Gradius, one of the cornerstones of the whole shoot ‘em up biz, turns 40 in just over a week. Happy birthday, game. I fucking hate you.
Okay, that’s extreme. I love Gradius as much as I hate it. It’s about as important as shmups get, greatly influencing the genre while hitting a level of mainstream awareness in America unmatched by most shmups. This type of game wouldn’t look the same today without Gradius, and I don’t know if they ever would’ve reached the level of popularity they hit in the States if it wasn’t for its NES port. And it also brutalized me as a kid more than almost any other game.
Even when I was young, clear-headed, and able-bodied, Gradius was an absolute dickhead. I died more during its first level than perhaps any other I’ve ever played in my life, getting hit by some errant space bullet, or flying into the side of that mountain that has that weird (and physically impossible) cut-out midriff, or exploding when its twin volcanoes belched a rock directly into my undercarriage. Its vaunted weapons upgrade system, where you could manually pick which options to use from a menu at the bottom of the screen, often seemed as much of a hindrance—either I’d focus too much on getting a specific upgrade and lose sight of the patterns on the screen, or else I’d get locked into those patterns and forget to ever activate an upgrade, sticking too long with the standard pea-shooter. Once my ship made it into that cave in the first level, the one where mobile cannons scoot across the top and bottom of the screen while enemy ships swirl through the middle, all of them spitting bullets, and those instant death mountains started to show up, I was always as good as gone. Something would kill me, I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t avoid it, and I’d immediately try again, getting more and more frustrated every time.
I wasn’t even 10 and my heart already knew hate.
Occasionally I’d stay cool and somehow make it past that opening level. That happened so infrequently I can’t even remember what the next one looks like. I recognize it when I see it, but off the top of my head? Total blank.
The Gradius I played on my Nintendo brought the worst part of the arcades into our house’s family room: arcade games’ inherent need to kill the player as quickly as possible. That kind of quarter churn wasn’t a factor once you paid your $50 and brought a game home (or, in my case, unwrapped it at a birthday party), and yet, other than a short-lived boon provided by the Konami code, Gradius didn’t make any concessions on the NES. It was as cold and cruel as it was when I first played it at the bowling alley, where it appeared under the name Nemesis. In fact the NES home version is actually harder: you can only have two power-ups active at one time, compared to the four in the arcade version, limiting your potential firepower. Goddammit, Gradius.
Here’s where I admit that Gradius isn’t really unique or notable in its difficulty. In truth there are other ‘80s shooters that are harder that have never vexed me as much. And outside of shooters, it isn’t close to the hatefulness of a Ghosts ‘n Goblins. I somehow developed a mental block about this one game, failing at it so much for so long that I’ve permanently psyched myself out from ever being any good at it. I think Gradius looms large for me as an unbeatable bête noire for three reasons: because of how old I was when I first encountered it, because of how prominent it was compared to other shmups, and because, like most kids, I couldn’t just stop playing a new game in favor of another one when I only got a new game maybe three times a year.
Gradius was the shoot ‘em up during the first few years of the NES, the one your friends were most likely to own and that you were most likely to want to rent, and although it wasn’t quite as huge as fellow Konami code beneficiary Contra (no doubt because two buddies couldn’t play Gradius at the same time) it was still one of the most prominent non-Nintendo games during the NES’s first big peak. And although I was just old enough to understand what I needed to do in it, I didn’t have the patience or maturity to put it all together—or the luxury to quickly cast it aside in favor of another new game, something that I knew wouldn’t enter my life until the next birthday or Christmas. I was stuck with Gradius, tried to make the best of it, and that best was pretty damned bad.
Despite my personal grudge, I always had to give it to ‘em: Gradius actually is great. If it wasn’t I wouldn’t have been compelled to ask for it when I was a kid, or to write about it today, almost 40 years later. It was a better looking Defender descendant that did away with that game’s more complicated aspects—the ship’s inertia, saving abducted citizens, the randomness of the hyperspace jump—and replaced them with complications of its own, like a lot of options for your weapons and more defined, deliberate, challenging level design. Without Gradius’s stature on the NES I don’t know if I would’ve gotten into a genre that I have enjoyed for decades, one that dominated my gaming regimen during the TurboGrafx-16 days. I’m sure it played some part in why games captivated me to begin with, even if two older brothers and their Atari had already indoctrinated me literally earlier than I can remember. And if it wasn’t for Gradius, I probably wouldn’t know that the giant heads on Easter Island are actually called moai.
Its NES port might be how most Americans know it best, but if you’re interested in trying out Gradius today, go with the superior arcade version. You can find it (under the name Nemesis) in the Anniversary Collection: Arcade Classics compilation Konami released in 2019. It’s also available as a standalone game as part of Hamster’s Arcade Archives series, although it makes more sense to pay $20 for the Konami collection and its eight games (including the Gradius sequel Salamander, aka Life Force) than $8 for Gradius alone. The Anniversary Collection is one of two ways I played it this week to celebrate its upcoming birthday, along with the fine PC Engine port from 1991; I couldn’t make it past the first level on either of them.
Enjoy your 40th, Gradius. May you rot in Hell.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.