RetroAhoy: Galaxian
Games at the dawn of the video arcade era were often simple - and few were as simple as the humble shoot 'em up. Titles such as Spacewar! and Space Invaders laid the first foundations, but the rapid advent of technology led to a new wave of shoot-em-ups in this early 'golden age' of the arcade.
I'm Stuart Brown, and this - is Game Over... ...and in this episode we're covering arcade space shooter Galaxian. Galaxian was developed and published in Japan by Namco, founded in 1955 as children's ride manufacturer Nakamura Manufacturing. Galaxian was Namco's third game - their first was Gee Bee, a cross between a pinball and a ball-and paddle game, such as the earlier Pong.
Gee Bee spawned a sequel a year later, Bomb Bee. Galaxian is a fixed shooter game, perhaps the most basic of all shoot-em-up types - the playfield consists of only a single screen, within which both the player and enemies are contained. In Galaxian, the player takes control of a spaceship - referred to as the 'Galaxip', and is able to shoot upwards to destroy the aliens, the eponymous 'Galaxians'.
You're only able to shoot one bullet a time, so a missed shot which leaves your projectile in play for longer will hamper your destructive ability. Accuracy was key to despatching the incoming swarm quickly. One advancement over the earlier Space Invaders was the enemy's behaviour - rather than slowly meandering down the screen, the enemies were altogether more aggressive - dive bombing in an explicit attempt to destroy your fragile craft.
Different classes of enemy were also introduced - each with slightly different behaviour, and score reward. The most numerous blue drones were cannon fodder for the higher ranks - their lower position preventing your shots from hitting the more valuable galaxians.
The purple emissaries are a little more aggresive, with their faster lateral movement dangerous to the unready player - and finally, the yellow flagships with their red escorts who form a deadly diving cluster intent on your destruction. This variation in enemy behaviour, and unpredictable diving and swoops, make the game more challenging than earlier space shooters - requiring a skilled player to attain the higher score bonuses and stages.
The game's innovation extends to more than just the enemy movement - in fact, Galaxian was the first arcade game to feature coloured RGB graphics, quite the achievement by any measure. Previous titles relied on transparent overlays to colour sections of the playfield, an approach naturally limited in effectiveness.
The multicoloured aliens, and their ability to fly whereever they pleased, was truly remarkable for its time. The explosions, sound effects and multicoloured scrolling starfield really set Galaxian apart, and raised the bar for audiovisual standards of the day.
It also laid important foundations in the user interface design of the then-nascent shooter genre - with the number of lives remaining and current stage illustrated at the bottom of the screen, things which we may take for granted now. The fact that so many features of Galaxian are recognisable today is telling - this space shooter title truly paved the way for those games which followed after.
While Galaxian was popular, and propelled Namco into video gaming significance, it has largely been outshadowed by its 1981 sequel, Galaga. Galaga is the most successful space shooter ever - but borrows heavily from Galaxian's innovation, and adds a few features of its own.
Now you could fire more than one bullet at a time, special 'boss Galagas' would use tractor beams in an attempt to steal your ship and use it against you - and there were more varied stages, such as the bonus 'challenging stage'. There was a third sequel in 1984's Galplus, which introduced vertical movement and a host of other new features - but by 1984 interest in space shooters had significantly declined 1988 saw the release of the last of the original Galaxian titles, with the imaginatively titled Galaga '88.
With a higher standard of graphics and audio, and more varied sprites and the introduction of 'dimensions', it was an evolution - but the original Galaga overshadows it in significance somewhat. Following the success of Galaxian and Galaga, Namco went on to even bigger things - their biggest selling and most culturally significant title came just a year after Galaxian, with Pac-Man.
With the boom in video gaming in the early 80s, Namco made a significant mark, and is the name behind other big titles of the era such as Dig Dug, Pole Position and Rally-X. They persist today, and have since merged with toymaker Bandai to form Namco Bandai Games.
Recently responsible for franchises such as Katamari, Tekken, and Soulcalibre, they're still a major player in the modern video game scene. Galaxian itself set an early benchmark for shoot 'em ups, and despite rapid progress in the genre with the pace of technology advancement, many of the conventions and basic standards persisted with future titles.
With more advanced hardware, and the ability to better shift pixels, the fixed shooter became less commonplace, and instead was replaced by horizontally and vertically scrolling shooters. These provided a more diverse and interesting backdrop for the games, and in addition gave a better sense of level progression and the opportunity for more diverse enemies.
One of the most famous vertically scrolling shooters was Capcom's 1942 - a World War 2 themed game, but one which took at least some influence from the space-themed shooters which came before. The different classes and enemy behaviours first seen in Galaxian set a precedent for the greater variety of enemies that would show up in later games, and the introduction of tougher enemies and bosses made for a greater overall challenge.
1985's Gradius is a definitive horizontal shooter, and one which built on Galaxian's early UI conventions. One key innovation was the introduction of a 'power meter', where the player could elect to take an upgrade immediately or 'save up' for a better one, at the expense of a longer wait without the upgrade.
The oddly fish-themed Darius in 1986 was a further development in scrolling shooters, with a massive 3-screen cabinet, non-linear levels and tough-to-beat bosses at the end of each stage. By the mid-1980s, the space shooter had largely fallen out of favour - instead the theme of choice in 1986 was the muscle-bound soldier complete with machine gun, largely thanks to the 1985 cinema release of Rambo: First Blood Part 2.
Ikari Warriors was one such game, with its roots traceable to earlier shooters, with similar mechanics. As a soldier, the player is a little more grounded, with the mode of movement being running rather than flying - and as such the dawn of the run and gun era was upon us, perhaps characterised by 1987's Contra.
By the mid-1980s, the technology available in the arcades was even starting to outgrow the limitations of 2D, and so we saw the introduction of vector wireframe graphics and even full-colour psuedo 3d, such as those seen in 1985's Space Harrier. Essentially a scrolling shoot 'em up dressed up with fancier graphics, this fantasy-themed rail shooter was a glimpse into the future of the potential of computer graphics, and Sega's 'Super Scaler' technology and 16-bit graphics certainly were impressive for its era.
Galaxian, and to a greater extent Galaga, have enjoyed numerous remakes and clones over the years, and you'd struggle to find a platform without at least some version of the games. A personal favourite of mine was Edgar Vigdal's Deluxe Galaga on the Commodore Amiga, which greatly expanded on enemy variety, powerups and minigames, while still retaining the basic enemy mechanics of the early arcade games.
Deluxe Galaga lives on today, with the updated PC version Warblade offering higher resolution graphics and an even greater extent to the game's variety. Official remakes exist as well, with Namco Bandai's Galaga Legions, and Galaga Legions DX, available on the Xbox Live marketplace.
A more radical departure from the original, the game is awash with particle effects and swarms of hundred of enemies - but the original influence remains. Galaxian wasn't the first fixed space shooter, and was far from the last - but it exists as a lynchpin between the earliest days of arcade gaming, and the evolution of the shoot-em-up as we know it today.
Although the first in the Galaxian series is often overshadowed by its sequel, it marks an important milestone for Namco as a company, and for all the subsequent shoot-em ups which borrowed so heavily from its formula. Join me next time when I'll be covering controversial crash-em-up, Carmageddon.
