Galaxian

It's easy to tell at a glance what kind of influence Space Invaders had on Galaxian, as it's clearly built to a similar template. Big block-shaped formation of aliens at the top, single player ship at the bottom, you can only move left and right and fire one bullet at a time.

At the same time, it doesn't take long to see all the ways it's a leap forward from Taito's shmup milestone. The graphics are rendered in eye-catching full-color sprites whereas the previous year's Space Invaders (and earlier arcade titles like Breakout and Super Breakout) used a monochrome screen with strips of colored cellophane over parts of the screen to tint those areas a different color. Aside from making for a more vibrant overall visual impression than rows of white sprites with the occasional red or green, this allows for much more detail within individual sprite designs. Notably, whenever you see merchandise or cultural products reference Space Invaders, they tend to lean heavily on the more bug-like enemy ship, as it's not only the most iconic of the four enemy designs, but in my opinion the single strongest piece of sprite art in the game, and the only one that really leaves much impression. In Galaxian, every sprite is operating at that level; fly-like enemies with flapping wings in two different colors, green and purple, red ones with white accents near the top, and yellow-and-orange bee-like commander units on the very top row, obviously the most important at even the briefest glance. Likewise the player ship is much more defined and memorable, with easily recognizable engines and a nosecones where the Space Invaders player sprite is little more than a box with a turret protruding from it. Every time a ship blows up it produces a thrilling yellow and red explosion, and even the background, previously a flat black void, has had a colorful scrolling star field added to it.

This added visual affordance is put to excellent use in the gameplay, as well. Rather than slowly working their way down the screen, zig zagging left and right, the block formation stays at the top of the screen and instead sends down a steady stream of individual units to dive-bomb the player, flying down the screen and raining weapons fire. They swoop dynamically down the screen in strafing runs, attempting to avoid the player's line of fire, and upon leaving the edge of the display either at the bottom (upon completing the run) or either of the sides (if you pursue them aggressively enough to push them off the edge), will reappear at the top and return to their position in the formation. This would look really weird on a monochrome monitor, the attacking unit would visibly and obviously change colors as it passes under the various cellophane strips in a way that wouldn't make diagetic sense and would be distracting. On a full-color monitor, it looks great.

The added detail pays dividends in conveyance, too; both Space Invaders and Galaxian only allow the player to have one bullet on screen at a time, after you fire you have to wait for the bullet to either hit something or leave the screen before you can shoot again. In Space Invaders, you just have to keep track of where your previous bullet is in order to know if you can shoot again, or just get the feel for how long it takes. Galaxian on the other hand gives you a ship with a red nose cone that fires a yellow rod off the front, which reappears on your sprite only when it's ready to fire again. Of course, you don't want to spend too long leaning on this, you'll definitely be better served in the long run by just getting a sense for how long it takes for it to come back, but having the visual indicator does a lot for onboarding and greatly speeds up the rate at which a new player learns how the game works.

Which is much appreciated, because there's way more to chew on this time around! Space Invaders just kind of goes on until you run out of lives without a lot of variation, and it's certainly fun while it lasts, but also fairly flat. You can optimize to a degree, but the limit of that optimization is just finding strategies to avoid death in the face of extremely limited enemy behavior.

Galaxian introduces a fairly small but deeply impactful wrinkle: when you get enough points, you can get an extra life, and different behaviors will affect not only how long you live, but how many points you get. Various ship types not only behave differently, but are worth different amounts of points, most notably the gold ships which attack with an entourage of two red ships and are worth a different amount of points based on how many of the red ones you get before hitting the gold one. The best thing you can do is hit both red ships and then the gold one in a single run, but the timing is tight, you need to hit a tricky lead shot just as they exit the formation and then two more quick twitch ones as they're diving straight at you. It's worth it, though, you get an 800 point bonus, which in a game that doles out a 1up at 7000 is pretty impactful. It's a high-risk, high-reward, high-precision maneuver and it feels great every time.

Not only is this a thrilling goal to strive for in its own right, it's the beginning of a whole genealogy of arcade shmups with increasingly complex and multilayered scoring systems, and right off the bat it's extremely endearing. Experimenting around with how many points you get for different behaviors and figuring out what's optimal is simply a deeply satisfying play experience, even in this minimal example, and it's easy to see why it came to define the genre.

I can't recommend Galaxian enough, it's both a palpable leap in technology and game design compared with its predecessors, and a gripping game in its own right, which, almost 50 years later, has undeniably stood the test of time.