Space Invaders / Referenced By

References to Space Invaders in other media.

Men in Black, issue 2: Kay tells Jay that Space Invaders was one of the many video games a "computer simulated interstellar war" during the video game craze.

Film - Animated

Litwak's Arcade in Wreck-It Ralph has a Space Invaders machine. In the sequel Ralph Breaks the Internet, when Sugar Rush is unplugged and its denizens are evacuated, the Surge Protector notes that he hasn't seen this many gameless characters since Space Invaders went down. (Even though it's still in the arcade, as seen in the opening shot of the movie.)

In Backstreet Dreams, Dean smashes a lowlife's head into the arcade game's screen.
In Men in Black: International, while protagonists investigate in Marrakesh, they walk pass a wall with a design of one of the alien sprites.
M: Wow.
H: Yeah, you'll see that a lot around here.

In Only You Can Save Mankind, the ScreeWee ship passes an ancient, blocky wreck, and the captain tells Johnny that they often see them, but know nothing about the race that crewed them. He says he thinks they were called Space Invaders, and she replies that this was probably just what humans called them.
In Soul Music, the Mended Drum is home to a clockpunk contraption called the Barbarian Invaders Machine, which lets you fire little arrows at an advancing horde of wooden warriors.
In The Leaky Establishment by David Langford, one of the computer operators has programmed the ancient mainframe to play Space Invaders, which it does by very slowly printing out an ASCII Space Invaders screen, and then, when you move, very slowly printing it out again. Tappen calls it "Glacier Invaders".
In The Brentford Triangle by Robert Rankin, the Flying Swan gets a Space Invaders machine, much to the disaproval of the regulars. Who turn out to be right since, much like every intrusion of the modern world into Brentford, it has a Sinister Purpose.

Yellow Magic Orchestra's eponymous debut album features the track "Computer Game 'Theme from The Invader'", which recreates soundbytes from Space Invaders with analog synthesizers. The music video for "Tong Poo" (also off of the same album) additionally includes footage of Space Invaders alongside the band performing.

ANNO: Mutationem: One collectible poster features a contest for a shoot em' up game called "UFO Invaders".
The Darkside Detective: One of the arcade games in the mall is Faith Invaders, which has the same gameplay as Space Invaders but it's a priest defending a row of buildings from an advancing zombie horde.
Jazzpunk features a Mini-Game titled "Phage Infectors", a bacterial themed version of Space Invaders.
M&M's Blast: In the Space section of the Amusement Park board, there's a mini-game that you must play in order to advance to the other side of a path. In this mini-game, Red, Yellow, Blue, or Green is in a flying saucer and has to shoot M&M's Minis at ten aliens before they reach the bottom of the screen.
Neptunia has the Pixelvader series of enemies, who resemble the Space Invaders from the arcade game.
Teen Titans (2006) has a Mini-Game stage based on Space Invaders, with Starfire being the "ship" shooting starbolts at some robot drones.

In the Futurama episode "Anthology of Interest II" Fry asks Professor Farnsworth's "What-If" machine what life would be like if things worked more like video game. One of the things that happens is a collection of aliens (including Liir) attack the planet in ships that look like the Space Invader ones. Fry volunteers to shoot them down since he's familiar with Space Invaders. Unfortunately, he neglected to tell anyone he always fail to shoot the last alien, resulting in the ship landing on the planet.
In the first episode of Infinity Train, Tulip's "bad guy" character for her video game looks like one of the Space Invaders aliens.
An episode of The Loud House is entitled "Space Invader", and the title card depicts Lincoln being chased by sprites of Lynn Jr. shooting at him. The title card music is also similar to the game.
Footi and Torts combine with a Space Invaders effect in Mixels.
In The Simpsons episode "Who Shot Mr. Burns, Part 2", the police question Groundskeeper Willie about his involvement with Mr. Burns' shooting. Willie says he couldn't have fired the shot because he developed crippling arthritis in his fingers from playing Space Invaders. Chief Wiggum admits it was a very addictive video game to which Willie replies "Video game?"

Referenced By / Space Invaders