Galaga

Galaga is a spiritual successor to Galaxian. Building on the formula established by Galaxian, Galaga introduces several new concepts to the fixed vertical shooting genre that made it incredibly popular in the arcades. It can still be found in arcades to this day, and performs rather well next to more modern day offerings.

The most notable new feature of Galaga is the chance to increase your fire power by intentionally allowing one of the Galaga flagships to capture your space craft, and rescue it with your next life, returning the original ship to your side. Upon rescuing your ship, you are granted side-by-side double fire power, albeit with an increase in size, and therefore, vulnerability. Another popular feature of Galaga was its presentation of Bonus Rounds between the action which offered large point awards for perfection.

Galaga seems to represent something of a "sweet spot" in game design, having performed better than either its predecessor and it successor, Gaplus. However, despite it's incredible popularity in the arcade, it saw comparatively few official home conversions in the United States. Several homebrew programmers supplied alternate versions stateside, while Japan saw an incredible number of conversions for popular computer models only available in the land of the rising sun.

• 

  Title screen.

Story

There is no official story to Galaga. You are simply the only pilot capable of staving off the invasion of the Galaga army, a collection of giant sized insect looking aliens.

Table of Contents

• Controls & Characters
• Strategies & Secrets
• Home Version Comparisons

Box artwork

Galaga received far more home conversions in Japan than it did in the U.S. despite being more popular than Galaxian. Selected box art examples are shown below:

• 

  Atari 7800

• 

  Famicom

• 

  NES

• 

  Fujitsu FM-7

• 

  Sega SG-1000

• 

  Game Boy (Japan)

• File:GLG GLX GB box.JPG

  Game Boy