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Galaga is a fixed shooter arcade game that was released by Namco in 1981 (and also licensed to Midway). It was one of the most popular arcade games and is still sought after by collectors.
Gameplay Galaga is a sequel to Galaxian and has similar gameplay. The player controls a spaceship (which can move only right or left) and shoots at swarms of incoming insect-like aliens which fly in formation above him and occasionally swoop down to bomb him in a kamikaze-like dive. The enemies in the top row will sometimes dive with one or two escorts. Enemies which survive a dive will rejoin the formation from the top. When all enemies are destroyed, the player moves on to the next level. The three types of enemy each have a different score value. A blue-and-yellow enemy is worth 50 points in formation and 100 when attacking. A red enemy is worth 80 in formation, 160 when attacking. A boss is worth 150 in formation, and its attack value depends on whether it is accompanied by red escorts: 400 points if alone, 800 with one escort, and 1600 with two. This point value is determined when the boss's attack is initiated, so shooting escorts before the boss (or missing them entirely) will still earn the higher point values. A "rapid fire" chip is available, replacing chip 3J on the original Galaga CPU board. It allows for a continuous stream of fire, as opposed to the stuttered firing limitation of the stock 3J chip. Changes The game differs from Galaxian in several ways: Galaga can be played by a single player or by two players alternating turns (Galaxian is one-player only). The starting number of lives is set to three by default, and an extra life is awarded at 20,000 points, 70,000 points, and every 70,000 points thereafter, but these settings can be changed via DIP switches on the game's motherboard. Two-player mode can be unpopular, however, as it is possible for an experienced player to play his entire game before the second player gets his first turn. Captured Fighters Perhaps the most famous element of Galaga is the ability for the player's ship to be captured by the enemy. Boss Galagas (the gray enemies at the top of the formation) will occasionally stop mid-dive and attempt to capture the player's ship with a tractor beam. If the ship is captured, the boss carries it back up into the formation. If the captured ship is the player's last ship, the game ends. The captured player ship acts as an escort to the boss Galaga that captured it, and dives down simultaneously with the Galaga. To free the ship, the player must destroy the Galaga in mid-dive — if the Galaga is destroyed in the formation, the player ship will attack on its own and disappear off the bottom of the screen. (It returns as an escort to another boss Galaga in the next round.) The player can also destroy the captured fighter, scoring 1000 points. If the player successfully frees the captured ship, the two ships join together side-by-side at the bottom of the playfield, and they move and shoot together (resulting in a double-shot that makes it easier to hit enemies). However, the combined double-ship is also twice as wide as a single ship, and thus harder to defend. If one of the ships is hit, only that ship is destroyed and the player continues with the surviving one. Because of the obvious benefit of double firepower, a common Galaga strategy is to purposely let a boss Galaga capture a player ship early in the game, then immediately free it. Contrary to rumor, the double ship cannot be recaptured and released to form a "triple ship". Boss Galagas will only attempt to capture when only a single player ship is in play. However, the triple ship is a feature in the sequel game Galaga '88. Bugs There are at least four well-known bugs in Galaga: Galaga Arrangement In 1995, Namco rereleased this game and a game titled Galaga Arrangement, a remake of sorts. The game featured a number of changes from the original: The game has seen arcade and home console releases. The home version has been released on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube releases of Namco Museum. This game was released alongside Galaga in the 128-bit version of Namco Museum in 2001. Ports
Clones Although Galaga was never officially released for the Commodore 64, a game called Galaxy, released by Kingsoft, was an almost exact clone. Gameplay was somewhat slower, but the tractor beam and tandem fire features were included. A popular remake of the game was created by Edgar Vigdal in the early nineties for the Amiga called Deluxe Galaga. In 1998, an updated classic version was released for Windows, PlayStation, Game Boy Color called . Also, in the late nineties, Ambrosia Software released Swoop for MacOS. The open source xgalaga (*) runs on systems using X Windows, such as Linux. Legacy Galaga was so successful that it spawned several follow-up games, though none were as popular as the original. The Complete Arcade series: Because of its significance and success in the video game industry, Galaga is popular among collectors. It is ranked as one of the "Top 100 Videogames" by the Killer List of Videogames (KLOV). The KLOV readers rank it second as the most popular arcade game of all time, behind only Pac-Man. Popular culture In the movie WarGames (1983), Matthew Broderick plays a young hacker who nearly starts World War III because the computer that controls U.S. nuclear weapons cannot understand the difference between a game and an atomic war. Broderick's character is shown playing Galaga at least twice (one game "ends" even though there are still two ships showing in the lower-left corner of the screen). The studio had a Galaga and a Galaxian machine delivered to Broderick's home, where he practiced for two months to prepare for the arcade scene. One of the game's musical motifs is played during a scene in the NORAD command center. In the Doctor Who serial episode "Terror of the Vervoids", two aliens are seen playing a holographic version of Galaga in the rec room of an interstellar cruise ship. The music video "Love's Gonna Get Ya" by the rap group Boogie Down Productions featured a Galaga console when KRS-One starts rapping. In the movie Grandma's Boy, gameplay images from Galaga are used during the beginning and closing credits. In the television show "LOST," the mysterious group known as The Others uses a submarine apparently named "Galaga." Trivia In Ridge Racer, two of the bonus cars have the colors of the Galaga bugs. The car in that game with the red and yellow bird's colors is named "Galaga RT Prid's" while the car with the light blue and carrot orange bee's colors is named "Galaga RT Carrot". These cars were also used in Ridge Racer 2, Rave Racer, Ridge Racer Revolution and Ridge Racer 64. According to John Sellers, (page 73, see reference below) some players, usually left handed, would form an "x" with their arms by holding the joystick with their right hand and pressing the fire button with their left hand. Also according to Sellers, it is possible to have a 200% accuracy rating if a player can shoot two ships as they cross paths with a single shot and then intentionally lose all their lives. Galaga is one of very few coin-operated games from the Golden Age of Arcade Games that still draws paying customers. For this reason, vintage, rebuilt and replica Galaga arcade games regularly boast resale prices well above those for most other games from the 1970s and '80s. Further reading | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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