Space Invaders fue el primer gran éxito que llegó de Japón en las máquinas de arcade. El 19 de abril de 1978, comenzó la producción de máquinas para el mercado japonés, que alcanzó, según algunos estudios, hasta 300,000 unidades. Y, por supuesto: en cada una, había una gran fila de estudiantes para gastar sus 100 yenes por turno (en ese entonces, el equivalente a 50 centavos). La locura por el juego fue tal que siempre hemos escuchado que hubo un gran problema en el país causado por la falta de monedas de 100 yenes, que se utilizaban básicamente para jugar al juego de arcade. Pero… ¿es eso cierto o es solo una leyenda urbana?
More 100 yen coins, it’s (literally) a heist
In the early years of the Space Invaders craze, it was reported in the press that children were stealing up to 230,000 yen (over 1,000 euros) from their neighbors to play or even running away from home with 300,000 yen in hand to quench their thirst for Space Invaders. Moreover, there were even books that claimed Japanese teenagers robbed banks, shotgun in hand, to take all their 100 yen coins! All of this is very similar to the Satanic Panic, which would later sweep through American fiction, and probably just as true. What was being discussed was, as was often the case in these situations, the fear of novelty. Nothing that any generation doesn’t know.
But was there any truth behind these obvious exaggerations? Were the kids in Japan really spending so many 100 yen coins that they were leaving the banks empty? The truth is that it is impossible to know with absolute certainty, because after all, almost 50 years have passed and the press of that time presented contradictory claims. In 1979, a Japanese hotel manager interviewed by Pacific Stars and Stripes stated that “The game seems to swallow your money, doesn’t it? We have a lot of bills but we often run short of coins and have to wait for them to empty the Space Invaders“. And it is possible that the rest of the urban legend comes from here.
In several newspapers from 1980, it began to be mentioned that the country had a serious problem with 100 yen coins, and that the annual minting was subsequently tripled. This is true, but at the same time, it is not true at all. The fact is that, looking at the annual minting table for 100 yen coins, in 1978 it dropped significantly compared to the previous year, and it rose back to normal levels in 1979: from 440 million it went down to 292 million in the year the game was launched, and then back up to 382 million. It wasn’t that it tripled because of Space Invaders: more were made, simply… because fewer had been made.
Moreover, there is a factor that no one seems to have taken into account: until 1967, 100 yen coins contained pieces of silver, but due to the price of silver, they were made exclusively of copper and nickel. What happened? People, in the following years, started melting the coins to extract the silver. Additionally, it should be noted that there is no record anywhere that in 1978 there was, throughout Japan, a need for more coins, but rather, exclusively in some specific places in Tokyo. And it was not precisely in the arcade halls.
We may never know, I’m afraid, if the shortage of 100 yen coins was an urban legend or not, but everything points to it being one: in a country with billions of coins, is there really reason to believe that all of them were spent in arcade machines, to the point of causing alarm in the government? It doesn’t seem very likely, and considering that there were talks of bank robberies to keep playing, any information should be taken with a grain of salt. But of course, it is also true that, looking for information from that time, many believed that we would all forget about Space Invaders after we easily mastered it. And here we are, 47 years later, still going around the little martians. You never know.