Galaga, the best shooter ever?

This is Galaga, Namco’s great masterpiece from 1981.

Certainly helped by the era in which it was released, devoted to conceptual minimalism both by philosophy and by the obvious technical limitations in video game development in those years, Galaga fully represents everything that those who love video games in their purest essence have always sought: fluid and challenging pacing, very simple but carefully crafted graphics, a lively sound intro that winks at Eighties sounds with catchy hooks that, during gameplay, plunge you right into the heart of the action: it was an unwritten rule in the arcades of the last century to make you anxious now and then, thanks to insistent sonic counterpoint!

As a sequel to Galaxian, Galaga expands the gameplay mechanics while keeping the core idea, namely defeating enemies while avoiding being wiped out by their constant rain of bombs. The enemy troops appear in formation at the top of the screen, and each row is made up of aliens of different shapes and colors, behind which lurk those who, if we were in an epic fantasy, we would call standard-bearers, namely the warlords who pull the strings of the enemy army. Our avatar can only move horizontally, from right to left: the best weapon we have at our disposal is careful planning of movements and studying alien patterns. When my brother and I used to play the Galaga cabinet at the neighborhood bar, the initial briefing always involved watching other people’s games to memorize how and when the bugs moved on the screen, so as to avoid the dramatic Game Over in the first fifteen seconds of play: a true story, unfortunately.

Virtually endless, Galaga is known for a famous gameplay implementation: do you remember the bishops mentioned earlier? Well, these annoying little guys break the ranks of the enemy formations to swoop toward us, emitting a tractor beam. At that point we can choose to avoid it and continue the game in the usual way, or take the risk and have one of our ships taken hostage, then free it by shooting the captor with absolute precision. The prize on offer? Double ship, double firepower, double chances of taking out enemies, and a multitude of points waiting to be pocketed, or rather, stowed away in the hold!

Galaga, with this move so simple yet so dazzling, for the first time put the player in front of the possibility of choosing how to act within a shooter, usually a genre relegated to simplistic dynamics like “run and shoot” and nothing more. A choice, moreover, that had an enormous impact on the flow of the game, drawing a line between the casual player and the expert who instead wanted to break every record. In the microcosm of the “old” arcades, it was standard practice to learn from the latter in order to shed the label stuck to the former. 

The Namco gem was released for every platform, followed by so many clones that counting them all would be a Herculean task: an exemplary title, which on Atari found, among other things, a really not-bad conversion and which I own with the pride of someone who, in the past, stopped craning his neck around the shoulders of the older boys to learn from them and today, with a bittersweet taste on his tongue, finds himself during the holidays teaching his younger cousins the importance of getting captured by enemies: a temporary surrender, before the comeback that, as we all know, always arrives sooner or later.