There's a rich, organ-like texture to it that sounds more like a mid-1980s Capcom arcade game than a 1981 title. I'd go so far as to say the strident music that opens the game surpasses the opening jingle of Pac-Man. There's even the more subtle question of when to engage with this mechanic: do you strive for the maximum amount of firepower from the earliest point, or wait until just before the CHALLENGING STAGE missions (returning here from their first, far less welcome iteration in New Rally-X)? It all works in concert to comprise my personal favorite game covered so far in this series. In this case, however, the risk/reward calculation is stacked upon the already robust decision stacks required in Galaxian. Rescuing the player craft results in a bizarre two-shipped sprite at the bottom of the screen which allows for twice the firepower with the tradeoff of twice the surface area for enemy attacks to stick. But Yokoyama saw this as too boring of an idea, as it was basically an extension of the same old extra life concept present in many titles for achieving certain amounts of points. At first the rescued ship provided the player with an extra life. The player is compelled to either avoid this tractor beam, or rescue the captured ship. At periods, an enemy craft will fly to the bottom of the screen and hoover up the player's craft (and the associated life). It is a brilliant design choice that almost singlehandedly earns it a place in history.

The tractor beam gambit lies at the beating heart of Galaga. I personally feed my first ship to that tractor beam as soon as possible, but then again I'm not a feature on Twin Galaxies so what the hell do I know?

He hit on the idea of trying different enemy attacks, and ultimately was taken with the idea of a tractor beam.

He described the fundamental 'game' part of Galaxian being the part where the player had to weave between shots and manage diving formations to maximize scores, and thus thought that simply rehashing those elements themselves would not make a special game. Once it was determined that new hardware was necessary, Yokoyama gained more headroom to innovate on Galaxian's feature set to create a distinctive play style. The breaking point was auto fire, which was not possible on the older board. So the design work began, and based on the scope of the project it became clear that the hardware made to support Galaxian would not be adequate to host the features desired in this new title. He had a rough idea for what the game would be about two months after completing K&B, and was working with the guidance from Namco management to make 'one more game like Galaxian'. By his own account (recorded in an interview done to honor Galaga's 30th annivesary in 2011), Galaga was originally conceived of as a way to repurpose a surplus of Galaxian/King & Balloon PCBs stockpiled by Namco. Thus, we come to the man most responsible for Galaga's existence: Yokoyama Shigeru, a Namco employee whose previous works include surrealist pinball ( Cutie Q), defending an unspecified monarchy ( King & Balloon), and desperately attempting to juice a turnip for anything of value ( New Rally-X). Putting together information on the roots of Galaga's arcade debut is therefore less an exercise in conjecture than it is act of cribbing together some of the more pertinent notes for this piece. Therefore it has been covered in great detail by, a fantastic resource for translated interviews with developers of Japanese arcade and console games throughout the years. For the purposes of this entry in the NamCompendium, I am blessed with the good fortune of this widely celebrated game being grouped into the shoot-em-up family.

Namco museum 50th anniversary ps2 cover