Namco’s history—especially in their era of arcade dominance—is full of zigs and zags. Invent or refine a genre and create a popular, pivotal, and influential game in the process? Time to make a sequel that is in a different genre, and plays differently, and maybe isn’t nearly as popular or successful, but that’s still a total flex—of Namco’s creativity, of their commitment to providing new and different experiences, of avoiding just doing the same thing again and again.
Galaxian was Namco’s answer to Taito’s Space Invaders, one of the most important (and successful) games in the history of the video variety. This fixed shooter, released in 1979, would prove to be popular as well, and while not as successful as Space Invaders it had plenty to offer on its own, especially on the technical side. Galaxian had multi-colored sprites—hey, stop giggling, Space Invaders originally had black-and-white graphics just one year before—as well as a scrolling, starry background. It would be followed by Galaga in 1981, which remained a fixed shooter but otherwise was the major separation from Space Invaders that Namco had been looking for with Galaxian, thanks to new mechanics like the ability to control dual fighters following a ship capture and rescue, further improved hardware and graphical tech, and its deceptively deep scoring system which rewarded familiarity with the gameplay loop and patience as much as it did skill.
Galaga would get its own sequels—Gaplus and Galaga ‘88 were still under the umbrella of Galaxian, but clearly inspired more by the significantly more popular and successful second game in the series—leaving the Galaxian-specific part of the series comparatively behind. Namco would eventually have big plans for that name once more, however, for something significantly different than the Galaga portion of this little universe they were building. And that was Galaxian3.
Galaxian3: Project Dragoon is an arcade game, yes, but not in the same way that Galaxian and Galaga were. Galaxian3 was built as a theme park attraction for Expo ‘90—the International Garden and Greenery Exposition—in Japan. It was designed to be played by 28 simultaneous players, which resulted in an attraction so large that it required its own building. Namco didn’t want to just make an innovative videogame: they wanted to make one that no one else would be able to replicate.
It had 28 seats, it had hydraulics to move the whole thing and make it feel like you were actually piloting a ship during battles in space, it had theater screens… as Shigeki Toyama, Galaxian3’s designer, said in a 2011 interview with STG Gameside, it basically cut Namco’s overall productivity down because the project was so massive. “That’s why we only released half the number of games that year. Galaxian3 wasn’t very profitable, but it was a huge accomplishment.”
A non-insignificant part of the work wasn’t just in building this massive, moving machine, but in the software itself. Galaxian3 wasn’t sprite-based, and it wasn’t a fixed shooter. It was an on-rails, true 3D space combat experience. Namco was using polygons in Galaxian3, all the way back in 1990, and while they might not have been textured polygons, the level of detail included in these polygons, which were rendered in real-time, was still incredible. Consider that Star Fox on the SNES was a major accomplishment of its day, and one that required the Super FX chip to work even as well as it did, with all its slowdown and very visibly geometric 3D shapes flying around the screen. Consider, too, that titles like Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM were, like the faux-3D arcade games of the 1980s, not actually 3D, but more a programming and visual trick than the real thing. Galaxian3 was powered by arcade hardware—the System21 board that was behind other early polygonal, true 3D arcade games like Namco’s 1988 hit, Winning Run—and was light years ahead of what was to come on the console and computer side in the next couple of years. At least, until the era of 32-bit hardware and textured polygons, within which Namco was able to blow away most of the competition thanks to their already extensive 3D experience in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
All of this work for something that would be part of Expo ‘90 for six months—all of this work just to do it, because it could be done. Namco would scale Galaxian3 down into a 16-player version in 1991, which used faster 3D hardware and pre-rendered CGI backgrounds stored on LaserDiscs, and then in 1992, the smallest arcade version meant for broader access, was developed. This one was for six players, and instead of a building, it was a room. A room with a theater screen that, again, was for six players, but still small in comparison to what came before.
While this version of Galaxian3 was sold worldwide, it was still a massive “cabinet” that wasn’t going to fit in any old arcade. It also required significant upkeep, given how much went into just making this thing run as expected. Outside of how difficult it is to keep something like this up and running in a vacuum, there was also the issue with conversion kits: many Galaxian3 theaters (such as at Dave & Buster’s locations) were converted to Air Raid from Tsunami Visual Technologies in the early 2000s, instead. When those switched to Air Raid, unless the Galaxian3-specific portions were stored somewhere, the hardware (and software) was lost.
Phillip Bennett has published information on and photos of all of those innards and components of the six-person Galaxian3 game, and for more reasons than just because it’s neat. Bennett and a team of volunteers took it upon themselves to repair the lone Galaxian3 theater left in North America—and one of four just known remaining theaters of its type in the world, with another in Europe and other two in Japan—located at Fun World in Nashua, New Hampshire. It was not a simple process, and, even at this point, there are still some issues to iron out, mainly with the audio, as portions of it can cut out. Still: the game was non-operational, living under a tarp, and this team of volunteers both got it operational again and took the time to preserve what was preservable, such as what was stored on the LaserDiscs. Even if the theater itself was somehow unsalvageable, it would have been a victory to ensure that the game could live on in some form, rather than to be discarded like happened when Air Raid came to town over two decades ago.
It is operational, though, and I know this firsthand. Nashua isn’t that far, relatively speaking, from where I live these days, and Fun World is somewhere I used to frequent in my youth. A pretty good Tuesday in the early aughts in my neck of the New England woods was driving to the Nashua Papa Gino’s for $5 all-you-can-eat pizza—the manager there told his employees to just keep making our group of four-to-eight teen boys whole pizzas and bringing them to the table until we were done eating, rather than go by the rule of two slices to start, then wait for one slice at a time from there on out—and then heading to Fun World to play some arcade games, or watch your friends who were better and more committed to Dance Dance Revolution than you ever could or would be kick that game’s ass. So, in the present, I told my family that I had a plan, one that would require them to play an exceptionally rare game with me a few times after a bit of a drive and go see a place I used to hang out at when I was a kid, and they were all-in. (Once I promised the children that there were other arcade games to play, as well, and that they could try to trade in tickets for prizes, too, anyway.)
Now, the version of Galaxian3 at Fun World is not the original: it’s a conversion kit for a sequel, Attack of the Zolgear. The good news is that said original, the Project Dragoon version of the game, was not lost. And Bennett’s team was able to preserve those LaserDiscs as well as Zolgear’s, but this conversion did mean that I was only able to experience one version of Galaxian3.
Have you ever played Namco’s Starblade? That arcade game (also released for the 3DO, Sega CD, and PlayStation) was actually built off of a prototype for Galaxian3, and that’s being mentioned here to give you an idea of what the latter’s whole deal is. Rather than a “normal” arcade experience like Starblade, however, this on-rails shooter is built for up to six players, on a much larger screen. Still, it’s heavily based on being vastly outnumbered, on taking down as many enemies as you can while also defending yourself against incoming missiles, on hitting the weak points of bosses as quickly and as accurately as possible to preserve your shields and extend your run. Galaxian3 is tough, and since the number of enemies and the strength of the bosses scales up based on how many players you have, it’s not like inviting pals makes the game any easier. Not unless you can reliably ask them to focus entirely on incoming projectiles and oh, don’t miss the flashing weak points of the bosses, either.
You sit at one of six numbered turrets spread across the theater, which doesn’t change or limit the range of your shots by any means, but it does assign you one of six colors so you can know which of the reticules moving around on screen is yours. After you finish a mission, you get a choice of paths, Darius-style. The first and last missions are predetermined, but you get to choose path A or B for the second and third. There are six vertically oriented screens lined up, and again, these aren’t assigned to the turrets, but are just to display what is an enormous game all at once.
The game begins with a dramatic cinematic showing ships heading out into space, in the middle of what turns out to be an in-progress battle with Zolgear’s forces. Zolgear is a multi-headed space dragon (of course, why wouldn’t you be fighting one of those?) and you are very obviously overmatched. This will not be a game you’re completing on the first credit the first time, as the sheer volume of enemies showing up on screen, and the missiles they fire at you—and how much damage you take when you are hit—lets you know in a hurry.
Here’s a three-player run—myself, and my two kids, ages 8 and not-quite-6—that falters in Sequence A of the second stage. That boss moves fast:
Those backgrounds are pre-rendered CGI coming from the LaserDisc, but everything else is polygons. The sound isn’t working as it should the entire time—and is even tougher to hear in the video than in the theater itself—but there’s a combination of voiceover work from various officers in the United Galaxy Space Force, explosions, weapons fire, and the buzzing around of all of these bug-based alien foes. Sure, it might not seem like much graphically now in the world of 4K resolutions, but true 3D gaming wasn’t common at this point. Just eight years before the first iteration of Galaxian3, Namco produced the faux-3D “chase cam” racing game, Pole Position, which rightfully stands as one of the most influential titles in industry history thanks to how ahead of the curve it was at the time. Months before Pole Position was Galaga, which, again: fixed shooter, where everyone was excited about how comparatively bright and colorful it was when put up next to its genre competition. Namco truly went to some places in those eight-plus years to draw a direct line between Galaga and Galaxian3, in all of its untextured, polygonal glory.
Not only did Namco produce this version of Galaxian3 for arcades as well as its sequel, Attack of the Zolgear, but there was also a four-player PlayStation port of Project Dragoon—not nearly as enjoyable or groundbreaking as the “real” thing, no, but it at least can be played in the present—as well as the aforementioned single-player Starblade, which wasbuilt with similar tech (on the software side, anyway). They also made a 3D Xevious spin-off, Solvalou. Unlike Starblade, this one stayed in arcades, and used polygonal backgrounds on a planet instead of flying over one through space, so it has more of a Virtua Racing visual style with its untextured polygons rather than the detailed pre-rendered backgrounds of Galaxian3 to “hide” just where the 3D tech was at that moment in time. Starblade ended up being a huge influence on Nintendo and Argonaut Software with Star Fox on the SNES, as well as helping to usher in the age of the on-rail 3D shooter on home consoles—pretty good legacy for a prototype spun out of Galaxian3, huh?
And as implied earlier, all of this experimentation with 3D and polygons in the arcades in an era that was still very much about 2D prepared Namco for what was to come. Namely, the era of the PlayStation, which Namco’s own games—such as Ridge Racer, Tekken, Ace Combat, all running on arcade hardware similar to the PlayStation’s own—helped propel to the unrivaled dominance it enjoyed over the competition of its era.
Legacy talk aside, though, let’s not forget that Galaxian3 is playable right now. It’s maybe not working at 100 percent given the audio issues, and it’s unclear how long the fixes Bennett’s team made will last for, too. (Seriously, read that whole piece to see what went into getting it working again) Meaning, if you’ve got the chance, you should get out there and try to play Galaxian3 yourself. Maybe don’t schedule a cross country trip or anything at this juncture, given the questions about how well it’s working and for how long, but if you’re somewhere in the area, close enough to justify a 90-minute drive knowing you could have a good time at Fun World even if Galaxian3 wasn’t working? You should get yourself to Nashua while the option is even there, because who knows how long that’ll be the case.
Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.
