Lab 1: Analyzing "Galaga"

Now, me being born in 1992, I'm not much of what you would call an "old school gamer"; the first video game I ever played was Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992), a 16-bit cartridge on the Sega Genesis that was most definitely ahead of its time and is still considered a classic today. However, that is not to say that I have never played any games before my birth. Growing up, I began to trace gaming back to its roots, playing games like Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990) and Pole Position (1982). One game that I specifically couldn't get enough of was Galaga (1981).

A screenshot of the beginning screen.

As a kid, Galaga was an arcade machine in every laundromat in the region, and every time my father would go to wash clothes, I would happily tag along, quarters in pocket, ready to shoot my heart away at those little alien bugs. And they would run circles around me, blow up my space fighter, capture it, and so on until I was all out.

But anyway, enough about my personal experiences and on to the game itself. Galaga was - as most people are actually unaware of - a sequel to the 1979 game Galaxian, a game with a similar premise: you're a space fighter, shoot the aliens. However, Galaga improved in a lot of aspects as compared to its predecessor. For starters, in my opinion, Galaga just overall looks better than Galaxian. The space fighter in the first one looks like some kind of strange plunger, whereas the ship in Galaga actually looks like a fighter jet. Enemies in Galaga were faster and not only dropped towards your fighter in a side-to-side formation, but did loop-de-loops as well! Other improvements included the ability to shoot more than one bullet at a time, being able to have more than one space fighter out at the same time, and Challenging Stages in between every few rounds.

Sound design in Galaga was also a vast improvement from Galaxian in my opinion. The 1979 space fighter had a strange jingle before starting the game that just struck me as creepy, and there was an "ambient" sound in the background that annoyed me. The shot sound came off as just plain wrong as well.




Galaga, on the other hand, had a jingle at the beginning that I'm quite sure all gamers would recognize immediately. There was no background noise; the only ambiance needed came from the player's constant shooting and the constant swarm of enemies falling down to attack you. The sound was done on a Namco WSG using 3-channel mono, and the end product was something of beauty when it comes to 8-bit sound.