*Like many of the games we’ll see come out in 1979 and on into the 80s, Galaxian started off as an attempt to duplicate the success of Space Invaders which Taito had released in 1978. Namco had yet to have much in the way of big success when Kazunoro Suwano got handed this plum assignment by his boss: “Make the best post-Invaders game yet.”
*And, man, let me just say . . . they ******* nailed it. I mean, before I get into the game itself, I guess I should just mention that it was exactly the kind of success Namco wanted and needed at that time. It was a huge hit in Japan and by 1980, Namco had made a deal with Midway and the game hit North America like a wrecking ball: 42,000 arcade cabinets sold in two years.
*And I can say that this is richly deserved. To this point, I’ve definitely ranked Space Invaders as THE game to this point. There are still things I very much like about Space Invaders that this game doesn’t duplicate (the music, for one thing), but taken as a whole Galaxian is the new best game of this project in my opinion. It just raises the bar on the things that were great about Space Invaders and makes many of them even better.
*So, let’s just get on into the game and we’ll talk about those innovations as we go.
*So, the Galaxians are apparently a race of aliens who are attacking the Earth. We get two lines of text at the beginning of the game: “We are the Galaxians. Mission: Destroy Aliens.”
*I guess this could be considered an innovation in story-telling if you’re comparing it to Space Invaders. I guess.
*Ways in which Galaxian is like Space Invaders: player controlled ship at the bottom of the screen; ship fires only one missile at a time; invading alien ships arranged in formation at the top of the screen; player has three lives.
*Here’s where things diverge. First things first: color. This is one of the very first video games to use RGB color in order to create a wide array of various colors and, boy, does it look fantastic.
*RGB does stand for Red-Green-Blue, not Ruth Gader Binsburg by the way.
*On top of the fact that all of the ships now boast colorful designs, there is also a scrolling starfield with blinking, colored stars. Taking this journey has really contextualized for me just how visually stunning these first color games were. I mean, we’ve essentially been black-and-white to this point. Adventure used color, but those colors were not as vibrant as these are, nor were the designs nearly as detailed.
*I mean, the flagship here, is just beautifully designed. It’s red, blue & yellow and it’s shaped kind of like a pterodactyl or some kind of large bird with curving wings. It’s the coolest design in this game in my opinion.
*Second innovation: Enemy behavior. In Galaxian, the alien formation does not advance toward you in uniform rows as it did in Space Invaders. Ships break out of formation in order to make individual or grouped bombing runs at you. There are four enemy types. The only one I know by name is the Flagship, but I’m calling the row right in front of the Flagships the Escort Ships, because the Flagships do make bombing runs, but they are always led by two of the red ships when they do, so Escort Ships seems like a good name.
*Those two things right there kind of make Galaxian feel like a hyperspace jump. This is, remember, the year after Space Invaders came out.
*Prior to this, things moved rather slowly. You may recall that Breakout came out FOUR YEARS after Pong. But now? Gaming has entered warp speed. This is a bigger leap from Space Invaders than Breakout was from Pong and it took only a quarter of the time to make that leap. **** just got real.
*What’s responsible for that change? Well, tech, sure. I mean, if the tech isn’t there, the tech isn’t there. But let’s get real: money. A lot of games had made significant amounts of money prior to Space Invaders. But not Space Invaders money. Space Invaders is the money-bomb that went off in the gaming world and suddenly companies were willing to pour much larger amounts of money & resources into games. Galaxian and the quantum leap it represents is one of the best examples of that.
*Anyway, we’re catching up to my backlog of games/reviews because I did get to play this game on an original Galaxian arcade machine at the Max RetroPub, a local bar themed around eighties era arcade games, but it was mere days before COVID-19 made me decide to start staying around home except for work which was only a couple of weeks prior to the mandatory shutdown starting.
*Since I’d only made the trip to the RetroPub once and played a couple of times, I decided I wanted more time with Galaxian, so I bought a little thingy called a Plug and Play Retro Arcade which is essentially just a little box with arcade controls on it. You plug it into the TV screen and you can then select from eight different games that are loaded onto it. The one I got had Galaxian and also a few games we’ll be talking about shortly, so it’s going to get a lot of use.
*It’s pretty cool actually. The cords were too short for me to sit in my chair, but it kind of made more sense to stand anyway, if I was trying to get the true arcade experience. So, I could set it on a counter-top and stand there, looking at my TV screen and play that way. It’s very small and very light, just a square with a few buttons and a lever on top. I would call it a comparable experience to the actual arcade machine.
*Anyway, yes, this game is super-super fun. It’s as fun as Space Invaders, more challenging and, look, I’m going to say it, this is by far the most fair game I have yet encountered on this journey and one of the most fair games I feel like I’ve ever played.
*When I talk about fair, here’s what I mean. It’s very responsive to the joystick and you can make tiny little moves to make things work. Like you can dodge between missiles that are coming at you and squeak through tiny little gaps in the barrages. You can tweak your way out of an oncoming missile or a Kamikaze ship by what feels like a hair’s breadth. And I can honestly say . . . and remember who this is saying this . . . every single time I died, I knew why. Every single time, I knew what mistake I, the game player, had made with the controller. I mean, that is mind-blowing to me.
*Anyway, like most games of this period and style, there is no proper “ending” or way to “beat” the game other than the max out the score counter. The game will continue to throw faster levels at you each time you beat one.
*So, the enemy ships to make their bombing runs in a bit of a pattern. I couldn’t figure out exactly how strict that pattern was, but the bottom line is that you can often predict when a ship is going to break out of formation and come at you.
*They break formation in a loop and then come down at you diagonally across the screen, firing missiles. So, if a ship or two have just come from the right side of the formation, you can kind of predict, okay, one’s going to be breaking from the left here in a second.
*This leads to what actually might be the most satisfying game mechanic I’ve encountered on this journey so far which is the ability to fire your missile NEXT to the row where the ship is about to break and then the ship will break and loop right into your missile. So, like, if the ship didn’t move, the missile would just go by and not hit anything. So you fire at a blank space where you know a ship is about to be and darned if that isn’t satisfying. Getting one on the wing, so to speak, but even more satisfying than that because you’re just blasting it out of the sky before it can even fire a single missile. So cool.
*It’s also really satisfying to knock out the Flagship-Escort Ships wing when they come at you. They come at you in that triangle formation. And, since you can only have one missile on screen at a time, you have to wait until they get very close to the bottom of the screen. And then you just juke over right in front of them and bam bam bam three very fast shots to get all of them. Because if you wait until they’re close enough then the missile disappears immediately because it’s hitting one of them immediately.
*I managed to pull that little trick off exactly one time, but it was super satisfying.
*Strategy? Well, you need to stay ahead of the ships to the degree you can. As they move across the screen, stay ahead of them and then just move very quickly in front of them and fire to take them out. All of their missiles are going behind them, of course, so you stay out of their line of fire by moving in tandem with them, just remaining a hair ahead, until, of course, you stop for a second in order to shoot them.
*As the level progresses and there are fewer and fewer enemy ships, this gets harder because they will start coming from both directions at once. Then, once there are three or four enemy ships left, they basically just stay in motion all the time, coming at you constantly. At that point, you’ve got to just try to dodge the missiles and hope not to run into a barrage where the missiles aren’t spaced far enough apart for you to slip between them.
*Anyway, Galaxian is a really, really great game. It improves on Space Invaders in all, in my opinion, but two ways. First of all, there is just a virtue in Space Invaders’ simplicity. Secondly, the music. Space Invaders is a real outlier in terms of its use of music being so perfect so early in the history of games. It’ll be the best use of music in gaming for a really, really long time on this journey I would say.
*So, of course, Galaxian is such a huge hit that it spawns a series of sequels. The first will be only two years later, in 1981. We will talk about that game at that time, but I think it bears mentioning briefly here. The name of that game is Galaga and it will, in my opinion, kind of unfairly eclipse Galaxian.
*I talked last time about how Galaxian is kind of unfairly forgotten because it falls between two absolute giants. I’m talking, of course, about Space Invaders and Galaga. I feel like both of those games are more well-known, more remembered and more beloved than Galaxian is. And I think that’s kind of unfair to Galaxian.
*I mean, the leap from Space Invaders to Galaxian is way more impressive than the leap between Galaxian and Galaga in my opinion. I’m not trying to down Galaga, but if you look at Galaga in terms of a follow-up to Space Invaders, the majority of the big impressive changes were done first by Galaxian. I feel like you play Space Invaders and then you play Galaxian and your jaw just drops at how next-level it is in almost every way. You play Galaxian and then Galaga and you’re just kind of like, “Okay, that’s definitely more polished.” Between the two, Galaxian is by far the more innovative.
*I am looking forward to revisiting Galaga for this journey because I am admittedly basing all this on memories of playing Galaga years ago, so I may change my tune once I revisit it.
*But enough about Galaga and enough about Space Invaders too probably. Galaxian is a historic game when viewed in the context of those other two games, but, just taken on its own merits, it’s a great game.
*Is this the new Best Game of this journey? Yeah, probably. I mean, Space Invaders is still darn close even with all the innovations this one has on the formula. Invaders is just still so simple that it’s fun in its own way. But I’m not gonna truly be doing a Best Game thing or ranking these games as I go through them. I mean, that would be ridiculous and . . .
*You know what, maybe I am going to do that. I mean, it’ll get stupid really quickly as the games just become extremely good in different ways, you know what I mean? But I might do a running ranked list, just for fun.
*Anyway, maybe. It all depends on what one means by “best,” of course. I mean, Space Invaders kind of laid down the formula . . . it’s the thing with all art, you know.
*But all that aside, Galaxian is a masterpiece of a game and as we are about to move on to the tenth game on this journey (991 to go baby!), I can say it’s pretty well the best of the first nine. This bodes well, the brief detour into absolute crap that was Adventure notwithstanding.
*So, next time, we will finish up 1979 with one final game. Will 1979 come to a gentle and graceful landing with a masterpiece? Or will the year crash and burn with a disaster? We’ll find out next time, as we take a look at Lunar Lander.