Galaxy Game

The Good
When making an arcade port of the popular mainframe game Spacewar, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck decided to try to make the game as faithful as possible to the original. They purchased a full PDP-11 minicomputer to run the game, allowing them to run the complex physics and use real star positioning for the backdrop. They also allowed for many variations on the physics, such as positive, negative, or absent gravity from the star in the centre, or having the screen edges either wrap around to the opposite edge or cause the ships to explode when touched.

These aspects don't seem to work in the MAME implementation, so I haven't been able to experiment with them, other than the standard wrap-around and no gravity. I have seen videos of using the gravity of the star to slingshot the ships around it, which looks fun.

You can also set the game to slow or fast speed. I can enjoy both, but I think the faster speed makes for more fun gameplay although it's more difficult to control the ship.

The realistic physics are noticeable, and you can tell they put a lot of work into making the ships move realistically.

The Bad
A couple of months after Galaxy Space released at Stanford, another Spacewar port, but much less faithful to the original, Computer Space, was released by Syzygy (which would later become Atari). Computer Space cut some corners with the implementation and was less expensive to build, and they released to a larger market. One of the changes Computer Space made was to make a one player game where the enemy was a pair of flying saucers, flying in unison, which moved in random patterns and fired at the player's ship, making the game much more frantic and more playable as a single-player game. This is something that would have improved Galaxy Game as an arcade game but would have been a departure from the original game.

The MAME implementation doesn't have any sound, so I can't comment on whether there was supposed to be sound with Galaxy Game, but the sounds in Computer Space really add a lot to the gameplay, so I must hope that there was in fact sound on Galaxy Game, but I just can't experience it on the emulation along with the other options that are missing in MAME. So, while these aren't necessarily things lacking in the original game, their lack in the MAME version makes the game less enjoyable.

The single-player mode is only considered a "practice" mode, so it isn't fair to judge its lack of AI (the other ship just travels down at a constant rate to provide a moving but predictable target, but the main gameplay was always intended to be for two players).

The Bottom Line
Galaxy Game is important for historical reasons, but it was never released to a large market and was never intended to be commercially successful, but as more of an expensive project to share an implementation of a popular mainframe game, which had limited access, with the public at Stanford. At 10 cents per game, or twenty-five cents for three games, they barely broke even. I don't consider the game worth playing for any reason other than the historical importance. It wasn't as enjoyable as Computer Space looks (I haven't been able to find an emulator for that yet), but it was the first coin-operated video game, so it's worth trying just to see what it was like.