This game was so perfect. One thing I miss about this era was the cacophony of various games as you walked into the arcade. All those machines blaring their sinusoidal siren songs at once. The audio design of Galaga was extraordinary and a huge part of its charm in my opinion, but to truly experience it, you really need to be standing at the machine, fully bathed in it, with a backing chorus of all the other machines chirping and crooning their tunes.
The mechanic where you have to potentially sacrifice one of your lives by letting it be captured so that you can try and get it back later for double firing is a stroke of genius. It’s the perfect balance of risk and reward to make things exciting.
If your in the US there are a surprising number of arcades around that are loaded with the classic games. Just Google and you’ll find them. If you are willing to travel then probably the best two are https://www.gallopingghostarcade.com/ (Illinois), https://www.classicarcademuseum.org/ (New Hampshire). There is very little parking at Galloping Ghost, suggest you take Lyft to get there. Plan to spend the day for either.
If your into pinball then https://roanokepinball.org/ (Virginia) Limited paid parking, take Lyft to get there. You can play everything in 4-6 hours.
All three are free-play, pay per head for admission, ok to leave and come back same day.
My arcade back in the '80s was in the mall (which has long since died) and only a few stores down from the Marines recruiter, so they were always popping in.
There are at least 3 of these in my city and unfortunately all of them kinda suck for one reason or another.
Two of them are basically just noisy f'ing bars with a lot of arcade machines you have to pay for and the third, which operates as per your description, has a lot of slightly-broken cabs and uses emulation for several of them.
But what's worse is that when you don't have to pay for it, it turns out most arcade games really suck.
But what's worse is that when you don't have to
pay for it, it turns out most arcade games really suck.
One disconnect, perhaps, is that early 1980s games tended to really be designed to be played for score rather than just "stay alive as long as you can"
Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in particular have absolutely sublime risk vs. reward scoring mechanics. They're deadly boring IMO if you simply try and stay alive as long as you can, but if you play for score it gets interesting.
This isn't true for every game, and by the mid to late 80s games had fully transitioned into "stay alive as long as possible" quarter munchers.
One thing I really enjoy, as someone born in the late 80s and missing out on the arcade scene entirely, is experiencing the old games that I've heard so much about. I always try to hit up the local classic arcade whenever I'm out of town. It's fun to search for an arcade that finally has that game I've been hunting down to experience. For example just a month ago, I went to an arcade here in the Twin Cities for the first time, and they had both a Super Breakout (1976) and an Asteroids (1979). I've always heard about how eye-piercingly bright the weapons fire in Asteroids is, but never got to experience the real vector graphics machine until just last month. It was a treat! And Breakout has this huge, physical knob that you use to change game modes -- kchunk, kchunk. Great stuff, very memorable.
One day I'd really like to experience an original Pong :) But I think they're quite rare these days.
The shine does wear off if you keep hitting the same arcade, for sure. But it's fun to explore new ones in other cities, or new ones as they pop up in your hometown. And it's always great to bring along a friend who is new to the scene and show them the sights.
I've always heard about how eye-piercingly
bright the weapons fire in Asteroids is
Yeah! And the glowing phosphor trail! It just can't be described. And it really is a treat to be enjoyed while it lasts. Those machines (specifically the monitors) are all slowly dying and they ain't making any more of them.
Every time someone asks how's possible Twitch got so popular (or watching recorded videogames play on YT), I tell people how being in an arcade as a child in the '80s / '90s was.
I got good enough at playing Xevious that I could (i) play for 30 minutes+ on a quarter and (ii) people would give me the quarter to watch a good player play.
Those old arcade games almost always had a boomy, bassy sound that made explosions in particular sound amazing.
Emulators rarely capture this. My sense is that they more or less perfectly recreate the sound being output by the sound chips. But they are (understandably) not recreating the physical speaker drivers in the cabinets or other analog filtering steps (if any)
A retro arcade near me has all kinds of old machines on and running (and in freeplay mode!) and it is wonderful. Indeed it is an important part of the magic
I grew up in Lacey Washington, and our local arcade "Star Base One" was a wonderful place, with lots of video games, pinball machines, foosball and pool tables. There was a magical moment when the arcade first opened, when the attendant flipped the breaker and all the machines turned on at once. There was an explosion of light and sound as the machines sprung to life and started blasting their siren songs. I was often the kid waiting outside of the arcade for it to open, so I got to witness it a number of times, and it was always memorable.
I've gotten hundreds of emails since that post in 2012 with people who knew about the cheat in 1982, citing specific events that could not have been misconstrued.
Of course, I haven't revised the blog post to add all of them, but the one that I probably should have added was one person who noted that their mall got their first arcade the month before Christmas in 1982 and he visited it several times a week. Just after Christmas, they imported a Galaga game - and the same day they got it, the owner of the arcade told the patrons about the cheat as a sales feature (even made up a hand drawn sign of how it worked).
Perhaps it was clever marketing on the part of Midway and Namco.
The fad must have passed quickly and the trick been lost in the pre-Internet era. By 1990-2000, I don't think players knew about it anymore, and Galaga was far less popular.
In 1990 I had a classmate who would bore the hell out of us by demo strating his ability to get ridiculously high scores in galaga. He surely was using the cheat. He was the sort who wouldn't say that he was cheating.
I think I learned of the trick from the magazine blurb mentioned in TFA. If you didn't happen to read that specific page in that specific magazine in the few days it was on the newsstand, you would've had to find out via word of mouth/watching someone do the trick in person.
Most arcades didn't have the space to keep games around forever. Games that didn't bring in the quarters got replaced by newer, shinier, flashier games.
By the mid-80s, you'd be lucky to find one Galaga machine in most arcades.
So if an older friend mentioned the trick or you happened to read that specific issue of Joystik magazine in the library, you'd have a hard time even finding a Galaga machine to try the trick.
By the late 80s, ever more expensive arcade games lost their novelty and home entertainment (game consoles/rentable VHS movies) got good enough so overcoming the inertia of staying in the comfort of your home/sofa was too great.
The convenience stores/random stores got rid of their one or two standup arcade machines, then the smaller arcades closed down.
It sounds both somewhat difficult (the typical galaga player doesn't exactly aim carefully) and extremely tedious, both for players and for spectators. It reminds me a bit of the (possibly apocryphal) story that casinos promote tales of card counters cleaning up because the average attempted card counter doesn't know what he's doing, and will gamble more (and lose more) than someone who knows he's playing a game where the odds are against him.
On the difficulty scale, I'd say it was about 4-5 (on a 1-10 scale, 10=hardest).
Tedious, yes. You wouldn't want to do this trick in arcade primetime (Sat aft-night). As long as there wasn't a crowd waiting to play the game, I felt no remorse in using the trick. I also played mostly on a tabletop version of Galaga so I just sat for a mostly boring 10-15mins instead of having to stand / lean on the game for the same amount of time.
The goal was to get a double-ship by the time you did the trick.
The double-ship made playing the game after the aliens stopped shooting at you much easier since you had double the firepower.
The problem was that the double-ship also doubled your vulnerable attack surface to the remaining aliens.
The remaining aliens would also use attack patterns (diagonal from right to left towards the bottom left corner, almost horizontal, instead of mostly vertical) which increased the chance of crashing into you and ruining your chance at achieving the trick.
You didn't want to kill the two remaining aliens (which would have wasted all the time you spent avoiding the aliens), but you also didn't want to die.
You couldn't take a bathroom break either - there was no safe space to position your ship and avoid the aliens/their shots.
It wasn't a difficult trick to perform. Failed the first few times I tried it, but once you got the hang of avoiding the aliens at that point, success rate was more than 75%.
> Considering that this cheat is very obscure, it is unlikely something that was discovered by chance.
> However, if the cheat was widely known shortly after the game’s release, then it is very very likely that it was a planned cheat by someone at Namco
The article even mentions that a developer might have seen the bug through code analysis, but then reverts to "random chance or intention". Neither is completely impossible, but intentionally planting a backdoor by building what is close to a buffer overflow, without causing the game to crash? That's highly unlikely, IMHO.
I'm not even yet convinced of the "highscore theory". My best guess: The developer spotted the bug while proofreading the code, found it to be non-fatal but a bug nonetheless, and then a decision was made (by devs or management) to leave it in there because it's hard to trigger and non-fatal and the deadline was close. The highscore thing may have come as an afterthought, assuming it is even true.
But an adult wouldn’t stand and watch his screen for 10 minutes either and put the pieces together.
A kid might. They might also think he’s dumb and just goofing off. Kids also might find it themselves because they’ll do weird stuff in games, imagining situations in the game world, like sparing a character and giving them a chance at redemption or something.
A lot of speedrunning tricks are found by kids with a lot of time to just goof off and do seemingly pointless stuff in games.
> A lot of speedrunning tricks are found by kids with a lot of time to just goof off and do seemingly pointless stuff in games.
Most of those seemingly pointless stuff is done very intentionally.. one of the oldest tricks is to go "too fast" through a thin "wall", so you skip over it... and trying to squeeze between two polygons.
The rest is mostly seeing weird bugs and trying to recreate them in a way that helps the played... with the spread of streaming (by getting noticed and can be recrated after), this has gotten easier in years (and it's not just "i have no idea what I did, but i swear I went over that wall, and I didn't have a camera to take a literal screen shot").
As a former gamedev, I think the author lacks imagination for the monotony, depravity, and sheer volume of player effort.
The most likely discoverer is some kids, more interested with wasting time than getting high scores, seeing who can survive the longest on a single quarter. Or maybe they wanted to troll others and hog a machine as long as possible.
I suppose it could be a bug found during development/QA, deemed not worth fixing, and then leaked by those with knowledge showing off, followed by viral spread. But just typing this out it sounds more complicated than kids being kids.
I would bet money that it is not a clever developer sneaking a cheat or Easter egg into the game.
This. I was 12 when this game came out and bottom-line any time you could stretch out your game on a coin-op, there was incentive to do so. Really the only competing incentive was to get a free man, so you could also increase your score, but if you were down to your last couple of quarters then this or something like the pattern where you leave the last little rocks in Asteroids while fighting ships, was something to do.
The only flaw I can find in this is that I would have expected the person finding this out to have left just one enemy on screen, not two. They're much not dangerous in pairs, in my experience on Galaga...
This reminds me that one of the tricks I used to use to identify which difficulty jumper the game was set to was to leave exactly 1 mothership on the first board. If it would try to capture your fighter after a few sweeps through, you knew it was on the easy jumper setting.
I don't see how that could have been accidentally discovered. It is so esoteric and time consuming, that even if someone owned an arcade and could set the machine to free play, what kind of thought process from historical hacks prior to 1982 would have inspired that kind of a search space? Much like easter eggs in early Microsoft Office products from ca. 1990, I can't imagine. Like maybe trying to run down a shot counter might have been on the agenda, but those two specific aliens just cinch it for me. Now, as to whether it is a bug or not.
Looking at the forensics of the original ROM at the provided URL[0], the fix is nontrivial. It looks like a bug, IMHO. But if it is a bug, who stumbled upon it? I would think that if the author put that in there to get the high score all the time, it certainly is obfuscated enough, but he would run the risk of being discovered. Perhaps the cheat is obfuscated in order to sneak it through code review and not be fired by Namco?
What really supports the bug theory is that the flight pattern of the far left bees has to be altered to account for their location on the screen. This REALLY feels like a bug, because when I'm trying to alter a corner case in code, I can rarely see the second-order consequences without code coverage/fuzzing. This is a total code smell IMHO.
But again, how would someone even exploit this flaw without the ROM. Which leads me back to the intentional cheat by the programmer.
I'm legit ambivalent about this. But if I was pushed, I'd have to say it was an intentional cheat slipped into the code, because programmers were just too good back then.
I completely disagree; it's easy to imagine someone in the first few days of the game's availability deciding for fun that instead of beating the first level, they were going to see how long they could keep it going. At that point, the natural thing to do is kill all but one enemy, and eventually it would stop shooting, which would be very attention-grabbing.
Then of course word would spread and investigations would begin as to how to reproduce and optimize the phenomenon.
Like the movie ready player one. No one went backwards in that race? This was written by people who do not game but know the flash of it. Watch any of the thousands of vids on youtube of people doing crazy things in speed runs and you will see different.
This is something I like to bring up to programmers/designers in context of application security. And that is any assumptions on how the user is going to use said program you come up with will be broken. If you say "No one will do ______" you will likely be incorrect.
The ** is code review? Most places didn't even have version control. Version control in most game development studios was "let me copy my source files on to another 5+1/4 floppy just in case disaster happens."
If lucky to have access to a mini computer with a hard drive then you kept separate directories for backups of your code. And you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because your backups were taking up more than 500KB of drive space. Maybe you got SCCS that would happily destroy your work regularly if you breathed wrong. If your company was rich it had a fully paid up copy of RCS runing on the Perkin-Elmer mini computer with 1MB of RAM and a 200MB HDD hooked up to a data station that looked like it was stolen off the set of Silent Running along with a 32kbps serial cable to your ICE box plugged in to the arcade board. And you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because now your RCS directory was bigger than your backup directory. And then inevitably someone wasn't paying attention one day and did an 'rm -rf *' on the wrong directory and the version control repository for your project got erased.
Code merging on non-UNIX development was usually "give me your floppy and I'll re-type bits of code you changed in that text file into my text file and then I'll give you back a fresh copy of the file to work with." If you were both smart about it, you worked in separate files and just had one or two common files that you played hot potato with, which was the fashion back in the day. Or you had a nifty little tool that would concatenate all the files together and then deleted duplicate lines and kept only the last version of changed lines because we believed we were too manly to use real development tools but the real reason was the company was too tight fisted to pay for them. "Hard drives are for the weak and why do you programmers need the high quality DS/DD floppies from Fujitsu anyway!?! Look, I've got this little gadget I bought for you that'll punch a notch in the other corner so you can just flip the disc over and use the other side too."
> and not be fired by Namco?
Nobody would have gotten fired over that even if they had purposely put it in there. The QA team would have found it, severity would have been decided, and it would have probably be pushed to "eh, there's not enough bytes in the ROM to patch it, it doesn't crash the machine and we've just burned enough PROMs on the gang programmer that the cost of pulling the PROMs off of arcade boards, junking a few thousand ICs and doing over is too great." It is almost certain that someone on the QA team found the bug, wrote it up, it was discussed, and then WNF'd, and then a little later on, news about it leaked out.
This also assumes of course they had a QA team and it wasn't just Bob who took a smoke break between running his bare hand over the live wiring looms feeling for shorts and exposed wiring to kill a few burbling aliens.
That's an interesting historical perspective of a code review from 50 years ago. Especially where you state that the Q&A team would review the code and decide to patch it or not. Did I used the wrong term from the 21st century? Clearly I was hypothesizing. I'm disappointed you couldn't just inform us without being so snarky.
One man's snark is another man's war story. There was no code review because video game development, and arcade video game development was the epitome of the Wild West and the lone cowboys who had late night coding sessions trying to figuring out how to shave 173 bytes from the build by changing JMP absolute (three bytes) to BEQ/BNE relative (two bytes) without suffering a page boundary cycle penalty so they could squeeze the game into two 8K PROMs instead of two 16KB PROMs. The primary concern in arcade game development was "does this bug make the game crash or visually glitch?" and "will the player get free time?" and if the answer was "no" to both of those, the bug was relegated to WNF (will not fix). QA in most companies really was Bob on the assembly line who put little dayglo stickers on the inside and wrote his initials under below the line that read "Q.C."
This is why I'm glad to see the old guard boy's club fading into a memory, despite the loss of skills that we may never see again as a culture. It's a mixed blessing.
The "old guard boy's club" has been around a long time, and is still around. The gatekeeping/exclusionary mindset cannot die off fast enough as far as I am concerned. Unfortunately, it won't. Where ever nerds of a culture gather, there you will find them. The old guard. Arms crossed. Legs akimbo. Judging you not worthy. Thinking they are cleverer than you because they read some obscure fact on a usenet group.
It's quite different incentive when you play for free - why waste your time dodging shots when you can fight but if you were playing in an arcade, some players might try and prolong the experience and enjoy the challenge of evading shots.
This brings back a lot of memories. My part time job in high school during the early 80s had me working as video arcade attendant on evenings and weekends. Unfortunately, for the arcae manager, he had not properly done the research into traffic flows and how to actually make an arcade fun to visit - So, much to his chagrin, the patronage to this arcade was pretty low.
However, this was great for me, as I had the keys to the games and could load up free credits on them to my heart's content before or after hours. We had Defender, Pac-man, Centipede, Galaga, and 8-10 others which, because traffic was so low, the manager encouraged that I play so people might be enticed to come in. Eventually, I noticed that one of the few regulars, a kid around 12 years old, had the ability to play of Galaga just to the point he would roll the high-score counter on a single quarter. Then he'd move over to Pac-Man and do the same.
Curious, I asked him to show me how he did it in exchange for free credits on the other machines. He demonstrated that there was a pattern on Galaga that, if you followed precisely, would allow you to cruise through each level. The first key step, of course, would be get your ship captured so that you could free it and double your firepower.
He also demonstrated that there was also a pattern on PacMan, and again, if you followed the pattern precisely, it would also allow you to cruise through each level, while maximizing points.
Over the course of a few days, I committed the patterns to memory. Then, with this new-found skill, I was able to go to other arcades around town and obtain the high score. (At that point in my life it was the absolute best feeling to see every line High Scores Screen filled with my initials).
Shortly afterwards, the arcade where I worked closed (I can tell you it was a sad day for me when the truck came to pick up all the games as I was hoping to buy one on the cheap). I then found a new job, which involved a lot of physical activity, which caused me to lose a bunch of weight, which suddenly made girls show an interest in me, which then made video games much less attractive to me... and so, I forgot the pattern.
(geez, I sound like an old man - I guess soon I'll be yelling at kids to get off my lawn ...)
> UPDATE: Jon (I won’t give you his last name) sent me an email after visiting my post. In it he sent me a link to an October 1983 special edition issue of Joystik Magazine that covers winning strategies for common arcade games of the time. In the TRICKS OF THE TRADE section near the end of the magazine, they cover the Galaga No Fire Cheat beautifully!
Does anyone know more about the Galaga programmer, Tetsu Ogawa? I haven't seen any interviews, or even an idea about whether he might be alive or dead.
Here [1] is an article about the 30th anniversary of the game (from two years ago), very detailed and interesting but unfortunately it doesn't say anything about his later career. :(
It seems crazy that no one knows if it was on purpose and who did it. Everything nowadays is logged in minute detail in git that it would take little time to figure it out. I'm also surprised that the code hasn't been saved somewhere.
A log doesn't clarify whether a bug is intentional or unintentional. See the Apple goto fail security bug. [1] It's not known whether that bug was intentional or a bad programming mistake.
Oof! That's a blast from the past. I learned about this 40 years ago from my favorite book as a kid "How to Win at Video Games - from the editors of Consumer Guide(R)"
Nostalgia! Others have covered it, but I really miss how various cheats or special items seemed to be word of mouth rather than a YouTube video with 5 million views. Usually the word of mouth was pretty vague too, which created more mystery. “There’s a way to do X I’ve seen it” with few further details.
I remember this floating around about Mike Tyson’s Punch Out ways to beat specific fighters easily, and another for Final Fantasy 2 (US) about a special rare drop item on the moon.
Another Galaga mystery, what’s the origin of the “midway fast shoot hack” version, where the fire speed is twice as fast? My Dad loves Galaga, but grew up with that version and gets annoyed with the normal, slower version (mostly because after you’re used to the fast one it feels like the button is just dropping half your inputs on the slow one).
As far as I know, the game is otherwise unchanged apart from the fire speed.
Joystik Magazine was an epic publication. I remember visiting the local newsagent (Australia) every week to see if a copy had arrived and the feeling of glee seeing a new cover. The screenshots, layouts, fonts - all so unique at the time. Pretty sure I still have them lying around in storage somewhere and they’re probably also available on eBay - somehow a PDF just doesn’t do it justice.
I remember discovering that if you let the demo screen progress to where your ship is captured, you can then control the new ship! You basically got 20-30s of free Galaga haha. The catch was the demo still tried to run, so it would yank you around some while you tried to play.
That one was fun but sometimes would crash the machine and it'd have to be power cycled to go back into service. The bug is still in the Galaga/Ms. Pac Man combo cabinet but it actually does reboot on its own instead of locking up the machine. Think that's also true for the 20-in-1 cabinet one of my friends owns.
This game was so perfect. One thing I miss about this era was the cacophony of various games as you walked into the arcade. All those machines blaring their sinusoidal siren songs at once. The audio design of Galaga was extraordinary and a huge part of its charm in my opinion, but to truly experience it, you really need to be standing at the machine, fully bathed in it, with a backing chorus of all the other machines chirping and crooning their tunes.
The mechanic where you have to potentially sacrifice one of your lives by letting it be captured so that you can try and get it back later for double firing is a stroke of genius. It’s the perfect balance of risk and reward to make things exciting.
I also miss having a crowd looking at what you do. Some would cheer, others would try and get you killed. Practically grew up at the arcades.
If your in the US there are a surprising number of arcades around that are loaded with the classic games. Just Google and you’ll find them. If you are willing to travel then probably the best two are https://www.gallopingghostarcade.com/ (Illinois), https://www.classicarcademuseum.org/ (New Hampshire). There is very little parking at Galloping Ghost, suggest you take Lyft to get there. Plan to spend the day for either.
If your into pinball then https://roanokepinball.org/ (Virginia) Limited paid parking, take Lyft to get there. You can play everything in 4-6 hours.
All three are free-play, pay per head for admission, ok to leave and come back same day.
Yeah but do they have the sketchy banger guy in acid wash jeans selling hash??
Like I want the fully experience :)
Loved arcades back in the day
My arcade back in the '80s was in the mall (which has long since died) and only a few stores down from the Marines recruiter, so they were always popping in.
There are at least 3 of these in my city and unfortunately all of them kinda suck for one reason or another.
Two of them are basically just noisy f'ing bars with a lot of arcade machines you have to pay for and the third, which operates as per your description, has a lot of slightly-broken cabs and uses emulation for several of them.
But what's worse is that when you don't have to pay for it, it turns out most arcade games really suck.
Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in particular have absolutely sublime risk vs. reward scoring mechanics. They're deadly boring IMO if you simply try and stay alive as long as you can, but if you play for score it gets interesting.
This isn't true for every game, and by the mid to late 80s games had fully transitioned into "stay alive as long as possible" quarter munchers.
That's not an unfair take.
One thing I really enjoy, as someone born in the late 80s and missing out on the arcade scene entirely, is experiencing the old games that I've heard so much about. I always try to hit up the local classic arcade whenever I'm out of town. It's fun to search for an arcade that finally has that game I've been hunting down to experience. For example just a month ago, I went to an arcade here in the Twin Cities for the first time, and they had both a Super Breakout (1976) and an Asteroids (1979). I've always heard about how eye-piercingly bright the weapons fire in Asteroids is, but never got to experience the real vector graphics machine until just last month. It was a treat! And Breakout has this huge, physical knob that you use to change game modes -- kchunk, kchunk. Great stuff, very memorable.
One day I'd really like to experience an original Pong :) But I think they're quite rare these days.
The shine does wear off if you keep hitting the same arcade, for sure. But it's fun to explore new ones in other cities, or new ones as they pop up in your hometown. And it's always great to bring along a friend who is new to the scene and show them the sights.
There's also the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, TX.
Every time someone asks how's possible Twitch got so popular (or watching recorded videogames play on YT), I tell people how being in an arcade as a child in the '80s / '90s was.
I got good enough at playing Xevious that I could (i) play for 30 minutes+ on a quarter and (ii) people would give me the quarter to watch a good player play.
[dead]
Those old arcade games almost always had a boomy, bassy sound that made explosions in particular sound amazing.
Emulators rarely capture this. My sense is that they more or less perfectly recreate the sound being output by the sound chips. But they are (understandably) not recreating the physical speaker drivers in the cabinets or other analog filtering steps (if any)
Emulators could provide audio filters similar to how they provide CRT graphics filters.
Yeah! From a technical perspective, it's relatively trivial. However, I'm not aware of this feature existing in any emulators.
(But it's been years since I really looked into it)
The crt filters are pretty terrible though. None of the good aspects, just raster lines amd saturated colors it seems.
There are some good ones! CRT Royale is pretty decent!
I agree with you: most of them get it badly wrong.
>other machines chirping and crooning their tunes
Except the Sinistar game shouting at you "RUN, COWARD!"
Gorf's "Bad move, space cadet!" was one of my faves.
Or the Centaur pinball game's "Bad move, human!"
"Warrior needs food badly"
"Wizard is about to die"
And the Wizard of Wor's barely understandable taunts.
A retro arcade near me has all kinds of old machines on and running (and in freeplay mode!) and it is wonderful. Indeed it is an important part of the magic
I grew up in Lacey Washington, and our local arcade "Star Base One" was a wonderful place, with lots of video games, pinball machines, foosball and pool tables. There was a magical moment when the arcade first opened, when the attendant flipped the breaker and all the machines turned on at once. There was an explosion of light and sound as the machines sprung to life and started blasting their siren songs. I was often the kid waiting outside of the arcade for it to open, so I got to witness it a number of times, and it was always memorable.
Perhaps you’d enjoy these tracks recreating that: http://arcade.hofle.com/
The video game equivalent of a live show vs. an album.
Galaga also has that nice polyphonic stereo effect that is really cool.
I love when my old blog posts show up on HN :-)
I've gotten hundreds of emails since that post in 2012 with people who knew about the cheat in 1982, citing specific events that could not have been misconstrued.
Of course, I haven't revised the blog post to add all of them, but the one that I probably should have added was one person who noted that their mall got their first arcade the month before Christmas in 1982 and he visited it several times a week. Just after Christmas, they imported a Galaga game - and the same day they got it, the owner of the arcade told the patrons about the cheat as a sales feature (even made up a hand drawn sign of how it worked).
Perhaps it was clever marketing on the part of Midway and Namco.
The fad must have passed quickly and the trick been lost in the pre-Internet era. By 1990-2000, I don't think players knew about it anymore, and Galaga was far less popular.
In 1990 I had a classmate who would bore the hell out of us by demo strating his ability to get ridiculously high scores in galaga. He surely was using the cheat. He was the sort who wouldn't say that he was cheating.
I think I learned of the trick from the magazine blurb mentioned in TFA. If you didn't happen to read that specific page in that specific magazine in the few days it was on the newsstand, you would've had to find out via word of mouth/watching someone do the trick in person.
Most arcades didn't have the space to keep games around forever. Games that didn't bring in the quarters got replaced by newer, shinier, flashier games.
By the mid-80s, you'd be lucky to find one Galaga machine in most arcades.
So if an older friend mentioned the trick or you happened to read that specific issue of Joystik magazine in the library, you'd have a hard time even finding a Galaga machine to try the trick.
By the late 80s, ever more expensive arcade games lost their novelty and home entertainment (game consoles/rentable VHS movies) got good enough so overcoming the inertia of staying in the comfort of your home/sofa was too great.
The convenience stores/random stores got rid of their one or two standup arcade machines, then the smaller arcades closed down.
Maybe it was spread as a rumor to make people play it for longer... Depends on whether it's coin operated by time or how many lives you have though.
It's per lives. Advertising a way to play that would take 3 hours for a quarter is a bad strategy, unless it's harder to pull off than it sounds.
It sounds both somewhat difficult (the typical galaga player doesn't exactly aim carefully) and extremely tedious, both for players and for spectators. It reminds me a bit of the (possibly apocryphal) story that casinos promote tales of card counters cleaning up because the average attempted card counter doesn't know what he's doing, and will gamble more (and lose more) than someone who knows he's playing a game where the odds are against him.
On the difficulty scale, I'd say it was about 4-5 (on a 1-10 scale, 10=hardest).
Tedious, yes. You wouldn't want to do this trick in arcade primetime (Sat aft-night). As long as there wasn't a crowd waiting to play the game, I felt no remorse in using the trick. I also played mostly on a tabletop version of Galaga so I just sat for a mostly boring 10-15mins instead of having to stand / lean on the game for the same amount of time.
The goal was to get a double-ship by the time you did the trick.
The double-ship made playing the game after the aliens stopped shooting at you much easier since you had double the firepower.
The problem was that the double-ship also doubled your vulnerable attack surface to the remaining aliens.
The remaining aliens would also use attack patterns (diagonal from right to left towards the bottom left corner, almost horizontal, instead of mostly vertical) which increased the chance of crashing into you and ruining your chance at achieving the trick.
You didn't want to kill the two remaining aliens (which would have wasted all the time you spent avoiding the aliens), but you also didn't want to die.
You couldn't take a bathroom break either - there was no safe space to position your ship and avoid the aliens/their shots.
It wasn't a difficult trick to perform. Failed the first few times I tried it, but once you got the hang of avoiding the aliens at that point, success rate was more than 75%.
Lives.
It's just a bug: https://www.computerarcheology.com/Arcade/Galaga/
This is linked to, and discussed, in TFA. The primary question being: was the bug intentional or not?
It's not.
> Considering that this cheat is very obscure, it is unlikely something that was discovered by chance.
> However, if the cheat was widely known shortly after the game’s release, then it is very very likely that it was a planned cheat by someone at Namco
The article even mentions that a developer might have seen the bug through code analysis, but then reverts to "random chance or intention". Neither is completely impossible, but intentionally planting a backdoor by building what is close to a buffer overflow, without causing the game to crash? That's highly unlikely, IMHO.
I'm not even yet convinced of the "highscore theory". My best guess: The developer spotted the bug while proofreading the code, found it to be non-fatal but a bug nonetheless, and then a decision was made (by devs or management) to leave it in there because it's hard to trigger and non-fatal and the deadline was close. The highscore thing may have come as an afterthought, assuming it is even true.
The high score theory is quite unlikely, considering that arcade games are quite public.
So anyone watching the player would wonder why he doesn't shoot the last two enemies but just dodges them for 10 minutes.
But an adult wouldn’t stand and watch his screen for 10 minutes either and put the pieces together.
A kid might. They might also think he’s dumb and just goofing off. Kids also might find it themselves because they’ll do weird stuff in games, imagining situations in the game world, like sparing a character and giving them a chance at redemption or something.
A lot of speedrunning tricks are found by kids with a lot of time to just goof off and do seemingly pointless stuff in games.
> A lot of speedrunning tricks are found by kids with a lot of time to just goof off and do seemingly pointless stuff in games.
Most of those seemingly pointless stuff is done very intentionally.. one of the oldest tricks is to go "too fast" through a thin "wall", so you skip over it... and trying to squeeze between two polygons.
The rest is mostly seeing weird bugs and trying to recreate them in a way that helps the played... with the spread of streaming (by getting noticed and can be recrated after), this has gotten easier in years (and it's not just "i have no idea what I did, but i swear I went over that wall, and I didn't have a camera to take a literal screen shot").
Galaga is full of weird bugs, by design!
Lol
I think it was a design flaw that a programmer used as cheat but it wasn't put there as a cheat in the first place.
As a former gamedev, I think the author lacks imagination for the monotony, depravity, and sheer volume of player effort.
The most likely discoverer is some kids, more interested with wasting time than getting high scores, seeing who can survive the longest on a single quarter. Or maybe they wanted to troll others and hog a machine as long as possible.
I suppose it could be a bug found during development/QA, deemed not worth fixing, and then leaked by those with knowledge showing off, followed by viral spread. But just typing this out it sounds more complicated than kids being kids.
I would bet money that it is not a clever developer sneaking a cheat or Easter egg into the game.
This. I was 12 when this game came out and bottom-line any time you could stretch out your game on a coin-op, there was incentive to do so. Really the only competing incentive was to get a free man, so you could also increase your score, but if you were down to your last couple of quarters then this or something like the pattern where you leave the last little rocks in Asteroids while fighting ships, was something to do.
The only flaw I can find in this is that I would have expected the person finding this out to have left just one enemy on screen, not two. They're much not dangerous in pairs, in my experience on Galaga...
This reminds me that one of the tricks I used to use to identify which difficulty jumper the game was set to was to leave exactly 1 mothership on the first board. If it would try to capture your fighter after a few sweeps through, you knew it was on the easy jumper setting.
I don't see how that could have been accidentally discovered. It is so esoteric and time consuming, that even if someone owned an arcade and could set the machine to free play, what kind of thought process from historical hacks prior to 1982 would have inspired that kind of a search space? Much like easter eggs in early Microsoft Office products from ca. 1990, I can't imagine. Like maybe trying to run down a shot counter might have been on the agenda, but those two specific aliens just cinch it for me. Now, as to whether it is a bug or not.
Looking at the forensics of the original ROM at the provided URL[0], the fix is nontrivial. It looks like a bug, IMHO. But if it is a bug, who stumbled upon it? I would think that if the author put that in there to get the high score all the time, it certainly is obfuscated enough, but he would run the risk of being discovered. Perhaps the cheat is obfuscated in order to sneak it through code review and not be fired by Namco?
What really supports the bug theory is that the flight pattern of the far left bees has to be altered to account for their location on the screen. This REALLY feels like a bug, because when I'm trying to alter a corner case in code, I can rarely see the second-order consequences without code coverage/fuzzing. This is a total code smell IMHO.
But again, how would someone even exploit this flaw without the ROM. Which leads me back to the intentional cheat by the programmer.
I'm legit ambivalent about this. But if I was pushed, I'd have to say it was an intentional cheat slipped into the code, because programmers were just too good back then.
TEAM CHEAT FTW.
[0] https://www.computerarcheology.com/Arcade/Galaga/
I completely disagree; it's easy to imagine someone in the first few days of the game's availability deciding for fun that instead of beating the first level, they were going to see how long they could keep it going. At that point, the natural thing to do is kill all but one enemy, and eventually it would stop shooting, which would be very attention-grabbing.
Then of course word would spread and investigations would begin as to how to reproduce and optimize the phenomenon.
I remember books like
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4045527-the-complete-gui...
reccomending that you practice playing games dodging not shooting and seeing how long you can live to build up your skill.
Yup, gamers are gamers is the simplest answer.
I've said that same phrase about so many games and I'm still amazed at people's ability to track these things down.
Like the movie ready player one. No one went backwards in that race? This was written by people who do not game but know the flash of it. Watch any of the thousands of vids on youtube of people doing crazy things in speed runs and you will see different.
Or just to see if they ever "run out of shots"
This is something I like to bring up to programmers/designers in context of application security. And that is any assumptions on how the user is going to use said program you come up with will be broken. If you say "No one will do ______" you will likely be incorrect.
Stopping when there are 2 enemies left is a bit weird. As is picking those 2 specifically.
It works just fine with one; see the link from the post to the technical analysis.
I would be quite surprised to learn that arcade games written in assembler had "code review".
Or Jira tickets.
Sigh...
> sneak it through code review
The ** is code review? Most places didn't even have version control. Version control in most game development studios was "let me copy my source files on to another 5+1/4 floppy just in case disaster happens."
If lucky to have access to a mini computer with a hard drive then you kept separate directories for backups of your code. And you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because your backups were taking up more than 500KB of drive space. Maybe you got SCCS that would happily destroy your work regularly if you breathed wrong. If your company was rich it had a fully paid up copy of RCS runing on the Perkin-Elmer mini computer with 1MB of RAM and a 200MB HDD hooked up to a data station that looked like it was stolen off the set of Silent Running along with a 32kbps serial cable to your ICE box plugged in to the arcade board. And you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because now your RCS directory was bigger than your backup directory. And then inevitably someone wasn't paying attention one day and did an 'rm -rf *' on the wrong directory and the version control repository for your project got erased.
Code merging on non-UNIX development was usually "give me your floppy and I'll re-type bits of code you changed in that text file into my text file and then I'll give you back a fresh copy of the file to work with." If you were both smart about it, you worked in separate files and just had one or two common files that you played hot potato with, which was the fashion back in the day. Or you had a nifty little tool that would concatenate all the files together and then deleted duplicate lines and kept only the last version of changed lines because we believed we were too manly to use real development tools but the real reason was the company was too tight fisted to pay for them. "Hard drives are for the weak and why do you programmers need the high quality DS/DD floppies from Fujitsu anyway!?! Look, I've got this little gadget I bought for you that'll punch a notch in the other corner so you can just flip the disc over and use the other side too."
> and not be fired by Namco?
Nobody would have gotten fired over that even if they had purposely put it in there. The QA team would have found it, severity would have been decided, and it would have probably be pushed to "eh, there's not enough bytes in the ROM to patch it, it doesn't crash the machine and we've just burned enough PROMs on the gang programmer that the cost of pulling the PROMs off of arcade boards, junking a few thousand ICs and doing over is too great." It is almost certain that someone on the QA team found the bug, wrote it up, it was discussed, and then WNF'd, and then a little later on, news about it leaked out.
This also assumes of course they had a QA team and it wasn't just Bob who took a smoke break between running his bare hand over the live wiring looms feeling for shorts and exposed wiring to kill a few burbling aliens.
>you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because your backups were taking up more than 500KB of drive space.
IT becoming upset when the things people need to do to get work done deviates from their IT model?
Some things never change.
I mean, IT was upset because they were in an impossible position....
Developer: I need half a million in equipment.
Management: Here's your stuff.
IT: I need 50k in equipment so we can actually backup/support the new equipment the developer got so we don't lose millions in work.
Management: I'm sorry, we don't have the budget for that.
IT: We'll I'm right screwed, ain't I.
That's an interesting historical perspective of a code review from 50 years ago. Especially where you state that the Q&A team would review the code and decide to patch it or not. Did I used the wrong term from the 21st century? Clearly I was hypothesizing. I'm disappointed you couldn't just inform us without being so snarky.
One man's snark is another man's war story. There was no code review because video game development, and arcade video game development was the epitome of the Wild West and the lone cowboys who had late night coding sessions trying to figuring out how to shave 173 bytes from the build by changing JMP absolute (three bytes) to BEQ/BNE relative (two bytes) without suffering a page boundary cycle penalty so they could squeeze the game into two 8K PROMs instead of two 16KB PROMs. The primary concern in arcade game development was "does this bug make the game crash or visually glitch?" and "will the player get free time?" and if the answer was "no" to both of those, the bug was relegated to WNF (will not fix). QA in most companies really was Bob on the assembly line who put little dayglo stickers on the inside and wrote his initials under below the line that read "Q.C."
> One man's snark is another man's war story.
This is why I'm glad to see the old guard boy's club fading into a memory, despite the loss of skills that we may never see again as a culture. It's a mixed blessing.
The "old guard boy's club" has been around a long time, and is still around. The gatekeeping/exclusionary mindset cannot die off fast enough as far as I am concerned. Unfortunately, it won't. Where ever nerds of a culture gather, there you will find them. The old guard. Arms crossed. Legs akimbo. Judging you not worthy. Thinking they are cleverer than you because they read some obscure fact on a usenet group.
> hooked up to a data station that looked like it was stolen off the set of Silent Running
I'm dying laughing at this, your prose is amazing an so brough me back to my childhood growing up around these nerds ;)
Love it!
It's quite different incentive when you play for free - why waste your time dodging shots when you can fight but if you were playing in an arcade, some players might try and prolong the experience and enjoy the challenge of evading shots.
>why waste your time dodging shots when you can fight but if you were playing in an arcade
A kid pushed his last coin into the slot, 30 minutes until his parents come to collect him; he will prolong this game for as long as he can.
This brings back a lot of memories. My part time job in high school during the early 80s had me working as video arcade attendant on evenings and weekends. Unfortunately, for the arcae manager, he had not properly done the research into traffic flows and how to actually make an arcade fun to visit - So, much to his chagrin, the patronage to this arcade was pretty low.
However, this was great for me, as I had the keys to the games and could load up free credits on them to my heart's content before or after hours. We had Defender, Pac-man, Centipede, Galaga, and 8-10 others which, because traffic was so low, the manager encouraged that I play so people might be enticed to come in. Eventually, I noticed that one of the few regulars, a kid around 12 years old, had the ability to play of Galaga just to the point he would roll the high-score counter on a single quarter. Then he'd move over to Pac-Man and do the same.
Curious, I asked him to show me how he did it in exchange for free credits on the other machines. He demonstrated that there was a pattern on Galaga that, if you followed precisely, would allow you to cruise through each level. The first key step, of course, would be get your ship captured so that you could free it and double your firepower.
He also demonstrated that there was also a pattern on PacMan, and again, if you followed the pattern precisely, it would also allow you to cruise through each level, while maximizing points.
Over the course of a few days, I committed the patterns to memory. Then, with this new-found skill, I was able to go to other arcades around town and obtain the high score. (At that point in my life it was the absolute best feeling to see every line High Scores Screen filled with my initials).
Shortly afterwards, the arcade where I worked closed (I can tell you it was a sad day for me when the truck came to pick up all the games as I was hoping to buy one on the cheap). I then found a new job, which involved a lot of physical activity, which caused me to lose a bunch of weight, which suddenly made girls show an interest in me, which then made video games much less attractive to me... and so, I forgot the pattern.
(geez, I sound like an old man - I guess soon I'll be yelling at kids to get off my lawn ...)
And this is the magazine the article mentions at the bottom update part: https://archive.org/details/joystik_magazine-1983-10/page/n3...
> UPDATE: Jon (I won’t give you his last name) sent me an email after visiting my post. In it he sent me a link to an October 1983 special edition issue of Joystik Magazine that covers winning strategies for common arcade games of the time. In the TRICKS OF THE TRADE section near the end of the magazine, they cover the Galaga No Fire Cheat beautifully!
Page 61, Disarm The Bugs.
Here's the Joystik issue (and page) on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/joystik_magazine-1983-10/page/n4...
Does anyone know more about the Galaga programmer, Tetsu Ogawa? I haven't seen any interviews, or even an idea about whether he might be alive or dead.
Here [1] is an article about the 30th anniversary of the game (from two years ago), very detailed and interesting but unfortunately it doesn't say anything about his later career. :(
[1]: https://shmuplations.com/galaga
After Galaga, he got a job at Toyota in 1984 and worked his way up to CEO.
If one searches for “Toyota CEO Galaga” on Google, this reply is now the top result.
I wonder what fake information will be birthed out of this high pagerank.
Now atdrummond's reply is.
It will fade as recency effect wears off.
It seems crazy that no one knows if it was on purpose and who did it. Everything nowadays is logged in minute detail in git that it would take little time to figure it out. I'm also surprised that the code hasn't been saved somewhere.
A log doesn't clarify whether a bug is intentional or unintentional. See the Apple goto fail security bug. [1] It's not known whether that bug was intentional or a bad programming mistake.
[1] https://blog.codecentric.de/curly-braces
Oof! That's a blast from the past. I learned about this 40 years ago from my favorite book as a kid "How to Win at Video Games - from the editors of Consumer Guide(R)"
https://archive.org/details/book_how_to_win_at_video_games_c...
What if someone sucked at the game, got down to 2 bees, and just avoided getting shot? Then on a pass when they didn't shoot, they got them!
I heard it as something like: don't kill them until they run out of shots, and then nothing will shoot at you.
BTW: Space Invaders => Galaxian => Galaga always seemed like a natural evolution to me.
I loved that cheat!
Easy way to get the high score when visiting an arcade.
It was also fairly to see if the locals knew the cheat — the high scores would be unusually high.
Then the challenge was just to get on the board, especially if one player had all of the high score slots.
Nostalgia! Others have covered it, but I really miss how various cheats or special items seemed to be word of mouth rather than a YouTube video with 5 million views. Usually the word of mouth was pretty vague too, which created more mystery. “There’s a way to do X I’ve seen it” with few further details.
I remember this floating around about Mike Tyson’s Punch Out ways to beat specific fighters easily, and another for Final Fantasy 2 (US) about a special rare drop item on the moon.
Another Galaga mystery, what’s the origin of the “midway fast shoot hack” version, where the fire speed is twice as fast? My Dad loves Galaga, but grew up with that version and gets annoyed with the normal, slower version (mostly because after you’re used to the fast one it feels like the button is just dropping half your inputs on the slow one).
As far as I know, the game is otherwise unchanged apart from the fire speed.
Joystik Magazine was an epic publication. I remember visiting the local newsagent (Australia) every week to see if a copy had arrived and the feeling of glee seeing a new cover. The screenshots, layouts, fonts - all so unique at the time. Pretty sure I still have them lying around in storage somewhere and they’re probably also available on eBay - somehow a PDF just doesn’t do it justice.
I remember discovering that if you let the demo screen progress to where your ship is captured, you can then control the new ship! You basically got 20-30s of free Galaga haha. The catch was the demo still tried to run, so it would yank you around some while you tried to play.
That one was fun but sometimes would crash the machine and it'd have to be power cycled to go back into service. The bug is still in the Galaga/Ms. Pac Man combo cabinet but it actually does reboot on its own instead of locking up the machine. Think that's also true for the 20-in-1 cabinet one of my friends owns.
TIL!
Growing up, neighbors were an arcade dealer. Played quite a bit of the original Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Asteroids at their house.
You'd think with modern code analysis a good look at the binary would give some insight into what is going on.
Trivia: Galaga appears in the arcade scene at the beginning of the Wargames movie :-)
Boy do I wish someone had told me at the time...
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