ABSTRACT
We had a book of ideas that we kept, and one idea I had wanted to do was a first-person Space Invaders. I loved Space Invaders, and I thought it would be great in first person. Atari had a new color vector display under development, and they said I could use it. But when I completed my first version of the game, it was OK, but nothing special. At the first design review, Gene Lipkin said it sucked, and that was my feeling, too, but I still thought with some changes I could make it work. I mentioned a nightmare I had with monsters coming out of a hole in the ground and said, ‘I can take this first-person Space Invaders and make it into a tube, and the monsters will come out like a hole in the ground,’ and they said, ‘Try it.’ So I made a bunch of different shapes and made the necessary changes, and at that point people started coming into the lab and playing it a lot and making it hard for me to get my work done, which was the traditional way we knew we were onto something. When we field-tested it, it did really well. A large part of the game's popularity was that the controller was fun, and you could sit there and spin when you were waiting for something to happen. It had a nice feel to it. -Dave Theurer, Tempest Designer
