Category: Memories

Space Invaders

  • September 11, 2025

The first arcade game I ever saw was Space Invaders. It was at – of all places – the kiosk at Nobby’s Beach, but I didn’t play it since there was quite a crowd. I believe this would have been in 1979. I do believe the first arcade game I ever played was Space Invaders as well, although I don’t recall exactly where.

The game was released in Japan by Taito in 1978, and while not the very first arcade game, is unquestionably the most important and influential in creating the video game industry. It would eventually take the world by storm, but not until after it had completely conquered Japan.

These photos were taken during the late 1970s Space Invaders craze in Japan, when Taito could hardly manufacture cabinets fast enough. Shortly after the game was released they engineered a new type of sit-down (cocktail) cabinet to satisfy the requests of business that wanted their patrons to be able to drink and smoke as they played. These became extremely popular in Japan, and accounted for the large majority of Space Invaders cabinets made for the Japanese market. (In researching this I learned that cocktail cabinets were also very popular in Australia, but relatively rare in the rest of the world.)

In almost all of these black and white photos, the only game being played is Space Invaders (or some variant of). In under a year 100,000 cabinets were distributed around Japan, and even this was hardly enough. It has been reported that the average cabinet in late 1978 Japan was played over 50 times a day, and recouped its cost within a month.

Space Invaders had become a phenomenon and showed no signs of slowing down. Popular with both children and adults, in those heady days the game was playable almost everywhere. Some businesses changed into arcades as they found Space Invaders more profitable than whatever else they were trying to sell.

The Japanese ‘Game Centers’ we know today were born then, originally in the form of squalid rooms filled with cigarette smoke and the sounds of invaders and laser blasts, but in time into well-lit and very large halls full of games and people playing them.

Arcade gaming was a spectator sport, and the cocktail cabinets a perfect arena for a crowd to watch. Good players became famous, and some were even invited to play live on TV so others could observe their skill. Some players even wrote books on how to better your score, which became best-sellers.

It was during this time two urban legends about the game were born: that it caused a shortage of ¥100 coins and that it led to a rise in delinquency among children. Neither claim has born up to investigation in the decades since, and seem to have been inventions of non-Japanese journalists, but the popularity of the game in Japan between 1978 and 1980 was still incredible. It was the #1 video game in Japan for three years, and earned more money than any film released during that time.

Isn’t it wonderful seeing how popular the arcades were – and this was mostly for one game! You didn’t go in those days to play ‘video games’, you went to play Space Invaders. Imagine the sounds of so many machines being played at once!

Even the arcades were unambiguous about their purpose, as the above photo shows. The earliest Game Centers were even called ‘Space Invaders Houses‘ since that was why they existed. (I believe this image – which dates to 1979 – shows the same building in Ikebukuro that is now Mikado Game Center.)

I found a few colour photos from that era as well, although these date from a couple of years later (I think that is Galaxian in the above shot). Woodgrain paneling on the cocktail cabinet is so evocative of those days.

The above was an early Game Center in Nagoya, Japan. Most of the games look to be Space Invaders, and you can see four upright cabinets lined up in the background. The game on the left (The Driver) was a driving game released in January 1979 and was apparently a failure in arcades.

The above arcade looks so large and comfy. Once again it’s dominated by cocktail cabinets, and most of the uprights (at the back and far right) look to be Space Invaders or variants.

This photo is lovely! Plush chairs and cocktails (the drink, not the cabinets)! A proto-barcade if you will, showing there’s no such thing as a new idea. This brings back memories of a childhood trip to Canberra, and the arcade games they had in the bar. (I believe these guys are playing Moon Patrol.)

The above is a still from a (sadly now removed from YouTube) 1978 video of Nagoya city, showing a large billboard for Space Invaders displayed alongside a marquee for the first Superman film. When was the last time (if ever) you saw a billboard for an arcade game?

It wasn’t long until the Space Invaders craze spread worldwide, as the above story from the September 9, 1980 Sydney Morning Herald reveals. At the time of writing Sydney had 3000 machines, but Japan actually had almost 400,000. In time Japan would have over half a million, and to this day the total number of cabinets manufactured worldwide is unknown.

The rest of the world had its own version of the craze of course, but it wasn’t as intense or sustained as it had been in Japan because the game was six months old when it was released in the USA and almost a year old when released in Europe. This was enough time for other games (notably Galaxian) to steal some of its thunder. I was in the arcades by then – as often as possible! – and even with other games available I remember still playing Space Invaders, like the couple in the above photo taken in New Zealand in 1980, or this pair playing in Penn Station, New York in the same year:

Arcade game technology evolved quickly and only a few short years after 1978 Space Invaders was looking long in the tooth to most gamers. It had conquered the world, made an incredible amount of money, and even created a hobby now enjoyed by billions. But nothing lasts forever, and by 1980 the mania of Space Invaders – and arcades in general – seemed at its end, and the days of arcade games taking over the world looked to be fading into memory…

Gum

  • January 30, 2025

Much like every other stripling, I had a healthy fear of chewing gum in my youth since I didn’t want it staying in my stomach for ten years (or however long the urban legend claimed). The only gum I chewed in those days came in trading card packs (then called ‘bubblegum cards’) or (usually in tiny pellet form) from the lolly machines at shops.

I used to think of chewing gum as an adult pastime – much like smoking – and never much understood it, only chewing until the taste was gone. Why would someone want to keep chewing such tasteless stuff? Unable to understand, I simply dismissed chewing gum as something not for me.

Those were the ‘big three’ in the 1980s in Australia – vintage examples no less – and while I don’t recall ever really buying it myself I can remember powdery sticks of Wrigley’s occasionally offered to my by someone who did. Since I was never one for spitting it out – much less sticking it somewhere – I’d always keep the little foil wrapper so I had something to put the gum into when I was done. There was another brand as well – Stimorol – but to me that was well into the ‘for grown ups’ camp, and I thought of it as a weirdly tasting lolly old guys consumed while they read the racing pages of the Sunday paper. Like Fisherman’s Friend.

And then, somewhere around maybe 1981 or 1982, bubblegum seemed to explode. All of a sudden every kid at school was chewing Hubba Bubba or Bubble Yum and blowing big ‘nonstick’ bubbles. Quickly we learned the more pieces you chewed the bigger the bubbles and had mouths full of the stuff! Schools banned it quickly of course, but that hardly stopped us. We’d smuggle packs into class, chew it surreptitiously, and put it in each other’s hair for laughs. As kids do.

Reading a bit about this now I learned that Hubba Bubba came to market in Australia in 1980 and that’s what triggered the ‘wars’. In the USA it was Bubble Yum vs Bubblelicious since Hubba Bubba had been retired (as a brand) even before their wars had began. My memory of gum exploding isn’t wrong either: the market increased more than tenfold between the late 70s and mid 80s, and bubblegum started being sold almost everywhere.

At first I was happy with the standard flavour since that’s all that was available, but a while later I got into orange Bubble Yum and swore it was best. And then Hubba Bubba released pineapple and I never looked back! I used to buy multiple packs at a time, and recall having a stash of a dozen or more packs secreted in a drawer in my bedside table (alongside the giant pile of Redskins). Even today I can almost recall the taste, although it’s been decades since I last bought a pack. Is pineapple even available any more? Is Hubba Bubba?

The bubblegum wars led to a massive increase in types of gum available. I remember Spurt (a type of gum with a liquid center), Big Tooth (a plastic tooth container full of gum), a dinosaur-head container with bone-shaped gum pellets, gum being added to ice creams (such as Bubble’O’Bill) and the various gums that came with tattoos, like the above type still sold in Australia today.

As with all fads, gum passed, although this was more due to increased awareness of the sugar content than kids losing interest. By the time sugar-free bubblegum turned up I had lost interest, moving on to a healthy obsession with chips, Mars bars and Polly Waffles. The rare times I bought gum was the occasional pack of Juicy Fruit since I craved the taste. I think Bernard still bought gum, as did some of my friends, but it was the chewing type and never bubblegum. I recall a brief flirtation with sherbet-filled fruit-shaped gum balls from machines, but even that didn’t seem to last long.

I almost never buy gum now, and only eat it when it comes with some sort of ‘candy toy’ I buy in Japan. After I started this post I became curious and picked up a pack of Juicy Fruit to see if it tasted the same. Imagine my surprise – and disappointment – to find the pellets are gone and it’s now a bland stick product without the wonderfully fruity taste. It has become a worthless thing; only fit for geezers dreaming of horses.

I’m sure gum will never die, but it may be that it’s long been dead to me. I’ve probably never really understood why anyone likes it, nor why it would be chosen over virtually any other candy lolly or snack. I suppose it’s just not my thing.

Do you chew gum? If so, why?

Bean Counting

  • October 6, 2024

I spent many hours this summer in the attic, emptying out boxes that had been sealed in some cases for decades, and disposing of lots of things that we didn’t need to keep anymore. I ended up reducing the attic storage by a factor of about 75%, which was very liberating. In a few years I’ll do another pass and likely toss out more.

The last step of this years clean-out was today, specifically taking care of this:

This is our Beanie Babies collection, purchased during the fad in the late 1990s.

A lot has been written about the Beanie Babies phenomena, but the quick history is that these little stuffed animals became popular in 1996 and very quickly it seemed everyone was collecting them. They were sold almost everywhere, created long lines and shopper hysteria when new ‘waves’ were released, and spurned an entire industry around them as people latched on to the idea they were not just toys, but investments that would one day make them rich. And then in 1999 the whole fad fell apart and by 2000 almost no one cared about them any more, and the world moved on.

We bought them for a few years, then put them in a box and forgot about them until now. Had you asked me how many we had I would have said a few dozen, so I was quite surprised to find we had 111 of the things:

It is surreal to think back on that era. People were legitimately insane for Beanie Babies (there’s at least two good documentaries about them), and in particular went crazy for the teddy bear types. I always found the bears repellant, but we somehow managed to get 9 of them:

People were selling some of the bears for hundreds of dollars in those days. Beanies were about 10% of all eBay sales during the height of the fad, and by 1998 the madness was worldwide. We never bought in to any of this, since it was abundantly obvious since with everyone buying them there wouldn’t be a sellers market in the future 🙂

Some of our Beanies are unusual – including one that isn’t even an animal – but these mostly come from the end of the fad when all the normal animals had already been made.

I don’t like any of these and can’t remember ever buying them. In fact both of us were surprised by some of the ones we own that we don’t find attractive in any way. I suppose we just bought them because they were inexpensive.

That said, one of ours has a $15 price tag on it!? It’s hard to believe we ever paid that and indeed I don’t recall every buying one on the secondary market (like a toy show) so this remains a mystery.

McDonald’s got in on the action as well with Happy Meal ‘Teenie Beanies’ toys several times during the craze. We have 18 of these, from the 1996, 1998 and 1999 series. As with the full sized beanies, these were extremely popular and sought after at the time. In 1996 the first series was the most successful Happy Meal promotion McDonald’s had ever had to that point!

As you can see the McDonald’s ones (on left) are about half the size of the normal toy (in the middle). At the right is a ‘Beanie Buddy’, and no I don’t know why we own that either.

A small few of ours have ‘tag protectors’ on them to keep the red cardboard tag on good condition. But we also had a pack of dozens of protectors that we never bothered putting on, which perhaps shows how much we valued this ‘investment’! Some collectors bought elaborate storage cases or even sealed them in lucite. It was important to keep the investments in tip top condition 🙂

So let’s talk money. In 1996 the suggested price of a Beanie was $5, and it seems this continued until at least 1998. We have one from 1999 with a $5.50 price tag, but that was probably just a store marking up due to demand. I think it’s reasonable therefore to estimate – at the low end – that we paid about $555 for our normal Beanies plus at least $36 more for the McDonald’s ones (Happy Meals were $2 in those days). The above photos therefore represent an ‘investment’ of about $591.

I’ll say again that some people truly thought these would make them rich one day, and such beliefs continue through the endless eBay auctions where sellers don’t understand the market died 25 years ago and never recovered.

The truth is Beanie Babies are worthless today. Every single one we have can be obtained for under $1 on eBay right now, and collections are selling for much less than $1 per Beanie. If you search you’ll find that the vast majority of auctions for these things don’t actually sell at all, since everyone has them in their attics and no one wants them! I’m sure there’s a few diehard collectors out there seeking holy grail error Beanies (and good luck to them), but it doesn’t change the fact that 99.99999% of the things now retain no value at all.

So our $591 we spent between 1996 and 1999 has now become… well maybe $50 if we successfully sold them on eBay, which is not what anyone would call an investment! But what if we’d ignored the Beanies entirely and spent our $591 back in 1999 on a true investment like the Dow Jones or Apple stock?

If we’d spent $591 on a DJIA mutual fund in December 1999 we’d have about $2458 worth of stock today.

If we’d spent $591 on APPL (Apple) stock in December 1999, we have about $171,800 in Apple stock (yes you read that correctly) today.

But we didn’t, and today we simply have worthless Beanies! We selected a ‘favourite’ each (the term is used lightly) – Legs the frog for KLS and a dubiously coloured Platypus for me – and put the remaining 16 kg of them into a different type of permanent storage:

Goodbye Beanie Babies. We’ll never forget you.