What 👾 means
It's the enemy from the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders. Tomohiro Nishikado designed the game for the Japanese company Taito and cited the octopus-like Martians of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, serialized in 1897 and published as a book in 1898, as inspiration. Tanks and planes moved poorly on his hardware and shooting people felt wrong, so aliens became the targets.
The game was a huge hit, and its blocky invaders turned into shorthand for video games as a whole. That is the reading the emoji carries: gaming, retro tech and a wink of sci-fi.
Don't confuse it with
2Combination ideas
1Worth knowing
- The invaders speed up as you shoot them down. It was a hardware side effect: fewer aliens to draw meant quicker frames. Nishikado later said the accident made the game more thrilling.
Questions people ask
1why does it look different on samsung?
Different artwork. Samsung Experience 9.0, released in 2018, drew an octopus-like creature instead of the pixel invader; an older Samsung design was a big-headed alien.
How to type 👾
:space_invader:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.👾Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.