3 ms·

Don't forget Space Invaders (1978). The four note background drone speeds up a little bit with each alien you kill (along with the aliens themselves, of course)

• megablast 14y ago
  I read recently that the speed of the aliens, and I am guessing the sound, is based on how many are left to draw on the screen. The less aliens, the faster it is to draw, the faster they move.
  • peteri 14y ago
    From memory the code moves one invader one pixel[1] each video frame. [1] Might be wrong and it's multple pixels.
    • narcissus 14y ago
      That value might be correct, but I think what megablast is getting at is that the original hardware wasn't able to calculate the position of all of the invaders and still maintain the video frame rate. So even though it was intended to work the same speed all the time, the hardware was limited in its ability to handle all of the aliens: once there were less to draw, it was able to draw them faster. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_invaders#Hardware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_invaders#Hardware : While programming the game, Nishikado discovered that the processor was able to render the alien graphics faster the fewer were on screen. Rather than design the game to compensate for the speed increase, he decided to keep it as a challenging gameplay mechanic.