Another Gaplus afficionado. I first saw Gaplus at the Air Force Exchange at Tempelhof in Berlin, it was branded as Galaga 3, and it was in 1990, so it was a long time after the game first came out. I later got it on Namco Museum Vol. 2 for PS1. I have the Arcade Archives version on Switch. Nowadays, it kind of depresses me to put my age in on the high score screen.
The Exchange services on military bases always had arcades, and in a lot of cases they were arcade machines that were made for Japan and not intended for the US market. One of them, Chelnov, even had a big disclaimer saying "Warning: If you are playing this game outside of Japan, you are involved in a crime." That one was in England.
Since I was pretty young when the 2600 was a thing, I didn't know until years after the fact that there was a big stink about Pac-Man on 2600. We naturally assumed back then that the home version was never going to be as good as the arcade. Look at Space Invaders, which was pretty bastardized on the 2600. Or Donkey Kong, which was incredibly primitive. I did know that Atari lost money on Pac-Man despite it being the best-selling 2600 game of all time by virture of still having 2 million cartridges sitting on store shelves, most of which ended up being buried in New Mexico.
