Gradius (video game)

The player's ship, the Vic Viper, exchanging shots with enemy Moai in the game's third stage. The player's power meter is towards the bottom of the screen.

The player controls the trans-dimensional spaceship Vic Viper and must battle waves of enemies through various environments. The game became synonymous with the phrase, "Destroy the core!", as the standard of boss battles in the Gradius series involved combat with a giant craft, in the center of which would be situated one to several blue colored spheres. These bosses would be designed in such a way that there would be a straight passage from the exterior of the giant craft which leads directly to one of these cores. The player must fire shots into this passage while avoiding attack patterns from weapon emplacements on the body of the boss. However, small but destructible walls are situated in this passage, impeding the bullet shots from damaging the core, and must be whittled away by repeated well-placed shots. In a way, these tiny walls represent the boss' shielding gauge until its core is finally vulnerable to attack. Some bosses can regenerate these walls. When the core has sustained enough hits, it usually changes color from blue to red, indicating that it is in critical condition and its destruction is imminent. Upon the destruction of a core, a piece of the boss may be put out of commission, seeing that it is no longer powered by a core, or if all of the cores are destroyed, the entire boss is defeated and explodes satisfyingly. Note that these cores are not present on the more organic bosses of Gradius. Such bosses have weak spots in places such as a mouth, head or eye.

When gameplay begins, the Vic Viper is relatively slow and has only a weak gun. This level of capability is generally insufficient for engaging enemies, but the Vic Viper can gain greater capabilities by collecting and using power-up items. While most arcade games utilize distinct power up-items that each correspond to a specific effect on the player character, Gradius has a single power-up item. The effect of this power-up item is to advance the currently selected item in a power-up menu that appears at the bottom of the screen. When the desired power-up is highlighted, the player can obtain it by pressing the power-up button, returning the menu to its initial state in which no power-up is highlighted.

Gradius was the creation of Konami game designer Machiguchi Hiroyasu, being the first video game he publicly released.[4] Joining the company in the early 1980s originally as a programmer, Konami was trying to transition from being a producer of medal machines to a video game developer and assigned him to a small team to try and create a game that could put the company on the map.[4] He asked the team what kind of game they'd like to work on, responding that they'd like to make another shooting game.[4] The shoot'em up genre had seen a resurgence at the time with Namco's Xevious, with the goal of the project being to make a shooter that could surpass it.[4] The project was at first intended to be a followup to Konami's earlier game Scramble, being titled Scramble 2 and reusing many of its material and game mechanics.[4]

Development of Gradius lasted for about a year, which Hiroyasu says was filled with anxiety and worry from the production team due to it being their first game, lacking confidence in what they were doing.[4] Members of the project came up with ideas that were then tested on the arcade monitor to see if they worked or not.[4] While designing the Option satellites, the team tested over 20 different movement patterns for them, which were cut through the process of elimination based on those that didn't work.[4] The game was produced for the Konami Bubble System arcade hardware, which gave the team more hardware capacity and memory to experiment with.[4] Hiroyasu wanted the game to have a visually distinct world with unique enemies and locations, something relatively uncommon for shooters at the time.[4] Inspiration for mechanics and the story were derived from films such as Star Wars: A New Hope and Lensman, with the Laser weapon being directly taken from those in Lensman.[4] The idea for the power meter mechanic stemmed from the team's desire to give players the freedom to select whichever weapons they pleased.[4] Early versions had the player collecting individual pick-up icons, which were cut for not being "satisfying" enough; it was instead replaced with a selection bar where players collected capsules to allow access to other weapons, an idea based on the function keys on a keyboard.[4] The Moai enemies were added to pay homage to Xevious and its Nazca lines, and as a way to give the game a sense of mystery.[4]

• 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 for this game (Original Sound of Gradius – KHY1016) on 5 May 1987.
• Also, disc 1 of Konami Music Masterpiece Collection, which was released on October 1, 2004, is mostly devoted to Gradius.

In Japan, Game Machine listed Gradius on their July 1, 1985 issue as being the most-successful table arcade unit of the year.[12] The game went to number 2 in the UK sales charts, behind Feud. The Western cover art for the NES version claimed that it had sold one million copies in Japan.[13]

GameSpot stated that Gradius was one of the toughest side-scrolling shooter games available on the NES, second only to Contra.[14] IGN has given the game a rating 7 out of 10 for its re-release on the Wii Virtual Console and has hailed it as one of the greatest classic side-scrolling shooter games.[15]

Gradius spawned several sequels, the first of which was 1986's Salamander. The series has continued into the seventh generation with Gradius ReBirth.

It was also re-released on Windows Store on December 20, 2013, GameNow in May 2014 and for PlayStation 4's Arcade Archives on January 25 in Japan. An NES port was re-released for the Nintendo Switch Online on September 19, 2018, worldwide and an updated release as Gradius: Stage 5 Stronger Version (グラディウス ステージ5最強バージョン, Guradiusu Sutēji 5 Saikyō Bājon) on November 14, 2018, worldwide. Another updated release titled Gradius SP: Second Loop was released worldwide on August 22, 2019.

• Gradius at the Killer List of Videogames