Namco's third
in-house arcade game, released in
1979. Notable for being the first
full color raster game ever. Before Galaxian,
color overlays were used on arcade screens. It was also Namco's first big hit. Using the
space invaders formula and speeding play up by having the
bug-like enemies
throw themselves at the player, Galaxian
spawned a ton of
rip-offs,
clones, and
homages, most of the earlier ones using the same
hardware. In
North America the machine was distributed, like many of the early
Namco games, by
Bally/Midway.
There were a few sequels to the game, including Galaga, Gaplus, and the laserdisc-based Galaxian3. The game has popped up all over the place in other Namco games too, such as the Pac-Man series, Dig-Dug, Ridge Racer series, and most recently in Gun Balina (known in the US and Europe as Point Blank 3).
The game has been ported to home videogame and computer systems everywhere, including the Atari 800, Commodore 64, Colecovision, Nintendo Entertainment System, MSX, GameBoy, the Sony Playstation (as part of the great Namco Museum series) and the IBM PC for Windows 95. Of course for the PC there's tons of shareware and freeware clones. And for the most accurate arcade experience MAME would be a good bet on multiple computer platforms. (Insert random arcade ROM legality disclaimer here.)
Bomb Bee --- Cutie Q