In the first week of March of 1980, Gary Carlston, co-founder of Brøderbund set up a micro-booth at the 5th annual West Coast Computer Faire. With him, he brought an Apple II computer and four games, his young company’s entire line of software titles. Three of co-founder and brother Doug’s intricate Galactic Saga games along with Tank Command from Donald, the third brother.

The neighboring booth was occupied by Jack Hatfield, a Californian accountant who imported memory chips to American consumers from Japan. Along with Hatfield was Mr. Mioshi the memory supplier and president of a Japanese trading company that had brought a couple of Apple II arcade games from Tokyo-based Star Craft. Unaware to Gary, Mioshi’s games would come to play a pivotal role in Brøderbund’s early success and help pave the way for the company to become a heavy-weight titan during the ’80s and ’90s.

Towards the end of the 1970s, as a response to rival Taito‘s hugely successful 1978 arcade title Space Invaders, Japanese Namco had tasked company engineer Kazunori Sawano to switch his design philosophy on his current project to create the ultimate post-Invaders game. The video arcade game he and his design team were working on needed to compete with Space Invaders and capitalize on its widespread popularity.

Lead designer Sawano had previously been involved in the development of many of the company’s electro-mechanical shooting gallery arcade games and had a keen eye for designing enjoyable and challenging yet simple and easy-to-understand games. Inspired by the grand cinematic space combat scenes in Star Wars, Sawano wanted to replicate the feeling of a space battle with the player taking control of the Galaxip, a starfighter in its mission to protect Earth from waves of hostile aliens.

When Sawano’s Galaxian debuted in September of 1979, it quickly rose to fame and became Namco’s first major video arcade game hit and the second-highest-grossing arcade game of 1979 and 1980 in Japan. Namco approached Midway Manufacturing, who earlier had lost their license with Taito, to release Galaxian overseas. Midway showed interest and wanted to acquire the rights. The parties agreed to a deal and Midway released the game in North America in early 1980. The same year, Galaxian became the second-highest-grossing title and by 1982 it had become one of the best-selling arcade games of all time with 50,000 arcade units sold.

In 1980, while American arcade real estate was being filled with Galaxian cabinets, back in Japan, twenty-one-year-old college student and aspiring programmer Tony Suzuki, was creating a clone of the popular game for the Apple II home computer. Suzuki was one of the young talents working for Minoru Nakazawa‘s Star Craft, a company founded a year earlier, just as the Japanese personal computer revolution was taking off.

While the Japanese consumer market was still in its infancy, across the Pacific, the market was rapidly maturing and gaining recognition as a considerable industry, primarily driven by the emergence of computers such as the Apple II which for many was the first experience with microcomputers. The computer was priced within the reach of many middle-class families and a partnership with the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium helped make the computer popular in schools. As a result, by the close of 1980, over 100,000 Apple IIs had been sold.

With the success of the Apple II in the US, Apple expanded its market to include Europe, Australia, and the Far East, including Japan in 1979-80, where a few thousand dedicated Apple II J-Plus models were sold. Given the virtually non-existent market for Apple II games in Japan, Star Craft provided copies of a few of its titles, to representative Mioshi for him to demonstrate while visiting the U.S. for the upcoming trade show in the spring of 1980.

Mioshi arrived in San Francisco with games but no computer to run them on. Gary, in the neighboring booth, had the computer but out of the four titles only Tank Command was designed for the platform. Doug’s more intellectual text-heavy strategic Galatic Saga games were all designed for the widely used but rather underwhelming Tandy TRS-80 computer. Out of curiosity and to help attract attention to his booth, Gary agreed to showcase the games, Mioshi had brought with him, on his Apple II. The fast-paced Japanese games with color graphics, animation, and sounds were unlike anything he and the enthusiastic crowd, gathering, had seen.

While Gary only managed to sell $200 of Brøderbund titles, he left the trade show with a clear indication that the market favored action games over intricate strategy games designed for systems like the TRS-80. The brothers decided to pursue the Apple II market and by June they had finished the initial Apple II conversions of the Galactic Saga trilogy but the company was grappling with financial challenges and was going broke fast. In May, sales had hit an all-time low, prompting a pressing need for new titles that aligned more with the market’s preferences. The demand was unmistakably leaning towards action games that offered arcade-like experiences, games similar to the ones Mr. Mioshi had demonstrated earlier in the year.

During the summer of 1980, Brøderbund received an unexpected call from Mioshi who happened to be in California visiting Hatfield. Mioshi wanted to fly up to Brøderbund in Eugene, Oregon, and discuss a potential publishing deal for the impressive Star Craft titles that had captured Gary’s attention just a few months earlier. After negotiations, the parties finalized an agreement in which Brøderbund would purchase 100 copies at a time. The copies would initially be shipped from Japan to Hatfield in California before being forwarded to Eugene as Brøderbund paid for them.

Golden Mountain and Hyper Head-On, the first couple of titles from Japan were published by Brøderbund in the Autumn of 1980.
Neither of the titles achieved much success but the title that followed did.

To establish a presence in the market, Brøderbund offered its initial titles to retailers at a 50% discount off the retail price. However, with the high cost associated with acquiring Mioshi’s products, the company was burning through the last remaining finances fast. With Gary and Doug using every opportunity to market and sell the games, sales slowly started to pick up.
In Eugene, Nakazawa, president and founder of Star Craft unannounced turned up and revealed that Mioshi had been withholding a substantial portion of the funds Brøderbund had paid for his products. Nakazawa and Brøderbund negotiated a new agreement, removing Mioshi from the equation, resulting in a reduction in the acquisition cost and significantly enhancing the profitability for both parties.

In early winter 1980, the newest title to arrive from Japan at Brøderbund’s doorstep was Tony Suzuki’s Galaxian, a clone of Namco’s now hugely successful video arcade game. Suzuki’s game boasted impressive vibrant color graphics and sound, and most importantly it perfectly replicated the fast-paced gameplay previously exclusive to the custom-tailored hardware of video arcade machines.

Doug decided to send out Galaxian, to Robert Leff‘s newly established software distribution business, Robwin Computing. Robwin had its origins in a small distribution company initially acquired by Leff from Ken Williams, co-founder of On-Line Systems (Sierra On-Line). Robwin evolved into Softcel/Merisel, eventually becoming the largest software distributor in the United States.
Robwin’s infrastructure streamlined the process for smaller publishers like Brøderbund to place products in stores nationwide and Leff had confidence in Galaxian, to the extent that he sought 5,000 copies and even provided Brøderbund with the financial support needed to fulfill the order.

In December of 1980, Suzuki’s Galaxian clone now dubbed Apple Galaxian hit the market. In its first month, it sold 5,000 copies, surpassing the combined sales of all other Brøderbund products that year. In the following three months, it topped the Softalk magazine chart as the bestselling Apple II title, dethroning mighty Visicalc.
Apple Galaxian offered an impressive fast-paced gaming experience, with speeds that only rivaled those by Apple II prodigy Nasir Gebelli, whose popular games now stood outranked on the chart by college student and part-time programmer Suzuki’s Galaxian clone.
In early 1981, Steve Shendelman, general manager of the Data Domain retail outlet in Schaumburg, Illinois, called Apple Galaxian the finest example of Apple Hi-Res graphics yet and the buy of the past Christmas season.

Tony Suzuki’s Apple Galaxian was published in December of 1980.
With 5,000 sold copies in its first month, the game helped a struggling Brøderbund overcome the financial challenges that had haunted the company ever since its inception.
The cover art was done by illustrator Howard Rooks who illustrated covers for a number of early Brøderbund titles

Suzuki’s Apple Galaxian clearly copied Namco’s successful Galaxian video arcade game.
The game’s vibrant Hi-Res graphics and smooth animations coupled with fast-paced gameplay led to it being one of if not the best Galaxian clones for home computers.

With Apple Galaxian spearheading a new era, Brøderbund experienced a substantial increase in sales, surging from $10,000 in November of 1980 to $55,000 the following month. While the market was saturated with more or less successful copies of popular video arcade titles, the rapid success and widespread distribution of the game soon raised concerns related to its name and gameplay. Brøderbund didn’t attempt to conceal the fact and openly advertised Apple Galaxian as a faithful Galaxian rendition, emphasizing its ability to copy the arcade experience and save players their quarters. Explicitly conveying it wasn’t merely inspired by Namco’s monster hit but blatantly copied its gameplay and even its title.

Despite legal frameworks surrounding copyright in the digital realm being in its infancy, with limited established precedents, Namco/Midway and even Apple started making legal rumbles. To avoid any legal consequences, Brøderbund decided to change the name and rerelease Apple Galaxian as Alien Rain in the spring of 1981. Despite the new name, the game continued to maintain its status as a top-seller for several months.

Despite legal rumbles from some of the biggest players in the industry, Apple Galaxian was too important to abandon. Brøderbund changed the name to Alien Rain and rereleased it in 1981.
The game remained exactly the same and seemingly avoided any legal issues.
This copy is a later version with the San Rafael address instead of the earlier Eugene address.

During 1981, Brøderbund published a handful of titles from Nakazawa‘s Star Craft, including an enhanced version of Suzuki’s Galaxian dubbed Alien Typhoon which was advertised for the fanatics only, with twice as many aliens, twice as fast, and twice as tricky!

Alien Typhoon was released in Marts of 1981 and was Alien Rain on steroids, boasting double the number of aliens along with a few minor tweaks to the gameplay.

The 9 (including Alien Rain) Star Craft titles, published by Brøderbund from the autumn of 1980 to December of 1981, with the last release being Tony Suzuki’s Star Blazer.

In 1981, Brøderbund hired two full-time employees and increased its part-time staff. The Carlston brothers were joined by their sister, Cathy, who assumed responsibility for office management and bookkeeping. In due course, Cathy played a pivotal role as the Vice President of Educational Market Planning and made significant contributions to the company’s efforts in marketing software to educational institutions.

By the summer of 1981, Brøderbund was getting a lot of pressure from its Japanese colleagues to move to a more convenient and prestigious location. Doug and Gary considered Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area as potential locations and eventually settled on San Rafael in California. During the early autumn, the headquarters was relocated and the five-people-operation moved into an ordinary house but soon relocated to an old liquor warehouse and was formally incorporated as a California-based company under the name Brøderbund Software, Inc.

Back in Japan, the news of the software gold rush in the U.S., with young programmers earning hundreds of thousands in royalties reached Nakazawa’s programmers. Nakazawa had been, in accord with Japanese custom, paying his young workforce what amounted to allowances, keeping most of the incoming royalties for himself. Nakazawa had a small revolt on his hands, losing programmers and programs to sell. Brøderbund and Star Craft’s relationship would come to an end but the company would continue to do business in Japan to provide Japanese-developed software for the domestic market but from other suppliers.

Star Craft, later StarCraft, Inc. would go on and make a name for themselves within Japan by porting and translating many well-known full-fledged adventures and role-playing games from both Europe and the United States. The company ceased its activities in 1995.

Sources: Software People: An Insider’s Look at the Personal Computer Industry by Doug Carlston, Wikipedia, Softalk, The Digital Antiquarian…

-Note that some of the release dates are based upon dates depicted in the games themselves and might not be accurate with the actual publication date.