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Galaxian: First Video Game with Color?

Date       : 2026-04-21
Entry ID   : 18023
Entry type : analysis
Game       : Galaxian (@185)

Wikipedia Back and Forth

I love the game Galaxian, and I played a home port of it extensively back in the 1980s.

For many years, Galaxian was casually mentioned as the first game with color graphics, and I had this fact in my mind for years. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia Galaxian entry from May 2006:

It was the first arcade game to feature true color. ¹

It was already corrected later the same year:

Although true color [..] began appearing as early as 1975, Galaxian took graphics a step further with multi-colored animated sprites and explosions [..] ²

But then in 2026, it's somehow closer to the first 2006 article:

Galaxian is one of the first video games to feature RGB color graphics ³

So what's correct here? Were there no video games with color before Galaxian in 1979?

1970s Games with Color

First, let's be sensible about this: The Atari 2600 certainly had color and was released in 1977. All the launch titles were quite colorful.

Looking at arcade games, Taito's Super Speed Race, also from 1977, has colored pixel art. The artwork is way more detailed than Galaxian.

Atari's Indy 800 was released April 1975 and has colored cars and score.

And getting into the obscure ones, Ed Fries confirmed that Atari released a rare special version of the 1973 maze game Gotcha that was in color ^{4 5}. Thus, the first color video game we have been able find is Gotcha Color from October 1973.

References