This Week In Retro: Defender [1981] (Patreon)

March 1981: The space-shooting genre goes sideways

by Diamond Feit

I miss arcades.

This sentence is one I could have said out loud at any point in the last 20 years, but it carries extra weight in our pandemic-laden world. I miss playing games in public. I miss being surrounded by flashing monitors beckoning for my attention. I miss having an excessive number of entertainment choices which ask for nothing more than a single coin from my pocket.

One fact of life from the golden age of arcades that has become a lost art in 2021 is how many games expertly communicated everything a player needed to know before the action began. Whether through an informative attract mode or a "how to play" screen, even a child could approach most arcade cabinets blind and learn all the pertinent info in a matter of seconds. There was also always the option of watching another player test their luck first, then popping a coin in the slot once they left.

This week we celebrate the 40th anniversary of an absolute arcade classic. Defender borrows liberally from multiple famous games, yet it stands alone as a unique experience. It also stands as one of the hardest games of its era, for even as it visually conveys its core gameplay loop at a glance, actually learning to play the game can be quite a challenge.

Defender was Williams Electronics’ first original arcade creation—yet during its development in 1980, few observers would have called it original. In a 2008 interview with Retro Gamer magazine, Defender lead Eugene Jarvis said the project began as just another variant on the mega-hit Space Invaders. "But instead of shooting upwards,” he explained, “you had buttons to shoot diagonally!" With little to distinguish the game from any number of other Invader-inspired releases, Jarvis tinkered with his project by borrowing concepts from another outer-space shooter, Asteroids; but, again, he felt his version lacked sufficient innovation.

The answer, as it turned out, lay somewhere between those two variants of interstellar combat. One of the standout features of Asteroids was that the edge of the screen was not the edge of gameplay; anything that left the screen would wrap around and appear on the opposite side. "We thought you could have a game where you'd fly off the screen," said Jarvis, "but it would kind of scroll, and you'd keep flying into a bigger universe." The game would still focus on a moving spacecraft with a laser gun, but, unlike Space Invaders with its vertical orientation, Defender would instead scroll horizontally.

The game was now one-half Space Invaders, one-half Asteroids, and Defender's unusual control panel reflected its hybrid nature. This was years before players could expect any sense of standardization when it came to operating a video game; most machines sported unique interface configurations. Given that Defender evolved into a space shooter where players could move their ship in multiple directions, Jarvis said he intended to use a joystick. However, "a four-way directional controller was a new idea in arcades at the time, and we couldn't find a reliable mechanism." Instead, Defender uses a two-way joystick for vertical movement and borrows Asteroids' physics-based "thrust" button to move the ship forwards. Since Defender allowed for movement in either direction, a "reverse" button was added to turn the ship around.

If this sounds difficult to grasp today, it was just as complicated at the time. Still, it was hardly radical. On the contrary, Jarvis tried to match the buttons to the layout of Defender’s inspirations as closely as possible. In a 2015 interview with USgamer, Jarvis said he had to play the role of a one-man focus group when it came to designing the feel of the cabinet: "I would lay out the buttons, put my hands on them, try to play and see. We were just drilling holes in wood." In the end, he described the experience as "playing Space Invaders with your left hand and Asteroids with your right."

Defender does not offer any explicit narrative to explain what is happening, but its name was chosen to reassure players that they were fighting on the side of the good guys. To give that title purpose, Jarvis added helpless people to the game as a way to give players something (or someone) to actually "defend." Enemies try to abduct these people from the bottom of the screen and take them to the top. Should they succeed in their predations, their captives are transformed into "mutants"—an advanced enemy type that adds to the hostile forces filling the screen. Rescuing captured humanoids truly puts players’ skills to the test, as the alien abductees can be shot out of the air or fall to their death; for a successful save, players must carefully shoot the alien ship and then catch the abductee in mid-air to return them to the planet surface below.

The inclusion of powerless civilians adds an element of Missile Command to Defender; that game (released in June 1980) also required players to defend cities from airborne attackers. However, in Missile Command, too many friendly casualties leads to a Game Over. In Defender, once the last humanoid has been mutated, the planet explodes in a dramatic display of colors—but the game continues until the player runs out of lives.

Really, "the exploding planet does not affect gameplay" is a succinct summary of how much visual stimuli occurs in every game of Defender. The graphics consist of simple, pixel-based objects whose relatively small size gives the player plenty of room to maneuver. Whenever an enemy or the player's vessel materializes on screen, it forms via a visible convergence of dots. Everything that gets shot likewise explodes, scattering particles in all directions. In other words, a game of Defender is a constant parade of small objects exploding and un-exploding, repeatedly.

With the stakes and controls in place, Jarvis had one last gameplay issue to solve: If the player was expected to scroll the screen in two directions in order to defend the innocent, how were they supposed to keep track of all these moving parts? The answer turned out to be a miniature version of the playfield that sits above the main screen, letting players confirm the position of all enemies and friendlies at a glance. Thus, Defender contains one of the earliest examples of the mini-map, now a standard feature of video games large and small.

In an age when video games lived or died based on accessibility and first impressions, Defender stood out as difficult to play, difficult to control, and even difficult to understand thanks to the sheer amount of commotion on screen at all times. However, it was also undeniably cool, and thanks to its innovations it stood out amongst its contemporaries—an impressive feat, given its creation was rooted in near-plagiarism. The game was such a huge hit for Williams that the company has reportedly netted more than one billion dollars from Defender in the 40 years since its release.

Given its high-profile status, Defender has since been ported to a variety of platforms, but there's a "lost in translation" air about every subsequent edition of the game. Defender drew direct inspiration from two established arcade hits, and it was designed to be played using its custom control configuration. Even if properly emulated today, no amount of keyboard mapping or button assignments can quite replicate that experience. Similarly, even if I tell you how innovative Defender was for 1981, the scrolling space shooter genre has evolved in the subsequent decades. To modern gamer eyes, Defender cannot help but appear to be both dated and demanding; a damning duo of descriptors.

I said, "I miss arcades" at the start of this column, and I meant it, but I'm fortunate to still have occasional opportunities to venture into a major metropolis and experience classic video games the way they were intended to be played. I can even take my kids along for the ride and let them have a glimpse of what it was like for me at their age to discover new games—not through YouTube, but through random encounters outside the comforts of home. I've seen them engage with Space Invaders and Pac-Man on their own terms and come away with a smile, but I doubt Defender would click with them today. It is too frantic, too unforgiving, and entirely unfamiliar to children raised on touch screens.

Honestly, the only irrefutable evidence I can submit towards Defender being an important video game is its inclusion on Buckner & Garcia's 1982 album Pac-Man Fever; only eight games warranted musical immortality on that novelty record, and Defender was number six.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.