GALAGA & GALAXIAN FULL

With the first Galaga prototype, enemy formations would appear at the top of the screen, and fly down at you in patterns that were different from Galaxian. Yokoyama: Back then we always went through the process of creating one or two prototypes. Was there a hint or suggestion then, that led you to it? Was that an idea you had from the beginning? In Galaga, your ship can be captured, and then rescued to be combined with your ship for double the firepower. If your boss, or your bossвЂ™ boss, gave you the OK, youвЂ™d just start working on it.

GALAGA & GALAXIAN FULL

Then the planning and game design docs would get stuffed full of all kinds of ideasвЂ¦ we didnвЂ™t really have planning meetings back then at Namco. First IвЂ™d write the spec sheet, making sure that what I wanted to create was technically possible for the programmers. The вЂњDual FighterвЂќ Idea -For Galaga, I understand you worked together with the programmers in coming up with the planning and design documents? With new hardware the impossible became possible. And then new hardware came along and you could add it. So even at this very early stage of STG, developers were thinking about autofire. I was also told to make it autofire, but since we werenвЂ™t using sprites, we couldnвЂ™t do autofire either. In King & Balloon, the enemies steal the King, and that puts you in a state of panic, right? I wanted to reflect that mindset in a game with tons of bullets, but sadly the Galaxian hardware couldnвЂ™t do that, so we settled on making the bullets faster than they had been in Galaxian. Unfortunately, King & Balloon used the same hardware as Galaxian, so it couldnвЂ™t do autofire. I see, and Galaga is the game where you did everything yourself, including the initial conception. I acted as what you would now call a вЂњdirectorвЂќ on that project, and helped out with the design, but the original idea was SawanoвЂ™s. During the development of Galaxian, Kazunori Sawano, who oversaw game development at Namco, had another idea for a non-space STG. King & Balloon is a STG game that came out before Galaga, but is there any connection between the two? Galaga didnвЂ™t have those elements at the start either, but we added a lot of stuff like that as we went along.Дocs for King & Balloon. When a great player puts on a performance, you see, everyone watching goes вЂњooo!!вЂќ And the heart of that performance is scoring. 1 That was something we added later in the development process of Galaxian. Another thing from Galaxian is the way the boss galagas will appear with two red guards, and if you destroy the guards before killing the boss, you get a higher score. ThereвЂ™s a number of things that Galaga seems to have inherited from Galaxian, like how when you kill a boss galaga, the other enemies will stop firing for several seconds. (laughs) -I feel like your experience there is clearly reflected in Galaga.

At the office it was always me sitting in front of the Galaxian cab. When I was a student I played a ton of Space Invaders, and I was legitimately good. Yokoyama: At the time, I was the best video game player at Namco. Did you study Galaxian much in preparation for making Galaga? And management had expressed a clear desire to us that we make вЂњone more game like GalaxianвЂќ, so we took up the challenge.

However, at the time, other companies were creating their own Galaxian knock-offs, but since Galaxian, Namco had been busy pursuing other avenues via games like Pac-Man and Rally X. Yokoyama: Well, we didnвЂ™t have any explicit instructions to create a game like Galaxian. You said your first conception of Galaga was a вЂњspace gameвЂќ you werenвЂ™t considering it as a straight sequel to Galaxian? After completing our previous game, we had the initial plans done for Galaga in less than two months, I think. It really all happened over a short span of time. It sounds like Galaga had been planned for awhile then? Then we went back to square one and planned a new game, and that is the Galaga we know today. Yokoyama: Yes, the project began on that premise, and we completed a partially-complete prototype, but Ishimura from Research and Development, who was responsible for our hardware, decided we should use a new board. So Galaga was originally going to use the Galaxian hardware? After this, because there were still so many Galaxian and King & Balloon pcbs circulating, we again used the Galaxian hardware, but this time to create another вЂњspace gameвЂќ-and that turned out to be Galaga. The first in this line was King & Balloon. We produced an especially huge number of Galaxian pcbs, so it was decided that our next games should use the Galaxian pcb hardware too. Yokoyama: NamcoвЂ™s first game was Gee Bee, and after that we released Galaxian. Galaga вЂ“ 30th Anniversary Developer InterviewДЄ Sequel to Galaxian -How did Galaga come to be?

Galaga & galaxian