Original: Arcade · 1978
The Atari 2600 conversion of Space Invaders is the video game industry's first killer app — a port so desirable that it quadrupled sales of the console it ran on, and in many cases sold the entire system by itself.
Taito's Space Invaders had conquered arcades since 1978, and when Atari secured the licence and released a home conversion for the Atari 2600 on 10 March 1980, it changed the economics of the console business permanently. Designed and programmed by Rick Maurer, the 2600 version could not hope to match the arcade original's fidelity — the invaders were chunkier, the sound thinner, the presentation cruder — but it captured the essential loop faithfully enough, and crucially it let people play at home a game they had been feeding quarters into for two years. The commercial result was unprecedented. Atari 2600 sales quadrupled following the game's release, and the cartridge itself sold over 4.2 million copies by the end of 1981 and nearly 6.1 million by 1983, making it one of the best-selling titles on the platform. The Winter 1981 issue of Electronic Games reported that the release established Atari's dominance in the home video game market and that it was the one title that "sold the entire system in many cases" — consumers were buying a console specifically to play this one game. This is the behaviour that would later be given a name: the killer app. Space Invaders on the 2600 is widely described as the industry's first, and it established a strategic principle that has governed the console business ever since — that a single exclusive or high-profile game can drive hardware adoption more effectively than any amount of technical specification. Every platform holder chasing a system-seller since has been following the template Atari accidentally proved in 1980. There is a sour coda to the story. Rick Maurer, whose port had transformed Atari's fortunes and moved millions of cartridges, received an $11,000 bonus for the game's extraordinary success. Feeling inadequately compensated for a title that had effectively made the company's home business, he left Atari and never developed another 2600 game — an early instance of the tension between individual creators and corporate publishers that would soon prompt other Atari programmers to walk out and found Activision, the industry's first third-party developer.
Taito's original, with its iconic accelerating four-note march and monochrome overlay colouring.
Rick Maurer's conversion. Visually crude next to the arcade, but the industry's first killer app — it quadrupled 2600 sales and moved ~6.1 million cartridges by 1983.
Later Atari home computer and console conversions offered improved colour and fidelity over the 2600 version.