Narcissus’ Direct-to-VHS Return: MGA’s Space Invaders Color FX

Remember the Game & Watch Panorama Series? The use of mirrors for a clever approach to a portable color LCD console. Of course, in 1999, you didn’t need that; this was the era of the Game Boy Color, which had a color LCD screen that you didn’t need a reflective mirror light trick to get sort-of visible color. So the panorama trick was long gone, right?

Space Invaders is back

In 1980, Space Invaders was a hit and you might’ve needed something like the Epoch TV Vader in order to play it at home at all. But in 1999, Space Invaders was already a retro game, playable on anything with a processor. Even a 4-bit processor.

The MGA Color FX line, of which this was a part, was kind of a midrange, being a nice LCD game. MGA was doing a huge push into LCD games at the time, a niche which had been mostly occupied by Tiger Electronics, of Miniature Golf fame.

Much like Tiger’s, perhaps even moreso, MGA’s were in generic plastic shells that weren’t optimized for a particular game; notice the unlabeled buttons that just don’t do anything, and the odd positions of Start and Pause. The same game also existed in a black and white format, which shared a different shell.

Of course, the most interesting