Namco’s first video game has wide-ranging influence across the scene, including with the team at Nintendo who will eventually produce the Famicom in Japan a few years later. The game creates quite a crazed sensation inside Namco during its development, and once released Galaxian continues to be a stupendous hit in the arcades, with Namco selling 350,000 units in Japan, the game following the trend of Space Invaders by having entire arcades full of just the one title.

The Galaxian team instead pioneers the use of graphic ‘sprites’ in arcade games, allowing them to create individual objects on the screen whose coordinates can be shifted around, requiring much less overhead for the brains of the system. This entails having the CPU keep track of the entire screen in order to have images appear to move around. It is achieved by Takundai and Nagumo eschewing the method of drawing graphics on the screen previously done in games like Space Invaders, called bitmapping.

This furious action of having multiple enemies moving quickly around the screen is probably the more important technical innovation in Galaxian over its use of colour. They actually leave formation and swoop down the screen after you, dropping bombs all the way. As in Invaders, Galaxian has players controlling a ship left and right along the bottom of the screen and firing at lines of aliens above, but this time the enemy is no sitting duck. They design an arcade game that pushes the use of full RGB colour in arcade games, as opposed to being merely replicated with the use of coloured overlays on the screen, al la Space Invaders.

In 1979 engineers throughout the company are teamed together to create the company’s first internally designed videogame, including the planner of the game, Kazunori Sawano, assisted by Akira Takundai and Hurashi Nagumo. The company name is changed to Namco in 1972, and they establish a videogame presence with the purchase of the Japanese subsidiary of Atari Inc. In 1966 they begin licensing Disney characters for their rides. In 1955, Nakamura Manufacturing Company of Tokyo, Japan is founded by Masaya Nakamura as an installer and operator of merry-go-rounds perched atop a department store in Yokohama.

Galaxian arcade game sprite