Space Fever

Space Fever is a series of shoot 'em up games. It debuted with Space Fever in 1979, and would receive a sequel later the same year, making it the first ever Nintendo series. The series consists of two commercial releases, and a sequel released as a minigame in the Game Boy Camera. Each installment was developed by Nintendo R&D1.

Overview
All the Space Fever games are shoot 'em ups, though actual gameplay differ considerably. While they are all fixed shooters, meaning the player's ship can only be moved on a horizontal axis, enemies are handled differently. In the arcade games all enemies attacks at once, and slowly move towards the player. In the revival however, ships attacks one or a few at a time, quickly flying towards the player. This game also adds bosses.

In all three games, enemies comes in three varieties, all giving different amounts of points. The enemies' appearance differ between all three installments.

History
In the late 1970s Nintendo was trying to enter the video game market through a number of arcade games. Rather than trying to win ground with original ideas however, many of their games were copies of their competitors’ successful games. Space Fever, which was released in 1979, was one of these games, based on Taito's Space Invaders, which was released the year before. Nintendo basically copied the general gameplay, but included several different game modes, allowing for more variation. The game would receive a semi-sequel later the same year, called SF-HiSplitter. This game didn’t change the formula considerably, instead it introduced enemies double the size of the original ones. However, these would be split into two smaller enemies when hit, making the gameplay less of a copy of Space Invaders.

The Game Boy Camera features as sequel to Space Fever, titled Space Fever II, as a bonus minigame. Aside from the name, Space Fever II has little in common with its predecessors. Its gameplay is divided into small waves of enemies, with bosses in between.