolling starfield looked like the future. Astro Invader looked like the past.
So, Astro Invader was the runner-up. If you couldn't play Galaxians at your local arcade because of the mob surrounding the machine, you could always walk across the room and plunk your quarter into the lonely Astro Invader machine.
Why did Stern release a game that was clearly behind the times?
Then there's the color issue. It's been a lot of years, but I thought Astro Invader was a black-and-white game with a color overlay -- sort of like Space Invaders. According to Wikipedia, it was a color game. It plays in color with MAME. And yet, if you play the game in MAME you'll notice the color is applied in a very overlay-like manner. All game objects are monochrome and they change color as they move through different regions of the screen. Which is right: Wikipedia or my faded memories?
Next issue: Scarcity! Wikipedia offers this:
An Astro Invader machine appears in the music video for the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song You Got Lucky. The band finds a working one buried under some junk in an old barn, and eventually Petty knocks the machine over. Although not commented on at the time, this has retroactively caused some lament among arcade fans because Astro Invader machines were not produced in large numbers to begin with, and intact, working specimens are now fairly rare.
Back in the early 1980s, in the region of rural Texas where I lived, there was no shortage of Astro Invader machines. The two arcades I most often frequented both had one. Maybe my area was freakish, maybe it was a dumping ground for games nobody wanted. They were also among the first arcade games that I ever saw coming up for sale the public -- for cheap! The use of an Astro Invader machine in that Tom Petty video made perfect sense to me when I saw it on MTV. "Aha! They used the cheapest, most unwanted arcade game they could find." It was already obsolete.
If the machines are fairly rare today, I suspect it's because so many were unceremoniously dumped into landfills around 1982.
However. . . I don't want to give the impression that I hated the game. It may not have wowed me the way Galaxians did, but I probably put more quarters into Astro Invader than I ever did into Space Invaders and Galaxians combined. That was partly due to availability, as I've previously alluded. . . but there was something else.
I've heard some people talk about the hypnotic qualities of Space Invaders. They talk about getting into the rhythm of the game and finding an almost trance-like state. I never got that out of Space Invaders, but I have experienced something like it when playing Astro Invader. The aliens fall into their slots at a fixed rate, your gun fires at a fixed rate, and you have move and fire into slot after slot to the beat of the game. It could be -- briefly -- fascinating.