Aliens are attempting to conquer Earth. They’re stacked six deep and six across, and coming in unending waves. Your trusty laser cannon is the only thing keeping the attackers from enslaving humanity. Shoot them before they shoot you. If they land, it’s over. So long, civilization.

That’s Space Invaders. The game is as simple and intense as a whiskey with a beer back, and almost 30 years after its release, I’m still hooked on it. For me, there’s majesty in the march of those alien battalions. As they descend like strikes on a typewriter’s return key, pressure builds until I feel, approximately, like I’m being judged for murder. There’s nothing remotely complicated about the game. No princess to save. No victory. Just defend earth until killed. As a kid, I gave myself blisters playing it. And in my dreams, I’d fire against row after row of that alien army’s vanguard. Even though I knew I could never win, I played Space Invaders incessantly.

Upon its debut in Japanese arcades, Taito’s Space Invaders was black and white, and even for 1977, its graphics were far from extraordinary. In fact, the very origin of Space Invaders highlights the primitive state of that decade’s computer technology.

When looking at a modern video game, where characters appear more lifelike than the people of the WB, it’s hard to conceptualize that everything on screen is just endless lines of zeros and ones. That’s DNA of any computer program, whether it plays games or does your taxes. And before Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft—aka “the Big Three”—could begin wowing gamers with realistic graphics and fluid play, programmers had to design for computers exponentially weaker than a modern calculator. In those dark days, computers were programmed by imputing long strings of digits, which was difficult and detail-oriented work.

Before it found a home in video arcades, the program that would become Space Invaders had simply been a test for evaluating prospective programmers. An inspired, yet unnamed, Taito employee eventually transformed the test into a game. Accordingly, the executives who green-lighted its release had nothing but modest expectations for the former utility. But revolution was around the corner.

In video game history, calling Space Invaders a “success” is akin to describing the Beatles as “good.” The hypnotic shooter game was so ferociously popular that production of the 100-yen piece—the Japanese quarter—had to be tripled to just keep it in circulation. And while the mania that surrounded Space Invaders in Japan didn’t quite translate to American shores—there are no incidents of the U.S. Mint ever reacting to a video game—its wild popularity demonstrated that arcade games could be profitable here and ignited an entire industry. As Eddie Adlum, editor of industry journal Replay Magazine, describes in Steven L. Kent’s fantastic Ultimate History of Video Games:“Games such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders were going into every location in the country, with the exception of maybe funeral parlors, and even a few funeral parlors had video games in their basements. Absolutely true. Churches and synagogues were about the only types of locations to escape video games.”

In addition to opening up funeral parlors to video games, Space Invaders also helped transform a small American company into a cultural icon—and turn former carnival games operator Nolan Bushnell into a high-tech visionary. Among the handful of people who knew of video games in the prehistoric times before 1970, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell is unquestionably the most famous. His first addiction was Spacewar. Invented by Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Steve Russell and modified by fellow MIT geeks, Spacewar—as the title suggests—was a battle between opposing spaceships. While studying electrical engineering at the University of Utah—one of the few places in the country with a computer powerful enough to handle it—Bushnell played Spacewar incessantly, and his obsession with it only grew after graduation. Computer Space became the fruit of that obsession.

Computer Space, the very first game Bushnell created, was a stand-alone version of Spacewar, and the 1,500 machines produced were the world’s first video arcade machines. The game came in a curiosity-inspiring rounded cabinet, but Computer Space was difficult, and well-oiled bar patrons found the formidable instructions discouraging. In short, it turned people away in droves. The game wasn’t successful, but to Bushnell, the fact that he’d built a functioning example—as well as gotten it manufactured—was important enough. Inspired, he formed a company, Atari, to pursue electronic games. Atari’s first release, a pingpong game titled simply, Pong, would prove a watershed moment in the history of video games.

Atari’s Pong was actually an accident. The idea of video pingpong was not new—or particularly original. William Higinbotham, a physicist working for the Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York, developed Tennis for Two in 1958, and Magnavox had been marketing a home electronic tennis game—Odyssey—since 1972. So when Bushnell decided to give Al Alcorn, Atari employee No. 2, a competency test, he asked him to build a pingpong game.

Like Space Invaders before it, this test would reap unexpected rewards. Alcorn’s game was simple, cost-effective and, most importantly, fun. By adding a ball that accelerated during rallies and building in an ability to angle that ball, Alcorn had improved the game exponentially. Bushnell loved it. Upon release in 1972, Pong was a smash, and the runaway success of its first product caught Atari off-guard.

Overnight, the company’s hiring procedure became simple: Hire anyone. As a result, the converted Southern California roller rink where Pong machines were built was populated primarily by paroled criminals, slackers with exhausted unemployment benefits and heroin addicts. Despite its less-than-perfect production line, Pong, along with variations like Hockey and Tennis, would remain Atari’s chief moneymaker for five years.

Atari entered American living rooms in 1975 with the release of Home Pong, but Bushnell and company were already behind the curve; 1976 saw Fairchild Camera and Instrument release Channel F, a home video-game system that played games stored on interchangeable cartridges, raising the technical bar significantly. Consumers no longer wanted a box dedicated to one game, and Atari had to respond. Its response was the Video Computer System. Better known as the 2600, the system would be produced for an astounding 24 years and inspire an unrivaled catalog of games.

Initially, sales were slow. Atari was facing competition not only from Channel F but another cartridge-based system, RCA’s Studio II. Shipping snafus kept many 2600s off the shelves during the 1977 Christmas season, and for the next two years, Atari weathered the storm as the market became saturated with game systems. While it was outselling the competition in 1979, Atari still needed a way to cement its dominance of the market, and it found the answer in Space Invaders. An arcade game had never been licensed for home systems, and Atari thought it could capitalize on Space Invaders’ runaway success. It was right.

Space Invaders on the 2600 was, arguably, a significant improvement over the arcade version. It was in color, and there were more than 100 different variations on the game. The Space Invaders cartridge made the 2600 the must-have system, and it seemed every kid on my block—myself included—had one. I don’t remember the first time I played an Atari, or when my parents bought one. I don’t even remember asking for one. It wasn’t some flagship present at Christmas, and I seem to remember it arriving unexpectedly—a surprise on an otherwise unremarkable day. One of my clearest memories of Atari is playing Pac-Man at a neighbor’s. It was a Friday, and I was waiting for my dad to pick me up. David, the neighbor kid, was a textbook bully with squinty eyes who wholeheartedly deserved the bad haircuts his father inflicted on him. He’d let me play his Atari only when his mom forced him to—and all my faculties were committed to besting his score.

My eyes were stuck to the screen. I was on a terrific jag of dot-munching, well on my way to supremacy, when my dad walked in. He said “Time to go,” and I knew I had mere moments. Now, patience is not one of my father’s virtues, but there was an unusually long pause as he waited for me to quit playing. When I didn’t, he asked, “Is that Pac-Man?” I replied, and he just stood there, watching me play. Fifteen minutes later, I made what’s basically the only mistake you can make playing Pac-Man; I zigged when I should have zagged.

“Ok, time to go,” said my dad. He meant it this time, but I didn’t care. I’d beaten David by over 1,000 points, and his glare smoldered on my scalp while I collected my coat and backpack. On the way home from church that Sunday, dad took a detour. “Where we going?” I asked. Not that it mattered—anywhere being better than church. “Pep Boys,” he said. But he pulled up in front of Toys “R” Us. Dad bought Pac-Man that day, and while he didn’t play as much as I did, he certainly didn’t play much less.

For Atari, Pac-Man was technically a success, but unlike Space Invaders, many players found the Pac-Man cartridge to be a crude imitation of the arcade classic. The 2600’s enduring popularity was due largely to other titles, none with themes much more sophisticated than Pac-Man’s. Combat was one-on-one battle with tanks and airplanes. Missile Command and Defender asked players to protect cities and rescue humans. The objective of Frogger was to dash across a busy street without getting squashed, and Pitfall charged players with avoiding crocodiles and quicksand.

Of course, not every game developed a following. One notable failure was E.T., a game based on Steven Spielberg’s movie. Atari executives bet that third-rate game-play and graphics wouldn’t matter because of the movie’s success—and lost big. More interesting than these high-profile hits and misses, however, are the Atari catalog’s anomalies.

First it’s important to remember there were—and still are—Atari games about virtually every activity. Take Bowling, for example. While the game is certainly more fun than it sounds, it’s only slightly more intense than brushing your teeth. And think Jogging would make a fun video game? Unfortunately, somebody did, and the result was a cartridge so spectacularly dull it could very well be used to discipline children. As video games became established as more than a fad, companies rushed to get in on the craze: Kool-Aid Man, Purina’s Chase the Chuck Wagon—which took inspiration from, of all things, a dog-food commercial—and Johnson & Johnson’s Tooth Protectors were some of the most memorable of the corporate-sponsored games, and because they were only available via mail-order, these now command high prices for collectors.

Even less savory than the corporate games were the X-rated titles. Games like Bachelor Party and Beat ’Em and Eat ’Em, while too technically crude to express anything but a basic representation of sexual contact, took video games to a new low. The company responsible for these games, Mystique, also has the dubious distinction of having released Custer’s Revenge, the most deplorable video game ever. After killing a certain number of Indians, the main character forces himself on an Indian woman. So, unfortunately, along with Bowling and Jogging, there’s an Atari game about rape.

In 2004 it’s impossible to remain oblivious to the video-game world. Newspapers report—almost daily—on the electronic slugfest between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Games like Tomb Raider inspire hit movies and Grand-Theft Auto—Pick up prostitutes? Chop up people with a chainsaw?—pushes the limits of the First Amendment.

With that in mind, the Atari universe is overwhelmingly wholesome. No games—Custer’s Revenge and Boxing aside—feature violence against human beings. And while Atari as a company is gone—a victim of poor decisions and a changing industry climate—2600 games, like the perfectly titled This Planet Sucks, are still produced by hobbyists everyday. There’s even a modification which allows a 2600 to be plugged directly into state-of-the-art plasma-screen TVs. So while Atari devotees may feel disheartened by the thought of cartridges cluttering up junk bins at Goodwill, we can pacify ourselves with the knowledge that there’s a whole subculture of people ready to dust them off and give them a whirl—even if victory is impossible.