Galaga '88

About Galaga '88

Galaga '88 (1987) is Namco's fourth Galaxian game, a detailed update of Galaga with triple fighters, warps between dimensions and a soundtrack the enemies dance to.

Galaga '88 in Depth

As the Blast Fighter, the player shoots waves of Galaga aliens that fly into formation from the top and sides of the screen and then dive-bomb; touching an alien or its shots costs a life. Each formation is topped by four Boss Galaga, which take two hits and can capture the player's ship with a tractor beam. Shooting a Boss carrying a captured ship as it dives frees it to join the player's ship as a dual fighter, with more firepower and a bigger target. A dual fighter can be captured and rescued in turn to make a triple fighter, with wide, fast shots, which can also be gained from pink capsules.

The game is split into five worlds of up to four stages each, ending in a bonus stage. Defeating large enemies and destroying obstacles in a world yields up to two blue warp capsules, and finishing the bonus stage with both sends the player into a new dimension with different, harder enemies and formations. Two vertically scrolling stages each feature two enemy formations and a boss, and there are four endings depending on the dimension the player finishes in. Compared with earlier games, it has detailed backgrounds, larger enemies and more detailed ships.

Making Galaga '88

Namco showed a prototype at the JAMMA show in October 1987 alongside Pac-Mania, Bravoman and Assault, released it in Japan that December, and let Atari Games publish it in North America and Europe in 1988. Running on Namco's System 1 board, it let Kawada combine FM synthesis, Namco's wavetable sounds and PCM effects, and he wanted the music to convey entertainment rather than stoicism. It was Japan's sixth highest-grossing arcade conversion kit of 1988, its success there credited to its simplicity and additions, but it did poorly in North America.

Computer + Video Games liked its cute visuals and new ideas, Your Sinclair called it "one of the most enjoyable machines on offer this month", and ACE dismissed it as "nothing more than a prettified version of the original" while praising its looks and music. Allgame called the TurboGrafx-16 port the best shooter on the system, and Eurogamer described the Virtual Console release as a "pitch perfect dose of frenetic arcade blasting". Galaxian³: Project Dragoon followed in 1990.