And none of this is adjusted for inflation, either, of which there was plenty of over the last 45 years. Taito, after all the costs involved in building the 750,000 custom arcade cabinets that housed Space Invaders, the overseas licensing with Midway, and the cut of the venues with the machines in them, still made a net profit of nearly half-a-billion dollars on Space Invaders.

Nothing could come close to that, not even Star Wars, the highest-grossing film of the day that had been released one year earlier: the entire original Star Wars trilogy grossed around $1.4 billion in its original theatrical run. Space Invaders, from 1978 through 1982, grossed $3.8 billion in revenue. without Space Invaders, and not just because Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of that game, claimed his introduction to Space Invaders gave him an interest in videogames and a desire to make his own.

And it had ended its own videogame crash by putting a stop to the proliferation of Pong clones and kicking off what’s referred to as “the golden age of arcade games.” Maybe you don’t even get Super Mario Bros.

might have powered the early popularity of the NES and rescued home game consoles from an industry-wide crash and near demise, Space Invaders was at the center of that transition from arcade to the living room in the first place, thanks to its dominance of arcades and entertainment media at large. If Space Invaders isn’t the most important videogame ever, then it’s at least in the discussion.

Galaxian arcade games