The "War and Peace" of "Space Invaders"

Please, I beg of you -- don't press that button! You have no idea of the heartbreak you will wreak

Published March 20, 2008 6:18PM (EDT)

Pure minimalist brilliance.

See the Space Invader be born. See him go to school, get a job and raise a family. See him off to war.

The eye-on-Japanese-culture blog Pink Tentacle routinely highlights striking images and fascinating slices of technologically bizarre Japanese life, but this music video for Japanese techno DJ Ken Ishii's "Space Invaders 2003" has to be seen to be believed.

I killed a lot of those little buggers in my day. Now I feel kinda bad.

UDATE: Reader "widow13" defends a generation of Space Invader killers:

It was a Just War!

I know I'm responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of these so-called Space Invaders. I have no remorse. They attacked us first, and caused untold damage to our free-standing video game infrastructure.

If it weren't for the upstanding youth of my day racing to our battle stations to rid the world of these insidious bytes, we would have been overrun by this invasion. If we had not vanquished their invasion, they'd be sucking off the teat of the American taxpayer and sending their little invader spawn to our schools and taking away our jobs and filling up our emergency rooms spawning their little "earth-anchor" babies.

We '80s kids were successful in our fight against the Space Invaders, and you should be proud and thankful. We made the world safe for future generations of gamers everywhere.

Earth-anchor babies! How the World Works salutes you, widow13.


By Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.

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