Retro spotlight: Gradius

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Gradius is one of the most important shoot ‘em up series ever, as influential to horizontal shooting games — or horizontal STG — as Xevious was to vertical shooters. It also wasn’t going to be a new series at all, when development began. Instead, it was known as “Scramble 2” at first, a sequel to Konami’s 1981 shooter that had released in arcades as well as at home: for the Tomy Tutor computer in Japan, and the Vectrex vector-display console in North America, Europe, and Japan, as well as unauthorized ports to computers like the Commodore 64. Scramble was influential itself, as the first horizontal STG with forced scrolling and distinct levels, and since it was Konami’s first hit, it was an important game for the company itself that helped them to establish themselves as a presence in the arcade scene.

There’s no Gradius without Scramble, then, for multiple reasons. But while the project that would become Gradius had started out as a Scramble successor, the development period itself was full of so much experimentation, so much thinking outside of what was then a fairly small box for the genre, that the final product couldn’t help but become its own thing. The team at Konami — led by 23-year-old Hiroyasu Machiguchi on his first project as a director — revolutionized the genre in 1985 with a beautiful shooter on brand new 16-bit hardware.

Shooting games in arcades used two buttons before Gradius. That was just how these things worked — one button for firing, another, perhaps, for a special attack of some kind. Gradius had buttons for those two things, naturally — the second button was for firing off missiles that would attack ground units, a la Scramble — but also required a third button, however, tied to its power-up system. Location test players didn’t know what the button was for, and sometimes didn’t even upgrade their ship, then failed, as expected, and walked away unsatisfied. Which led to the creation of a detailed instruction sheet — once some players started to see what Gradius was about, and others watched them play, the team’s decision to go with three buttons was proven to be the right one.

This system is what truly separated it from what came before. In other shoot ‘em ups of the day, you picked up a power-up item, and you kept that power-up. Except for in rare circumstances, you had little control over what you were powering up to, as items did what they were designed to do and that was it. With Gradius, though, rather than use power-ups to automatically change how your ship worked and was powered, the decisions were left up to you.

You would pick up a power-up, and it would be stored for later use — to use it, you’d press the button designed specifically for this purpose. How did you determine when to use these power-ups? It depended entirely on what it was you wanted to power up. At the bottom of Gradius’ screen is a grid, and each box on the grid corresponds to a different power-up.

The first power-up is “Speedup,” and it requires just one collected power-up item. You can use it right away and make the Vic Viper move a little bit faster, or, you can hold on to that power-up until you get some more. Maybe you don’t mind the slow movement speed of the Vic Viper, and would rather get some missiles first, so that you can hold down two attack buttons at once for maximum coverage. Or maybe you want to work your way up to the Double shot, which will fire off shots at a 45-degree angle to help you with those pesky enemies clinging to the ceiling of a cavern or military base, but limit how many shots you’re firing directly in front of you. Or the laser, which is an incredibly powerful and focused beam of energy that the team added to the game after watching Lensman in theaters and being drawn in by the spectacle of its own laser blasts. “Multiple” is what we know as Options — in Gradius, those are little orbs of energy that follow your ship and its movement, and fire off identical shots to whatever the Vic Viper is equipped with. And last is the ?, which is a pair of blue energy shields that can absorb some damage before vanishing. You’ll need the full six collected power-ups to unlock the shield; each upgrade’s placement on the grid, from left to right, corresponds with how many power-ups you need to be able to unlock it.

You can speed up the ship multiple times, and certainly don’t need to max it out if you’re more comfortable with the ship at a specific speed. Personally, I don’t like the max speed option, and feel that, after a few speed upgrades, I’m going as fast as I’ll ever need to if I want to have full control of my movement in what is often a fairly claustrophobic game requiring precision — maybe not to the degree of R-Type, but the screen still gets real busy here in the game that inspired Irem’s own classic. So instead, once I’m moving at a sufficient speed, I save up for the laser, and then add at least one option before going for the missiles. After I’ve maxed out on options and missiles, every power-up is saved for replenishing the shields as needed. Your mileage and strategy may vary, but that’s what makes this system so great in the first place. You get to do you here, and adjust as necessary when you decide to.

Gradius’ development didn’t start out with the power-up gauge. That was something that the team came up with over time, to solve the issue of the existing power-up system just being a bit boring to them. Part of the idea, per Nagata Akihiko in a 1993 interview, was to borrow from western role-playing games to make something new in the shooter space. “At that time, Western computer RPGs were coming into Japan, and ‘building your character’ was a kind of new gaming buzzword. We were thinking of ways to bring that concept into the STG genre. Nowadays it seems rather obvious, but back then it was a combination no one had thought of yet.”

The power-up items in early builds of Gradius, like in other shoot ‘em ups, had preexisting purposes — an item just for speeding up, one for powering up guns, etc. — but, in addition to not being exciting, there also ended up being far too many of them once systems changed to allow for power-ups to appear when an entire wave of enemies was defeated, rather than just making the red enemies hold the power-ups and drop them when defeated. The power-up gauge helped to solve this issue — after all, cutting out that addition of earning something besides points for clearing a wave was a non-starter, given that had made hunting down foes more exhilarating — since it required that multiple power-ups be needed in order to upgrade anything besides the Vic Viper’s speed.

The solve was rather ingenious, as Machiguchi explained in a 1996 interview (translation courtesy Shmuplations):

Now, the power-up system isn’t perfect in the initial Gradius. It’s responsible for a shoot ‘em up term, “Gradius Syndrome,” which refers to how you end up ridiculously overpowered in such a way that even the game’s rank system — which adjusts to how well you’re doing/how powered up you are by increasing the difficulty and intensity of enemies and their attacks — can’t quite keep up with you, but then you die and have to start from nothing again, against an onslaught of foes that, while now leveled down themselves, are still a real tough match-up for you and your now pea-shooter self. Observe the shift in intensity on both sides, before and after a death:

Look at that unstoppable wall of lasers! The fast-moving ship! And then look at how slow and weak you are upon returning from death. That clip is from fairly early in the game, so the intensity of the enemies isn’t so bad upon your return, but it’s still a difficult transition, and if you fail to pick up enough power-ups fast enough to get back to being unstoppable, you can certainly pay for that in a hurry. Again, enemies get stronger and fire more often as you do, that’s how rank works, but you start out far too weak to reliably deal with them in that state, forcing the issue on your end. And don’t get me started on what happens if you die against a boss, where there are no more power-ups to be had. Luckily, if you’ve got any power-ups in storage at the time of death, you do start with one when you return, at the least allowing you to speed up the downgraded Vic Viper.

Visually, Gradius is a treat. It’s a 16-bit game released in arcades in 1985, and made a point of not just having distinct stages, but distinct areas within those stages, as well. The first section always takes place out in space, and is meant for you to use it to power your ship up before getting to the meat of the level in the second section, while the third is always a boss fight. The same music is used for each intro area in all seven stages of Gradius, while the unique environment and song for each stage shows up in the second, and there’s just the one boss theme to signal that it’s time. As for those middle portions, you go through the interior of asteroids with active volcanos in them, natural maze formations featuring giant Moai statue heads firing energy rings at you, military bases, the stage where everything is organic rather than mechanical or rock… Gradius has a ton of variety, and it all sings from a visual perspective.

It was powered by Konami’s “Bubble System,” a magnetic ROM system which was new for the company at the time, which needed to be heated up in order to work. As Machiguchi described it, the bubble system made for a massive leap forward in display and processing power, which is why the team was able to focus so much on the visual side, loading up the screen with enemies and bullets in these varied, layered, and detailed backgrounds. Even the backgrounds that were “just” stars had extra details in them: as Kengo Nakamura explained in an interview for the Gradius Portable Guide, “we made sure the stars in the background that were more distant moved slowly, while those closer moved more quickly. Its easy for space scenes to seem rather flat and one-dimensional, so we laboured to make it as 3D as we could.”

Gradius’ checkpoint system was something of an accident. As Machiguchi put it, “We faced many difficulties, but one that stands out was the limitations of the memory. For its time it was a large amount, but it still wasn’t enough. When you die in Gradius, you’re sent back several screens to a checkpoint. That actually wasn’t in our original design plans. You see, the background data was loaded 3 screens at a time, but when that transfer gets interrupted by a player death, to allow time for the data to transfer we had to send the player back 3 screens.” The answer as to why there was a delay might have to do with the bubble system itself: one of the translation notes in that Shmuplation’s interview explained that, per a source, the bubble system moved too slowly to read a bunch of data, interrupt itself, and then go right back to what it was doing, but these limitations also resulted in players being able to reset and recover rather than forging on ahead, underpowered, so it seems to have worked out. Aside from the whole Gradius Syndrome thing, anyway.

While the bubble system did allow for more memory and processing power, it still wasn’t enough to match the ambition and volume of ideas of Gradius’ development team in other ways. Per Akihiko, in that same 1993 interview, they had initially hoped to have branching paths at the end of levels, allowing the player to choose where they would end up going next. Thanks to “memory space limitations,” however, this wasn’t implemented. Two years later, Taito’s Darius would end up using this very system to differentiate itself from the competition in the horizontal shoot ‘em up space, with 28 possible levels available in a game where just seven need to be completed in order to finish a run. While that doesn’t quite count as directly inspiring Darius, that — as well as the size of the pile of temporarily discarded ideas that were implemented in later Gradius games — goes to show you just how much effort was put into making Gradius something special and new for the genre.

Along those lines, the music in Gradius is great, and unlike the kind of music you often heard in shoot ‘em ups. Really, even to this day: it’s upbeat and uplifting, emphasizing the vastness of space and greatness of the task you’re undertaking, rather than coming in as something filled with dread or sci-fi coded. The sound effects, however, are a good reminder that this game, despite its visuals and music, is still from 1985. There’s a bit of a grating sound to your attacks hitting bosses, for instance — it’s the kind of sound you’d imagine would be telling you that your attacks were ineffective, if you didn’t already know it meant they were doing damage — but these are small complaints. The soundtrack is great and varied, and there’s nothing quite like the feeling you get from the change in music as you shift between sections, thanks in no small part to the songs themselves.

Gradius shows its age is in the little ways like that aforementioned sound effect. There’s just the one kind of boss, on repeat — you don’t need the voiceover from Gradius II yelling “Shoot the core!” at you to understand why that became a thing, since that’s your goal with every boss besides the final one in Gradius. The game balance isn’t quite as good as it would eventually become, as Gradius Syndrome was ironed out. There’s a lot of power-up variety for 1985, but not for even a few years later, thanks to everyone picking up what Gradius did and running with it. These are small issues, though, not gamebreaking ones, or reasons to avoid Gradius 40 years later. It’s still a lovely little time, and I cannot emphasize enough how much it clashes with the idea in your head of what video games looked like in 1985. Consider that the NES wouldn’t reach North America until October of ‘85, eight months after Gradius landed in arcades.

The NES would get its own 8-bit version of Gradius, of course — named Gradius, too, not Nemesis — and practically everything else ended up with a version of it, as well. The Commodore 64 received an official port of this game, unlike with Scramble. The Amstrad CPC and PC-8801 had Gradius, as did the Game Boy, the X1, the MSX, ZX Spectrum, and X68000. The PC Engine eventually received a 16-bit port that even enhanced the visuals and audio a bit, while the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch have seen the original version released as part of Arcade Archives, and, along with Windows and Xbox, as part of Konami’s Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection, which isn’t even the first compilation it’s been part of: Gradius ended up on the Saturn, Playstation, DS, Playstation Portable, and on PC in the past through various collections, as well.

If you’ve never played Gradius, but want to see what one of the granddaddies of the horizontal shooter is like, it’s easy enough to get a hold of and play. And while it won’t feel as fresh as it did 40 years ago, given its immense influence over the direction of the genre from that point forward, it’s still more than playable, an enjoyable good time and good use of your time. There might be better Gradius games out there at this point, but the original still has plenty to offer all these years later, and it’s easy to see how it spawned a long-running series in the first place… as well as multiple spin-off series in Nemesis and Salamander, and a parody series, too.

None of this stopped Konami from celebrating Gradius’ 35th anniversary in its 36th year of existence, but this is modern-day Konami we’re talking about here; that they remembered at all is something of a victory. Hopefully they’ll recognize the 40th before the franchise is 41, but either way, there will be quite a bit of it in this space this year.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.