The rest of the games, available through in-app purchases, are as follows:
GALAGA VS GALAXIAN DOWNLOAD
The initial download is free, and for that you get the original Galaxian for free. This app was released in 2011 to mark the 30th anniversary of Galaga, the sequel to 1979’s paradigm-shifting Galaxian by Namco, distributed in North America by Midway. Justice Department over various monopolistic practices, Nintendo would eventually drop the exclusivity clause from their developer contracts.Īs our final entry into The 12 Video Games of Christmas we bring you Galaga 30th Collection for iOS, made by Namco Bandai. Due to Nakamura’s resistance, as well as accusations from the U.S. Although Namco had been one of the first licensees for the NES, Nakamura would chafe under these restrictions and call out Yamauchi in the press for his licensing system, stating that “Nintendo is monopolizing the market, which is not good for anyone.” Namco then allied itself more closely with Nintendo’s competition at the time, most notably with Sega and their Master System and Genesis machines. Nintendo’s powerhouse game console had a draconian third-party licensee program, forcing makers of NES games to fork over a 20 percent royalty on sales and give exclusivity to Nintendo’s game machine for two years, among other financial hardships. It would be during the heydays of the NES when Nakamura would face-off with the most powerful company in the industry. They would go on to not only trailblaze in the industry by developing one of the first full-colour and sprite-based video games with Galaxianin 1979, Namco would help solidify the video game market in North America a couple of years later with a blockbuster hit by employee Toru Iwatani, featuring a little yellow circle with a wedge of a mouth named Pac-Man. Becoming Namco in 1972, they entered the video game industry by purchasing the Japanese subsidiary of Atari from that company’s founder, Nolan Bushnell, in 1974.
Started in 1955, Nakamura Manufacturing Company of Tokyo was initially an installer and operator of amusement park rides atop a department store in Yokohama, Japan. Today it was announced on Namco’s Japanese-language website that one of the few people to go up against Yamauchi has passed way at the age of 91: Namco founder Masaya Nakamura.
In my article about the Nintendo Entertainment System, I paint a picture of then-Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi as an iron-willed leader who’s uncompromising nature was famous in the video game industry.