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the Atari 5200 version was one of it's 2 launch titles. (the other being super breakout.)
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There's an unofficial DOS port of the game.
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Galaxian arcade was one of the most widely pirated motherboards during the early 80s. Numerous hacks were made of the game and featured slightly redesigned aliens and special bonus stages.
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Galaxian has spawned several follow-up games. The most popular of these was its immediate successor, Galaga, which largely eclipsed its predecessor in popularity, introducing aliens attacking in intricate formations, multiple guns, and bonus rounds. A third official sequel, Gaplus, was released in 1984. Like Galaga, this was a bottom shooter, with some limited up/down movement (like Centipede). However, by 1984 the novelty of the Space Invader formula had faded, and it was no longer successful.
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Galaxian was also released on Microsoft Windows in 1995 as part of Microsoft Return of Arcade.
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Galaxian has also been released as part of the Namco Museum series of collections across several platforms.
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The "official" highest score in a game of Galaxian was achieved by Gary Whelan of Manchester, England on 13 August 2004 when he managed to amass a total of 399,290 points.
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The original arcade Galaxian was very successful for Namco and introduced several "firsts". Galaxian took graphics a step further with multi-colored animated sprites and explosions, a crude theme song, different colored fonts for the score and high score, more prominent background "music", the scrolling starfield and graphic icons that showed the number of ships left and how many rounds the player had completed. These elements combined to create a look/feel that would set the standard for many other 1980s arcade games such as Pac-Man.
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Galaxian Arcade for Atari 2600 from AtariAge is a hack of the official Atari release. The graphics were altered to more closely resemble the arcade game.
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Atari 2600 programmer Mark Ackerman, at the time working in Atari's "think-tank" GCC, was granted a patent for his technique invented for the 2600 port of Galaxian, allowing eight sprites to be displayed in one row.
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Atari's 2600 release of Galaxian came with the comic book Atari Force #5. Here is that comic at AtariAge.com
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Was later re-released under the Thunder Mountain label. What makes this trivia? Usually only Mindscape games were released under Thunder Mountain... Galaxian was originally licensed to Atari.

Galaxian (and its clone, Cosmic Crusader) get away with relatively high framerates on the original 4.77MHz PC because they don't use the entire screen for a playfield; the right fifth of the screen (64 pixels) is unused. Another side-effect of shortening the playfield to a width of 256 pixels is the optimization of game calculations, stemming from the fact that horizontal coordinates fit in a single byte instead of two.
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