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• Rocket Ship (Gottlieb, 1958): One of the first true science fiction themed pinball machines was this beauty where you had to spell out R-O-C-K-E-T-S-H-I-P during gameplay and blast off into outer space.
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• Egg Head (Gottlieb, 1961): A wacky mad scientist and his robotic pal use their wiles to play tic-tac-toe with a bevy of buxom beauties. The actual playfield had a tic-tac-toe setup made up of bumpers, and you had to try and light them up in a row based on the random bouncings of your ball.
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• Pinball Pool (Gottlieb, 1978): Dark-haired pool sharks with ample bosoms spar against a gleaming chrome robot. Just check out the closeup of the lower half of the playfield that shows them glaring at each other.
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• Apollo, Blast Off, and Lunar Shot (Williams, 1967): Hoping to cash in on the race for the moon, Williams released not one but three pinball machines, all with identical artwork and slightly modified playfields, that played on America's race for the moon.
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• Star-Jet (Bally, 1963): Bally's outer space fantasy game was one of the first to feature extra balls in play, which was called the "Blast Off Extra Balls" feature. The term multiball hadn't come into play yet. Pretty amazing back art showed a group of attractive young men and women heading for space.
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• Time Tunnel (Bally, 1971): Time Tunnel was a simple pinball game featuring mod-style artwork of teenagers who were probably supposed to be traveling through time. However, CBS sued Bally over the copyright to the name due to their Time Tunnel television show and Bally stopped producing this game.
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• Space Mission (Williams, 1976): Inspired by the space exploration of 1970s-era NASA, Space Mission featured artwork that looked like Spacelab above a playfield filled with outer-space docking targets. They also released a two-player version that was virtually identical called Space Odyssey.
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• Tri Zone (Williams, 1979): Tri Zone looked a bit like Logan's Run meets THX-1138, with vapid people standing around in some sort of a utopian future where they're forced to compete in the Tri Zone competition. Don't ask me to explain it.
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• Alien Poker (Williams, 1980): Yes, you've seen dogs playing poker on countless oil paintings, now it's aliens playing poker. You know, when interstellar travel and exploration get boring, it's time to bust out a deck and play a little five card stud. Check out the playfield, where it looks like ROM the Space Knight also plays poker.
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• Fireball (Bally, 1971): A giant space vampire hurling fireballs at you? Sign us up. The actual game was about releasing Odin and Wotan (the German version of Odin), and having them square off against each other, but we're holding onto our fantasy of a space vampire who wants to kick some ass. He even came back for vengeance in Fireball II in 1980.
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• Laser Ball (Williams, 1979): This game featured a buxom redhead (who looks a lot like Jean Grey) firing... er, laser balls at you. She sure was hell-bent on keeping you beat down for some reason.
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• Vector (Bally, 1982): This was a science fiction sports fantasy game, where it looked like players were combining jai alai with some sort of bizarre Discs of Tron hockey mashup. Still, they got to don cool Mighty Morphin Power Rangers-esque costumes and hurl things around, sounds like fun.
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• Embryon (Bally, 1981): This game featured some of the most graphic pinball art we've ever seen, featuring a half-naked bald alien woman writhing around in some sort of a birth-chamber-sac. There's a human figure who looks a lot like Adam Strange watching over everything... did he somehow impregnate her? Maybe that was the goal of the game.
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• World Defender (Nuova Bell Games, 1985): Boy, does the guy on the backart for this game look familiar or what? Plus, we can't recall a time when the Terminator went toe-to-toe with fighter jets. Holy ripoff, Batman.
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• Pin-Bot (Williams, 1986): The first in a series of three robot pinball-themed games from Williams featured a Pinball robot in outer space, forcing you to do his interstellar bidding and attempting to score points.
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• Strange Science (Bally, 1986): A truly bizarre pinball game that featured a mad scientist trying to swap a monkey's brain with that of a hot girl's. You had to facilitate the transfer by lighting up bonuses and making things happen. Much like Igor.
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• The Machine: Bride of Pinbot (Williams, 1991): Probably one of the coolest and most bizarre pinball machines was this early 90s model Pin-Bot sequel from Williams, which featured a robotic woman with light-up nipples, and an extreme bonus field right where her vagina would be. Overt sexuality in games? Shocking.
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• Jack-Bot (Williams, 1995): Jack-Bot was the third in a series of games featuring "bots" in pinball, and of course used the Pin-Bot babe yet again. The game features a jackpot robot (the Jack-Bot), and a jackpot-style playfield.
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• In 1978 Taito was a Japanese company that was struggling to make a profit on Pachinko machines. With the rise of electronic arcade games, Tomohiro Nishikado designed Space Invaders and created history.

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• The game was inspired by Atari's Breakout, by the descriptions of the aliens in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, and by a freaky dream that Nishikado had about aliens appearing in the sky instead of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. Which means you get lines and lines of relentlessly invading creatures, who all happen to look like an octopoids.
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• Arcades opened in Japan featuring nothing but rows and rows of Space Invaders games, so if you thought your corner convenience store with Galaga and Pole Position hardly had any choices, think again.
  
• The game was so popular in Japan that it caused a major shortage of coins, and they had to quadruple yen production to keep up with the demand.
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• Space Invaders was one of the first games to feature endless gameplay, as previous games had all worked on a timer. If you were good, you could go on blasting aliens forever... or until the game ran out of memory.
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• The upright cabinet version of the game in arcades actually had the monitor below the eyeline of the player, and the gamefield was reflected onto a piece of plastic on the back of the cabinet, which had cool artwork painted on it. The resulting combination had the gamefield on top of a lunar landscape.
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• The original Taito version of the game used joysticks, but the American version from Midway used buttons to control the laser cannon.
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• The game ran on an Intel 8080 as its processor, running at 2 MHz.
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• It was estimated that the game pulled in $500 million in its first year of release in the arcades alone, which still makes it one of the most profitable games ever developed.
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• In 1980 a version of Space Invaders was released for the Atari 2600, and it quickly became one of the "must have" games for the system.
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• Versions came out for other home gaming consoles, but due to copyright infringement they would have to be retitled. Like Space Armada for the Intellivision.
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• Coca-Cola even asked Atari to create a version for the 2600 called Pepsi Invaders, featuring invading letters spelling out Pepsi, so you could blast them out of the sky. Coke gave the 125 cartridges out to its employees.
  
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• Numerous sequels have appeared in arcades over the years, including Space Invaders Part II (or Space Invaders Deluxe), Return of the Invaders, Majestic Twelve: The Space Invaders Part IV (or Super Space Invaders '91), Space Invaders DX, and Akkan-vaders (or Space Invaders '95: The Attack Of The Lunar Loonies).
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• Guillaume Reymond created a human version of the game in 2006, which you can watch in all of its glory right here:
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• Shigeru Miyamoto, who created Donkey Kong and a slew of other games for Nintendo, has said that Space Invaders was what inspired him to get into game development.
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• The cover for Boston's "Don't Look Back" album was inspired by Space Invaders.
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• In an episode of Futurama, Fry fights off invading aliens because he's a master of Space Invaders. All he needs to rock the game are a two-liter bottle of Shasta, and a Rush mix tape.

Here's the full image of the game, lit up and bright red:
In addition to photographing every angle of the game's art and inner workings, the seller took this lovely photo of its epilepsy warning. Consult a doctor if battling the invaders From Mars causes any serious symptoms!