Galaxian - On this day

Forty years ago, the Japanese were obsessed with the cult game Space Invaders. The success of that game inspired many companies to do something similar, and among them was Bandai. The result of their brainstorming was Galaxian - an arcade 2D shooter in space in which we had only one task: to destroy the aliens.

The game differed from Space Invaders in two ways. At first, there were no shelters behind which the player could hide from enemy fire. Secondly, the enemy ships flew out of the formation and flew towards the bottom of the screen, that is, towards the player who had to either destroy or avoid them. In case he didn't destroy them, the enemies would return to the top of the screen.

Shots at the opponent had to be measured because only one player's projectile could be found on the screen at the same time, and the next could be fired only when the previous one hit the opponent or went out of the screen.

42 years ago Galaxian was a graphically advanced game. It was one of the first games made in the RGB color model, which allowed the sprites to be multicolored, i.e. for the player’s boat to be blue with a cannon that is a red-yellow combination.

Galaxian first appeared as an arcade machine game, and was very popular in Japan and later in the North American market. This popularity resulted in it later appearing for several other platforms, including consoles and computers - Commodore 64, Atari 2600, Zx Spectrum, and others.

Two years later, Galaxian got an even more successful sequel called Galaga, which can be found on both today's consoles and PCs.