Galaxy Force

Galaxy Force is a 1988 rail shooter video game developed and published by Sega for arcades. The player assumes control of a starship named the TRY-Z, as it must prevent the Fourth Empire from taking over the entire galaxy. Gameplay involves shooting down enemies using either a laser shot or a limited supply of heat-seeking missiles, all while avoiding collision with projectiles or obstacles and making sure the ship's energy meter doesn't fully deplete. It ran on the Sega Y Board arcade system, and was released with a motion simulator cockpit arcade cabinet like previous Sega Super Scaler games (Space Harrier, After Burner and Thunder Blade).

Created by the same group of developers that later went on to form Sega AM1, Galaxy Force was largely inspired by Star Wars, and was developed specifically to show off the capabilities of the Sega Y hardware with its usage of large, detailed backgrounds and massive amount of on-screen sprites. The soundtrack was composed jointly by Katsuhiro Hayashi and Kouichi Namaki, both of whom had previously created the music for Thunder Blade. The game came in three different cabinet styles; a standard upright, a "Deluxe" machine, and a "Super Deluxe" version that could twist and turn the player around. Almost immediately after the game's release, Sega published an updated version titled Galaxy Force II which added two new levels and other minor additions.

Galaxy Force was critically acclaimed, being praised for its graphics, gameplay, presentation, music and hardware capabilities, considered to be visually impressive for the time period. It was ported to several platforms, including the Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis and Commodore 64, and released under several different Sega classic game re-release labels such as Sega Ages. A high-definition remake titled Galaxy Force Neo Classic was released for the PlayStation 2 in Galaxy Force II Special Extended Edition, alongside the original, which featured smoothed-out graphics and additional visual effects. With the exception of the Master System version, all home versions of the game are based on Galaxy Force II.