Gradius (video game)

Did You Know?

• Alfa Records released a limited-edition soundtrack album for this game (Konami Game Music Vol.1 – 28XA-85) on 27 June 1986.
• Apollon Music released a limited-edition soundtrack album (Original Sound of Gradius – KHY1016) on 5 May 1987.
• In June 2020, Vic Viper was added as an easter egg unlockable cosmetic charm in the online horror game Dead by Daylight, alongside the release of the Silent Hill DLC.

Gameplay

The player controls the trans-dimensional spaceship Vic Viper and must battle waves of enemies through various environments. Boss battles in the series typically involve combat with a giant craft containing one to several blue spheres at its center, known as cores. A straight passage leads from the exterior of the boss to these cores, but small destructible walls block the passage and must be whittled away by repeated shots. Some bosses can regenerate these walls. When the core sustains enough hits, it changes color from blue to red, indicating critical condition. Destroying a core may disable part of the boss, and destroying all cores defeats the entire boss. Organic bosses lack cores and have weak spots in places such as a mouth, head, or eye. At the start, the Vic Viper is slow and has only a weak gun, insufficient for all but the weakest enemies. The game uses a single power-up item that advances a selection in a power-up menu at the bottom of the screen. When the desired power-up is highlighted, the player presses the power-up button to obtain it, returning the menu to its initial state.

Development

Gradius was created by Konami game designer Machiguchi Hiroyasu, his first publicly released video game. Hiroyasu joined Konami in the early 1980s as a programmer when the company was transitioning from medal machines to video games. Konami assigned him to a small team tasked with producing a game that could establish the company in the video game market. The team wanted to make another shooting game, as the shoot 'em up genre had seen a resurgence with Namco's Xevious, and the goal was to surpass Xevious. The project was initially intended as a follow-up to Konami's Scramble (1981), titled Scramble 2, reusing many of Scramble's materials and mechanics. Development lasted about a year, filled with anxiety due to the team's lack of confidence. Ideas were tested on the arcade monitor to see if they worked. Over 20 different movement patterns for the Option satellites were tested and whittled down through elimination. The game was produced for the Konami Bubble System 16-bit arcade hardware. Hiroyasu wanted a visually distinct world with unique enemies and locations, uncommon for shooters at the time. Inspiration came from films such as Star Wars: A New Hope and Lensman, with the Laser weapon taken from Lensman. The power-meter mechanic stemmed from the desire to give players freedom to select weapons; early versions with individual pick-up icons were cut for not being satisfying enough, replaced by a selection bar based on keyboard function keys. The Moai enemies were added to pay homage to Xevious and its Nazca lines.

Releases

Gradius debuted in Japan on Konami's Bubble System, an arcade board that let operators swap games using special cartridges built around magnetic bubble memory. Outside Japan, it shipped as a standard circuit board under the name Nemesis. The North American Nemesis is notably harder than its Japanese and European counterparts; to compensate, a group of orange enemies appears whenever the player loses a life, dropping power-up capsules to help rebuild upgrades, and a continue option is available up to three times. The title screen was also changed to show the promotional artwork behind the logo. The original Gradius has been collected in several packages, including the Gradius Deluxe Pack for PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Windows, and the Gradius Collection for PlayStation Portable. Hamster Corporation brought it to PlayStation 4 in 2015 and Nintendo Switch in 2020 as part of their Arcade Archives series, and Konami included it in the 2019 Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection for multiple platforms. The first home version arrived on the Famicom in Japan on April 25, 1986. Hardware limits forced simpler level designs—for instance, the Moai stage lost its vertical scrolling—and the maximum number of options the player could carry dropped from four to two. This Famicom version introduced a pause-screen cheat code that granted nearly all power-ups, a trick that later appeared in games like Contra and Life Force and became known as the Konami Code. The NES version reached North America in December 1986, marking Konami’s first NES release there, and kept the same title worldwide. It returned on September 19, 2018, through the Nintendo Classics service.

Reception

In Japan, Game Machine listed Gradius as the most popular arcade game of June 1985, and it became Japan's fifth highest-grossing table arcade game of 1986. In the United Kingdom, Nemesis was the highest-grossing arcade game of 1986 on London's Electrocoin charts. The arcade game received positive reviews from Computer and Video Games and Computer Gamer magazines. The Famicom version sold over one million copies in Japan during 1986. The home computer port reached number two on the UK sales charts, below Feud. The PC Engine version topped the UK's PC Engine sales chart in December 1991. The first Famitsu Best Hit Game Awards gave the Famicom version the award for Best Shooting Game and listed it as the second best Game of the Year, below Dragon Quest. Computer and Video Games awarded the home computer conversions Game of the Month. GameSpot later stated Gradius was one of the toughest side-scrolling shooter games on the NES, second only to Contra. IGN gave the Wii Virtual Console re-release a 7 out of 10 and hailed it as one of the greatest classic side-scrolling shooter games.