Unlike any other games at their times, Galaga was focused on enemy formations, so the enemies are forming swarms and maintain them throughout the game, even though they will occasionally start to attack the player by shooting down towards him or even launch towards him in order to crash onto his ship. You can easily move your player ship on the battlefield either in the left or right, and at the same time you will need to see how the enemies are going to attack you.
It might be a little tricky to do this in the beginning, because there is no explanation when it comes to the controls, but these are intuitive and you will immediately be able to learn how to control the game without that much hassle. The main objective in any Galaga experience is for you to defeat the enemies that seem to look like insects and obtain the highest score possible. You, as a player, can shoot the enemies but you have to avoid colliding with them, as this can be catastrophic for you, especially since you have a very limited amount of lives to begin with.
Each level starts off empty yet it quickly fills up as the enemies will appear in formations and they will start attacking the player ship with their lasers. What can be better than a great boost of confidence that everyone near us will see and appreciate? This is why Galaga is such a cult hit, because it not only offered entertainment, it has changed lives and it will continue to do so in the modern day, albeit in a much simpler form, of course.Īt its core, Galaga is an arcade shooter which was published by Namco and in it you control a spacecraft which can be found at the bottom of the screen. Why is that? Because unlike other games, Galaga manage to bring a sense of confidence, of power, but at the same time it managed to make us know that we can literally do anything.
This is exactly what people needed in a time when the society was clearly trying to be more and more innovative, but at the same time they didn’t have something to relate to, something to connect with and feel amazing, in complete control.įor many, Galaga is the game that has marked a focal point in personal development, and it has literally managed to provide many of us with some of the definite characteristics we have today. The fact that you could have played it alongside a friend just made it even more interesting and exciting at the same time. The game could be just picked up and play without any hassle. The 80s, pretty much like now, were a society in which people just wanted to matter, to stand out and because of that games that enabled them to make a difference were successful.Īnother thing that we all liked about Galaga is definitely its accessibility. They wanted something they could relate to, something that allowed them to make a difference. Why would such a game become a massive hit? True, at that time there weren’t that many games to begin with, but just like now, people always wanted something unique, different and which manages to stand out of the crow. It might seem hard to go ahead and play a game on those large arcade machines, especially when we have these small computers nowadays, but the reality is that games are just plain amazing and because of that we are definitely enjoying our experience with them. There are numerous reasons behind that, but what stands out here is the fact that unlike many other games at its time, which tried to become more and more complicated, Galaga was a pressure remover so to speak, because the gameplay was very easy to understand and this is the main reason why we have fallen in love with it.