I've gotten hundreds of emails since that post in 2012 with people who knew about the cheat in 1982, citing specific events that could not have been misconstrued.
Of course, I haven't revised the blog post to add all of them, but the one that I probably should have added was one person who noted that their mall got their first arcade the month before Christmas in 1982 and he visited it several times a week. Just after Christmas, they imported a Galaga game - and the same day they got it, the owner of the arcade told the patrons about the cheat as a sales feature (even made up a hand drawn sign of how it worked).
Perhaps it was clever marketing on the part of Midway and Namco.
The fad must have passed quickly and the trick been lost in the pre-Internet era. By 1990-2000, I don't think players knew about it anymore, and Galaga was far less popular.
In 1990 I had a classmate who would bore the hell out of us by demo strating his ability to get ridiculously high scores in galaga. He surely was using the cheat. He was the sort who wouldn't say that he was cheating.
I think I learned of the trick from the magazine blurb mentioned in TFA. If you didn't happen to read that specific page in that specific magazine in the few days it was on the newsstand, you would've had to find out via word of mouth/watching someone do the trick in person.
Most arcades didn't have the space to keep games around forever. Games that didn't bring in the quarters got replaced by newer, shinier, flashier games.
By the mid-80s, you'd be lucky to find one Galaga machine in most arcades.
So if an older friend mentioned the trick or you happened to read that specific issue of Joystik magazine in the library, you'd have a hard time even finding a Galaga machine to try the trick.
By the late 80s, ever more expensive arcade games lost their novelty and home entertainment (game consoles/rentable VHS movies) got good enough so overcoming the inertia of staying in the comfort of your home/sofa was too great.
The convenience stores/random stores got rid of their one or two standup arcade machines, then the smaller arcades closed down.
It sounds both somewhat difficult (the typical galaga player doesn't exactly aim carefully) and extremely tedious, both for players and for spectators. It reminds me a bit of the (possibly apocryphal) story that casinos promote tales of card counters cleaning up because the average attempted card counter doesn't know what he's doing, and will gamble more (and lose more) than someone who knows he's playing a game where the odds are against him.
On the difficulty scale, I'd say it was about 4-5 (on a 1-10 scale, 10=hardest).
Tedious, yes. You wouldn't want to do this trick in arcade primetime (Sat aft-night). As long as there wasn't a crowd waiting to play the game, I felt no remorse in using the trick. I also played mostly on a tabletop version of Galaga so I just sat for a mostly boring 10-15mins instead of having to stand / lean on the game for the same amount of time.
The goal was to get a double-ship by the time you did the trick.
The double-ship made playing the game after the aliens stopped shooting at you much easier since you had double the firepower.
The problem was that the double-ship also doubled your vulnerable attack surface to the remaining aliens.
The remaining aliens would also use attack patterns (diagonal from right to left towards the bottom left corner, almost horizontal, instead of mostly vertical) which increased the chance of crashing into you and ruining your chance at achieving the trick.
You didn't want to kill the two remaining aliens (which would have wasted all the time you spent avoiding the aliens), but you also didn't want to die.
You couldn't take a bathroom break either - there was no safe space to position your ship and avoid the aliens/their shots.
It wasn't a difficult trick to perform. Failed the first few times I tried it, but once you got the hang of avoiding the aliens at that point, success rate was more than 75%.
I've gotten hundreds of emails since that post in 2012 with people who knew about the cheat in 1982, citing specific events that could not have been misconstrued.
Of course, I haven't revised the blog post to add all of them, but the one that I probably should have added was one person who noted that their mall got their first arcade the month before Christmas in 1982 and he visited it several times a week. Just after Christmas, they imported a Galaga game - and the same day they got it, the owner of the arcade told the patrons about the cheat as a sales feature (even made up a hand drawn sign of how it worked).
Perhaps it was clever marketing on the part of Midway and Namco.