Cosmic Alien

Cosmic Alien was released by Universal in 1979, shortly after the overwhelming success of Space Invaders, and belonged to the first wave of space shooters trying to cash in on that boom with their own take on the proven theme. The player controls a cannon at the bottom of the screen and shoots down formations of alien ships descending in three distinct waves, each with its own movement pattern and speed.

Unlike the austere Space Invaders, Cosmic Alien added colorful graphics and smoother enemy animations, which moved independently and irregularly instead of in a single unified shift, making the game both harder and more varied and forcing the player to constantly reassess which formation to focus on. The game appeared in arcade halls around the world and became one of the many clones that defined the early period of the fixed space-shooter genre at the turn of the seventies and eighties, when almost every manufacturer wanted to profit from the fashionable wave of alien invasion games.

Cosmic Alien today reads as an interesting historical footnote — a demonstration of how quickly, after one breakthrough hit, publishers tried to catch its wave of success with their own only slightly modified variation on the same theme and mechanics, before the genre shifted a few years later toward faster action, more colorful enemies, and more elaborate end-of-level bosses brought by later titles from competing companies.

Why play it: Cosmic Alien is a nicely preserved example of the early era of space shooters inspired by Space Invaders, with a bit of its own visual identity.