Space Invaders was the best-selling video game and highest-grossing "entertainment product" at the time, and the highest-grossing video game of all time.

Space Invaders is considered one of the most influential video games of all time. It helped expand the video game industry from a novelty to a global industry, and ushered in the golden age of arcade video games. It was the inspiration for numerous video games and game designers across different genres, and has been ported and re-released in various forms. The 1980 Atari VCS version quadrupled sales of the VCS, thereby becoming the first killer app for video game consoles. More broadly, the pixelated enemy alien has become a pop culture icon, often representing video games as a whole. Space Invaders was the first game to save and achieve high scores!

In 1978, the microcomputers available could not handle the complex tasks of designing and programming the game, so Nishikado had to design his own hardware and tools to make the Space Invaders see the light of day.

The music style in Space Invaders utilized a first of its kind interaction with the on-screen animation to influence the emotions of the player.

Space Invaders was a pioneer shooting game in the arcade game market, which was the skeleton of the future shooting games we see today.

While creating Space Invaders, Tomohiro Nishikado, was influenced by Breakout, Star Wars and The War of the Worlds.

Rumor has it that the game was so popular that it caused a yen shortage in Japan. The rumor however, was false. The coin shortage at the time was simply because of a reduction in production of the coins during 1978 & 1979.

The game was originally released in a cocktail-table arcade game format and was converted to cabinet format for the Western release.