From “The Space Invader,” Simon Parkin’s interesting New Yorker blog post about Tomohiro Nishikado, who created the quarter-sucking sensation in 1978:

“Space Invaders sold an unprecedented hundred thousand machines in Japan; Bally Midway, the game’s U.S. distributor, sold around sixty thousand units in 1979 alone. Today, with its jagged shapes and sine-wave squeals, the game is an icon of the industry’s formative days and the medium’s ongoing appeal: a simplistic rendering of fears that can be overcome with determination and a steady focus.

But Space Invaders didn’t always generate favorable press. In Japan, soon after the game’s release, a twelve-year-old boy held up a bank with a shotgun. He didn’t want notes, he told the clerk, just coins. Under interrogation, he admitted that he wanted the money to play Space Invaders. In England, in November, 1981, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy prostituted himself in a parking lot for two pounds. This was enough, he later quantified, for ten games of Space Invaders. Police in the South of England dubiously claimed that the Space Invaders obsession had ‘doubled housebreaking figures,’ while the Labour M.P. George Foulkes, fearing for the ‘glazed eyes’ of youngsters, lobbied to subject the game to local authority regulation in Parliament. The novelist Martin Amis wrote, in his 1982 ode Invasion of the Space Invaders, of a young actress he knew with injuries sustained in the arcade so severe that her index finger ‘looked like a piece of liver.'”