Space Invaders Outtakes

With the E3 buzz over: I was watching the fake outtakes at the end of A Bug’s Life, where we see the mistakes made by the animated characters during the “shooting” of the movie.

So what would fake video game outtakes be like?

I bring you the hitherto unseen outtakes from Space Invaders:


Sorry, you need Java installed to play this game.

(Click on applet to play, move with cursor keys, shoot with Ctrl or Space.)

Legal: This game is a parody. All sounds and graphics copyright Taito 1978.

11 thoughts on “Space Invaders Outtakes”

  1. Good one…altough I must express some frustration regarding my death on level 5 >:^(.

  2. That’s hilarious, gorgeous, and beautiful! During the first seconds I didn’t know what the point was, but then, well, everything went wrong. Simply great! Tnx a lot!

  3. Excellent idea. Maybe you could post also a log of developpment bloopers, something like :

    “Monday 3:25 am. : I’ve searching a bug for two days and I don’t find it, i’m in the border of suicide!”
    “Thursday 4:00 am : I’ve found it! It was a mistake between an “i” and a “j”.!”

  4. I like this as an academic joke, but I have to say that CG outtakes really annoy me. Outtakes are amusing because of their spontanuity. CG outtakes are contrived – fake fuckups.

  5. Problem with CGI outtakes is that they are too techie for general audiences: flipped normals, oversized teeth/eyeballs, exploding cloth & physics, that kind of stuff.

    In games you have stuff like missing spawn positions in deathmatch leading to chain telefrags at (0,0,0), typos in damage numbers turning a simple grenade into a nuclear device… I’m sure the Sims had a huge array of funny things happening during development. Problem is that including those in a game is an organizational nightmare. So we use easter eggs and cheat codes instead.

    The best I ever had was the -miniplayers command line switch in NBA Inside Drive 2000, which rescaled all players to kid size; originally written to stress-test the animation / IK systems, I think it made it to the final product.

  6. Yeah, some things are just more funny than others.
    Truth be told, some of the outtake outtakes looked like the real thing – Invaders that followed the normal path; shots that killed one and only one invader; mortal invaders.

  7. Great idea!
    Made me think back to three days before E3 2000. We were preparing the playable demo for Hitman:Codename 47, but one bug was hard to iron out: Whenever shooting erupted all civilians would sit down in a way that made you want to show them the nearest toilet. So Tobias Rieper aka Hitman and the bad guys would be killing each other in a room full af people shitting on the floor. Maybe we laughed because it was too realistic…

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