Galaga is one of many stories from my childhood. One which reminds me of fantastic adventures to imagined spaces, yet also the crushingly realistic Chuck E Cheese that I had to come back to. Galaga is a space apart from space, in some untouchable childhood ball where I was busy saving the universe from strange alien critters. To be a savior was what my imagination told me, yet at that time I could hardly imagine what I was saving, or why it was important. Because the lights were coming and the Earth wasn’t going to save itself. The only spaceship that was out there was mine, after all.
Exploring any old arcade game requires me to realize how extraordinarily good they were at making me pay money for a skill-based game that had no real reward. I should have been playing skeeball, getting those stupid tickets so I could get some measly stuffed animal to throw away in a week if I hadn’t lost the stupid thing under a couch cushion or car seat. But somehow, being away from it all had a different reward, and with so much abstraction, the ship could be mine, the aliens could be mine, and space itself, for but a moment, could be mine.
Shooting was never really the goal for me. Even then, I was smart enough to know I was losing the game, the game was made to beat me. But while I rarely would say that I had fun with such games, I can say that I was thoroughly confounded, and thus fascinated, by them. Each time I inserted a coin, I could imagine some short scenario in an instant, some event that had occurred that clearly only I, grandstanding chap that I was, could solve. Yet there I was, sitting rather lonely in the stadium of my mind. When thinking back, it’s hard to say if it was a fear of engaging and being let down, or just loneliness.
As a kid, it was easy to think of situations where one might be alone. As a kid somewhat raised by games, pushing buttons to a screen’s tempo was a lonely event. Exciting, but never something that I had the opportunity to share. Galaga then, was one part of myself, an emptiness where I could imagine impossible scenarios, exert my imagination on the never-to-be imagined world of abstraction that lie within. If there is one thing I deeply miss about older games, it is the alien feeling. The feeling I related to most.
Recommended: Yes