When joining Atari, he was impressed with the Space Invaders arcade game and began developing it in his own time at the company.

Space Invaders would be one of Atari's biggest hits in 1980, with Electronic Games magazine referring to it as a console seller for the system.

The player uses the joystick to move left and right and hit the red button fire a laser cannon.

The game offered various variations on gameplay, such the ability to have moving bunkers, shots that zig-zag, invisible invaders who would only reveal their position when they were hit by the player successfully.

[6] The Atari version of Space Invaders also included a co-operative two-player mode that was not present in any form in the arcade game.

It was initially released with nine titles available, five of which (Air-Sea Battle, Combat, Star Ship, Surround and Video Olympics) were based on existing arcade properties (Anti-Aircraft (1975), Tank (1974), Starship 1 (1977), Blockade (1976) and Pong (1972)).

"[11] After a few months of development to get it into a playable state, the consumer division of Atari had Mauer stop progress on further work on the game.

He initially sought out a cover art designer at Atari to create the illustrations of the invaders on graph paper to use in the game.

The console version of Space Invaders, along with popular arcade games Asteroids (1979), Missile Command (1980) and Battlezone (1980) would move Atari to a growth of $512.7 million for the year.

[6] In the magazines list of the top 25 Atari 2600 games, Stuart Hunt and Darran Jones listed Space Invaders in at their 14th spot, writing that it "may not have been able to successfully emulate its arcade peer, but its vast amount of options arguable made it just as good a game.

[2][21] Prior to the release of Space Invaders, the sales of the Atari Video Computer System were described as "respectable, if not spectacular" while the release of the game led to what Edward B. Driscoll, Jr. of Poptronics described as making not just Atari, but "the whole home videogame industry", have its killer app.

[11][27] A special version of the game titled Pepsi Invaders (1983) was produced at Atari that was given at to employees of the Coca-Cola Company at a sales convention in 1983.

[29] Fulop's version also had unique elements to it, such as the invaders marching out of a rocket ship on the left side of the screen.

[30] In 2004, a hack titled Space Invader Deluxe for the Atari 2600 was released which included cutscenes and color schemes similar to Space Invaders Part II (1979), using an extra 4K of rom to add a title screen and higher sound quality.