Anyway, back to Galaga's 30th anniversary.
In 1978, Taito created what would be considered one of the most influential games in arcade history: Space Invaders. Considered the father of all shoot 'em ups, its popularity has spawned a plethora (I say plethora) of direct imitators. Out of all of them, the most popular has to be Namco's Galaxian.
Created one year later, Galaxian takes the classic formula of Space Invaders and adds its own elements. Where Space Invaders had you fighting rows of aliens as they slowly advanced toward the planet, bombarding you with death rays, Galaxian had your ship and the enemies floating through space. As you played, the aliens would fly toward you, kamikaze style. It was a style cloned by other games, such as Phoenix and Gorf (which had a mission called "Galaxians," as Midway owned the rights to many Namco games in the US (something they would abuse on many occasions).
With the sequel, Galaga, Namco perfected the formula they started. Galaxian only added dive bombing enemies to Space Invaders' foundation (even a lot of the sounds from Galaxian are extremely reminiscent of Space Invaders). Even though Galaga overshadowed its predecessor, Galaxian was still very popular and is considered a classic.
If you've never played Galaxian (which has been ported to just as many console systems as Galaga), check out this video and compare with the gameplay of Galaga.
And if you enjoyed making your own mini Galaga machine out of paper, here's the papercraft version of Galaxian to add to your papercade. Click, print, cut, fold, paste - you get the idea.
Next time, on Forgotten Worlds, (maybe next week, maybe not), I'll go over the sequels to Galaga. Keep in mind, these are not sequels to Galaxian. I'll get to those another time.
Keep your scores high and the quarters flowing.
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