The player assumes control of the Galaxip starfighter in its mission to protect Earth from waves of aliens.

He was inspired by the cinematic space combat scenes in Star Wars, with enemies originally being in the shape of the film's TIE Fighters.

The enemies appear in formation towards the top of the screen, with two escort ships, labeled the "Galaxian Flagship" or "Galboss".

Enemies will make a divebomb towards the bottom of the screen while shooting projectiles in an attempt to hit the player.

[9] Although development of the game lasted six months, Sawano had made several ideas half a year before production began.

[9] Sawano had wanted to replicate the feeling of a space battle, specifically with the game's sound effects.

[9] To save up on hardware memory and processing, programmers created a tilemap hardware model, which created a set of 8x8 pixel tiles – this reduced processing and memory requirements up to 64 times, compared to the framebuffer model used in Space Invaders.

Additional ports were published under the Atarisoft label: Apple II, ColecoVision, Commodore 64, VIC-20, IBM PC, and ZX Spectrum.

Coleco released a stand-alone Mini-Arcade tabletop version of Galaxian in 1981,[16] which, along with Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Frogger, sold three million units combined.

[2] Following its large success, Namco approached Midway Manufacturing in terms of releasing the game overseas.

Midway, who had previously lost their license with Taito due to the success of Space Invaders in the west, was in the midst of trying to find a new partner for releasing games.

One such was Moon Alien by Nichibutsu, a hack which only adds a title screen and slightly changes the sprites.

[35] In the United States, Galaxian was also the second highest-grossing arcade game of 1980, below Asteroids, according to Play Meter[36] and Cash Box.

[38] Critics applauded the game's use of true color graphics and for improving the formula established in Space Invaders.

According to Nintendo R&D2 lead engineer Masayuki Uemura, Galaxian replaced the more intensive bitmap rendering system of Space Invaders with a hardware sprite rendering system that animated sprites over a scrolling background, allowing more detailed graphics, faster gameplay and a scrolling animated starfield background.

Home systems at the time were not powerful enough to handle an accurate port of Donkey Kong, so Nintendo wanted to create a system that allowed a fully accurate conversion of Donkey Kong to be played in homes, leading to the development of the Famicom.

Galaga '88 was released in 1987, published in North America by Atari Games, which featured branching level paths, new enemy types and multiple endings.

Originally presented at Expo '90 and moved to Namco's Wonder Eggs theme park two years later, it was a rail shooter where up to 28 players used lightguns to shoot down enemies and projectiles.

This game added two-player co-operative play and boss fights, alongside new enemy and weapon types.

The following year, Hasbro Interactive released Galaga: Destination Earth for the PlayStation and Game Boy Color, adding side-scrolling and third-person stages to the core gameplay.

The most famous Galaxian rivalry has been between British player Gary Whelan and American Perry Rodgers, who faced off at Apollo Amusements in Pompano Beach, Florida, USA, on April 6 to 9, 2006.