We at the Games Room Company have always had a great appreciation for video games, ever since the first commercial video game ( Computer Space) was released back in 1971.

It spawned an even more successful and long-lived sequel, Galaga in 1981, and the lesser-known Gaplus and Galaga ’88 in 19 respectively. Although not the first colour video game, Galaxian took screen graphics a step further with multi-coloured animated sprites and explosions, different coloured fonts for the score and high score, the scrolling star field, and graphic icons that show the number of lives left and how many stages the player had completed. Galaxian did very well for Namco and introduced several innovative features. (Space Invaders was also imported to the US by Midway Games).

It was designed to compete with Space Invaders, Taito’s landmark game which was released a year earlier. Galaxian was a hugely successful ‘fixed shooter’ 1 or 2 player game in which the player controls a spaceship at the bottom of the screen and shoots enemies descending in various directions. This superb example has been extensively refurbished in our own workshops and is now in near mint condition inside and out. It established itself as one of the most popular games of its era and is remembered fondly by those of us of a certain age. The game alternates between drawing even ID lasers and odd ID lasers each frame.Developed by Namco and released in Japan in October 1979, Galaxian was imported to North America by Midway that December and the UK shortly afterwards. To support the new laser limit, code was added to the laser drawing routine to flicker the lasers. In newer sets, each alien can shoot up to three lasers at a time. In older sets, each alien can only shoot two lasers at a time. Only the older Namco set and the Taito set let the player start with 5 lives.

In Namco Set 1, the 'BONUS GALAXIP FOR' text was shifted to the left 8 pixels, and the string is now properly centered.

In Midway Set 1, the score value and the 'PTS' graphic were shifted to the right 8 pixels, potentially putting the 'PTS' graphic in the overscan area of the monitor.

The higher score values meant that the 'BONUS GALAXIP' string had to be readjusted.

In newer sets, there are four extra life settings, and all of the scores are higher than in previous sets.

In Midway Set 2 only, the extra life settings are lower.In the oldest sets, there are three extra life settings, and one setting that disables the extra life feature entirely.This is the only difference between the Taito set and Namco set 2. Of course, each publisher has a different logo on the title screen. They seem to follow the chronology below:

Galaxian tabletop arcade game art