Space Invaders was renamed from a war game because Japanese supervisors banned war imagery

Evidence

In an early prototype, the opponents were tanks and soldiers but Nishikado’s supervisors rejected it. “You must not create the image of war,” he was told, perhaps out of Japanese sensitivity about past imperial aggression. As it happened, Nishikado had around the same time been reading about the American hit film Star Wars. So he decided to name his game Space Monsters. In 1978, Taito released it in Japan as Supēsu Inbēdā—and in America as Space Invaders. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 677

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s attention-industry theme: how entertainment products get shaped by cultural and regulatory constraints, alongside Milgrom’s institutional constraints and the broader media history.
• CANDY: The origin story of Space Invaders’ name being a pivot from banned war imagery to a Star Wars homage is a fun, tweetable fact.