Galaxian

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Description

Galaxian is a shoot 'em up in which the player is at the bottom of the screen, with an arrangement of aliens at the top. The player moves left and right to aim at an alien, then shoots a bullet up the screen, and the alien it hits is killed. The aliens are classed as Drones, Emissaries, Hornets and Commanders, with those higher up the screen scoring more points when destroyed. At set intervals an enemy will move down the screen towards you, escorting a bomber, which is a moment of high danger. Clear a wave and another is generated.

Screenshots

Promo Images

Trailer

Alternate Titles

• "Zero Time" -- Spanish Petaco release
• "ギャラクシアン" -- Japanese spelling

Part of the Following Groups

• Galaxian series
• Galaxian variants
• Genre: Fixed-screen shoot 'em up

User Reviews

Much better than its PC counterpart	NES	Katakis | カタキス (42793)
Easy to pick up and play but difficult to master. Quite addicting!	NES	Ivan Obretenov (33)
An extremely faithful conversion of the original arcade game.	PC Booter	Trixter (9116)
A solid Space Invaders clone.	PC Booter	Tomer Gabel (4634)

Critic Reviews

The Video Game Critic	ColecoVision	Mar 03, 2001	A	100
The Atari Times	Atari 2600	Apr 08, 2002	90 out of 100	90
Atari Gamer - XL-XE Game Review Edition	Atari 8-bit	Dec, 2013	9 out of 10	90
Computer Games	Atari 2600	Sep, 1983	B+	83
8-bit Central Retro Gaming	Atari 2600	2011		80
VideoGame	Atari 2600	Aug, 1991		80
Micro 7	Commodore 64	Jun, 1984		67
Retro Archives	ColecoVision	Aug 04, 2021	11.5 out of 20	58
Retro Archives	Atari 5200	Aug 04, 2021	11 out of 20	55
Retro Archives	Atari 2600	Aug 04, 2021	10 out of 20	50

Forums

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Trivia

1001 Video Games

The Arcade version of Galaxian appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Development

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.

Extras

Atari's 2600 release of Galaxian came with the comic book Atari Force #5. Here is that comic at AtariAge.com

Graphics

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.

Re-release

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.

Awards

• Retro Gamer
  • October 2004 (Issue #9) – #49 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)

Information also contributed by Игги Друге, LepricahnsGold and FatherJack

Related Web Sites

• Galaxian - Wikipedia (Here you can find all sorts of info about the game.)
• The International Arcade Museum (Extensive information about the arcade game machine.)