Gradius | Code Like It's 198x

Konami’s 1985 coin-op Gradius let the player choose how to arm the ship. Shoot down certain enemies and they leave a capsule. Each capsule moves a highlight one step along a row of upgrades at the bottom of the screen, and a separate button buys whichever upgrade is lit, so every capsule means deciding whether to spend now or save for something better. In Europe the game was called Nemesis. Its Famicom conversion introduced the cheat that became known as the Konami Code.

Fast facts

Developer and publisher: Konami.
Arcade release: 29 May 1985 in Japan; Nemesis in Europe.
Home versions: MSX cartridge; Famicom (25 April 1986) and NES; ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, published by Konami in Britain in 1987.
The gauge: Speed Up, Missile, Double, Laser, Option and a shield.
Options: up to four in the arcade, two on the Famicom and NES.
The Konami Code: added by Kazuhisa Hashimoto to the Famicom version.
Sequels: Salamander (1986), then Vulcan Venture (Gradius II), the third in the series, in 1988.

The gauge

Computer Gamer’s arcade reporters, Mike Roberts and Eric Doyle, explained the system to British readers in February 1986. Enemies sometimes left a “supply pod”. The extras were “displayed on a list at the bottom of the screen. As you collect a pod, the highlighted item on the list increments. Pressing the select button will select that item for your ship.” Then the highlight jumped back to the start of the list.

The six choices ran in a fixed order:

Speed Up: faster movement, which could be taken “five times for really fast moving”.
Missile: air-to-ground missiles, fired with their own button.
Double: a second shot fired upwards as well as forwards, “useful for the gun batteries on the roof of the tunnel”.
Laser: turned the gun into “a rapid firing laser”, which “slices through aliens like a hot knife through butter”.
Option, called Multiple on Nemesis: “an extra gun, up to four, every time it is selected”.
Shield, shown on the Japanese gauge as “?”: “forward shielding against everything”, which “lulls you into a false sense of security as attacks from the rear still can get you”.

Speed Up cost one capsule and an Option five, so a better weapon meant playing on without it for longer. Losing a life took everything away. CRASH spelled out the rule in its review: “When a ship is lost all the features that it has gathered have to be collected once again.”

The Options gave Gradius its look. MSX Magazine described each one as “une ombre”, a shadow of the ship that fires at the enemy alongside it. Of the same system in Salamander, Computer Gamer worked out that four of them gave “five times the fire power you started with”.

Volcanoes and stone heads

The arcade stages included volcanoes, Stonehenge and Moai. CRASH’s review of the Spectrum version listed a forest, “space islands, an alien graveyard and the interior of a Bacterion battle cruiser”, with a mothership to destroy at the end of each. The Moai, stone heads modelled on the statues of Easter Island, are the best-known enemies. ACE described them as “missile-spitting”, and a Zzap!64 caption warned that “the ‘statues’ are alive and spitting”.

In the arcades

Gradius made a lot of money. Retro Gamer, looking back in 2008, says it “doubled the first-year sales of Scramble in just a six-week period”. Computer Gamer in 1986 called it “an excellent game” that mixed Defender, Scramble and “every other horizontal scrolling game you can ever think of”, and expected “a lot of interest in this game” despite “its high purchase price for the operator”. Two years later The One judged that Nemesis and Salamander were “arguably the first games” of the progressive shoot-’em-up type, in which the player builds up firepower as the game goes on.

The Famicom version and the Konami Code

The Famicom Gradius went on sale in Japan on 25 April 1986. It was cut down to suit the hardware: two Options instead of four. When ACE reviewed the NES cartridge in May 1989, it called that “an intelligent conversion, tailoring the game to suit the console’s capabilities (there are only two drones available, for instance). As a result, it’s colourful, smooth and pretty much flicker-free.” It rated the cartridge 874 out of 1,000 and called it “a definite must-buy”.

The Famicom version is also where the Konami Code began. Kazuhisa Hashimoto, who programmed it, told Retro Gamer why: “The arcade version of Gradius is really difficult. I never played it that much, and there was no way I could finish the game, so I inserted the so-called Konami code.” Entered while the game is paused, up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A gives the ship a full set of upgrades at once. In America the same sequence became famous through Contra, where the first issue of Nintendo Power printed it as a way to “start your game with over 30 extra men”. The Konami Code entry follows it further.

Nemesis on British computers

In 1987 Konami published Nemesis in Britain itself. Until then Ocean’s Imagine label had, in Zzap!64’s words, “had the pick of the deals” for Konami’s coin-ops, but “now Konami have decided to do it all themselves”. The two main 8-bit versions got very different reviews.

On the Commodore 64 (£8.95), Zzap!64 gave it 80%. One reviewer welcomed “the arcade game that destroyed a large proportion of my wage packet last summer”, finding that “nearly all of the original features have been included”, though “the sprites flicker quite badly when the screen gets busy”.

The Spectrum version (£7.95) got 59% from CRASH. One reviewer complained that the ship was “very unresponsive to quick key presses”, and another called the game “an overly difficult, overpriced and mostly unplayable shoot ’em up”. Both versions later appeared on Imagine’s Konami Arcade Collection.

On the MSX, Konami’s own one-megabit cartridge won over MSX Magazine in France. The reviewers had expected “encore un banal jeu d’arcade” (another ordinary arcade game) and found “un jeu excellent”.

The series

Salamander, in 1986, gave each weapon its own pick-up instead of the gauge, added a two-player mode and alternated horizontally and vertically scrolling stages. Vulcan Venture (Gradius II), in 1988, went back to saving up capsules and let the player pick one of four weapon sets before starting, the first of them “identical to Nemesis”.

Sources

Computer Gamer issue 11, February 1986: arcade report on Nemesis (the gauge and each upgrade; the operator’s price).
Computer Gamer issue 18, September 1986: arcade report on Salamander as the successor to Nemesis (four units, five times the firepower).
CRASH issue 40, May 1987, p. 110: Spectrum Nemesis review (Konami, £7.95; the levels; air-to-ground missiles; losing the upgrades); the 59% rating as listed in issue 60, January 1989, pp. 105–106 (Konami Arcade Collection).
Zzap!64 issue 25, May 1987, pp. 89–90: Commodore 64 Nemesis review (Konami, £8.95); the 80% rating as listed in the index in issue 38, June 1988.
MSX Magazine (France) issue 8, December 1986: Némésis review (Konami, one megabit; the Option as “une ombre”).
ACE issue 20, May 1989, p. 55: NES Gradius review (£24.95; two drones; “missile-spitting Easter Island heads”; 874).
The One issue 3, December 1988: Nemesis and Salamander as the first progressive shoot-’em-ups.
The Games Machine issue 8, July 1988, pp. 17–18: Vulcan Venture, third in the Nemesis series.
Zzap!64 issue 19, November 1986: Konami to publish its own conversions. Issue 39, July 1988: Vulcan Venture and its four weapon sets; Salamander’s two-player mode and mixed scrolling. Issue 41, September 1988: Commodore 64 Salamander, each weapon with its own token.
Video Games (Germany), June 1992: Vulcan Venture as the second Gradius.
Retro Gamer issue 53 (2008), pp. 24–29: Konami history (Nemesis sales against Scramble; Kazuhisa Hashimoto on the Konami Code).
Nintendo Power issue 1, July/August 1988: the Contra code.
Famitsu.com, “AC版『グラディウス』が稼動開始した日”, 29 May 2024 (web, secondary): the arcade release date, the gauge labels, the four Options and the stages. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202405/6202
Famitsu.com, “FC版『グラディウス』が発売された日”, April 2024 (web, secondary): the Famicom release date, the two Options and what the code does. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202404/3124