Space Invaders arcade game ran faster as enemies died due to Intel 8080 bottleneck — expert coder asserts ‘hardware accident’ to blame

One of the most charming bug = feature tales is the story behind the thrilling pacing crescendo gamers experienced when playing the original Space Invaders arcade machine. This weekend, self-proclaimed C/C++ expert Zuhaitz reminded us that the adrenaline-pumping rising intensity of Taito’s arcade classic was not due to genius level coding. Rather, it was simply the fact that the underlying Intel 8080 could run the game code faster as aliens were wiped from the screen one-by-one, by the player dishing…