Invasion of the Space Invaders

An Addict's Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines

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Summary

Back in a facsimile edition is Martin Amis’s closet passion project, first published in 1982: a compulsive gamer’s guide to arcades and beating your younger self’s high score

In this offbeat book, introduced by Stephen Spielberg, acclaimed author Martin Amis explores how 1980s video games took a generation by storm. Delving into the electric atmosphere of the arcades where he misspent his youth, he asks: Why did Space Invaders invade our hearts and minds? How much time, loose change and sex appeal did they cost us? And most importantly, which secret cheats and tactics must we master to reach the next level?

Part cautionary tale, part celebration of a lifelong addiction, this is an essential manual for many a self-confessed cyber geek, computer nerd and joystick junkie.

Reviews

[Invasion of the Space Invaders] has remained one of the great literary curios of the 20th century… Like Updike on golf, or Foster Wallace on tennis, Amis approaches video games with an enthusiast’s glee, deploying pleading prose that seeks to illuminate the subject’s hold on the writer.
Simon Parkin, Observer

About the author

Martin Amis

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.

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