Space Invaders takes off

Press, 21 March 1983, Page 10

Space Invaders takes off

NZPA Detroit A bar in suburban Detroit boasts a moving three-di-mensional spaceship video game that the player can climb inside and “blast off.” Once inside the ShakerOne, the player can shoot alien star cruisers on two video screens while controlling the capsule’s movements. “It is like a ping-pong ball that is held up by a current of air shooting out of a vacuum cleaner,” said Mr John Sassak, owner of Diamond Js Bar and creator of the machine with his son. “We were thinking, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to see how we could fit into that

little ball?’ “We could not do that, and so we had to make a ball big enough we could fit in.” The “spacecraft,” a fibreglass ball about 1.5 m in diameter, is shot up with a blast of air supplied by a 20 horsepower (15kW) electric turbine, Mr Sassak said. The machine is adjusted so that the capsule rises only about one metre, and a plastic ring restrains the vessel so it stays suspended atop the column of air. “The machine has enough power so that it is capable of lifting it 15m,” Mr Sassak said. “But we are not going to do that unless we have a lot of insurance.”