When Gradius appeared in Japanese arcades on May 29, 1985, it arrived during one of the most competitive periods in the early history of the shooting game. Namco’s Xevious had become a landmark of the genre, Konami already had experience with games such as Scramble, and developers across Japan were looking for ways to make the next wave of shooters feel more elaborate than the games that had filled arcades only a few years earlier.
Konami’s answer placed the player inside the Vic Viper, a small starfighter sent against the forces of Bacterian. The premise was familiar enough, but almost everything surrounding it felt unusually ambitious. The landscape changed dramatically from one stage to the next. Weapons could be selected rather than merely collected. Strange stone heads fired glowing rings across the screen. Organic structures shared the same universe with mechanical fortresses and volcanic landscapes. Even the ship’s movement could be transformed by the player’s decisions.
What emerged was more than another successful arcade shooter. Gradius established a design language that Konami would continue refining for decades, while its power meter, Options, stage themes, soundtrack, and punishing recovery system helped give the game an identity that survived long after the hardware on which it debuted disappeared from arcades. Konami itself continues to identify the 1985 game as the beginning of a series that had a major impact on later shooting games.
From Scramble 2 to Gradius
The story of Gradius began with a considerably less ambitious name. According to director and team leader Hiroyasu Machiguchi, the project was originally planned as “Scramble 2,” a continuation of Konami’s 1981 horizontal shooter Scramble.
By 1985, however, the development team was looking at another game as the standard it wanted to beat. Machiguchi remembered asking his new team what kind of game they wanted to make and receiving an enthusiastic answer in favor of a shooting game. Namco’s Xevious had become the benchmark against which the developers measured themselves. Rather than merely producing another version of Scramble, the team adopted the much more intimidating goal of creating a horizontal shooter capable of surpassing the influence of Namco’s vertical-scrolling hit.
The connection to Scramble still shaped the project. Konami possessed existing materials that could be adapted, which helped lead the team toward horizontal scrolling, but Gradius gradually moved far enough from its predecessor that it became something distinct. Machiguchi later remembered a development period of roughly a year in which the designers repeatedly placed ideas on the screen, tested them, discarded what did not work, and tried again. Even the behavior of the game’s famous Options went through around twenty movement patterns before the team settled on the system players would eventually recognize.
That experimental method became one of the defining characteristics of the project. Instead of beginning with a rigid specification that dictated every feature, the team discovered parts of Gradius by seeing what the hardware could do and deciding whether the results were interesting. Some of the game’s most memorable ideas came from that process rather than from a carefully fixed blueprint created at the beginning.
Building a World Instead of a Series of Levels
Machiguchi remembered that the developers wanted Gradius to possess something that many earlier shooters lacked: a distinct sense of world. The team did not want every stage to look like another variation on the same battlefield. Moving through the game was supposed to feel like traveling from one strange environment to another.
Konami’s new 16-bit Bubble System hardware gave the team more room to pursue those ambitions. Machiguchi described it as a major advancement in display and processing power for the company, and the developers used that increased capability to imagine stages that looked radically different from one another. The game’s environments became part of its identity rather than scenery placed behind the action.
Science fiction provided another source of inspiration. Machiguchi recalled that the team watched contemporary science-fiction films together, including the animated adaptation of Lensman. The film’s presentation of lasers and plasma effects impressed the developers enough that they discussed it after leaving the theater, with that visual inspiration helping lead to Gradius‘ powerful Laser weapon.
Designer Kengo Nakamura remembered the creation of the game’s world in similar terms. An early concept involved warping into a different dimension with each stage, allowing the designers to move between ancient ruins, mysterious landscapes, and futuristic environments without worrying about making every location look closely related to the one before it.
That freedom helped produce one of Gradius‘ most recognizable images.
The Moai Heads Become Konami Icons
Stone Moai heads from Easter Island seem like unlikely inhabitants of a futuristic space shooter, which was precisely part of their appeal.
Nakamura remembered that the Moai were originally little more than pieces of background scenery. He believed they were too memorable to remain decorative, so he worked with the background designer to make them active enemies. The stone heads became destructible and began firing rings from their mouths, creating an enemy so peculiar that it eventually became inseparable from the identity of Gradius.
Machiguchi offered another part of the story. The developers wanted the stage to carry a mysterious quality, and Namco’s use of the Nazca Lines in Xevious had demonstrated how archaeological imagery could give a shooter a strange and almost ancient atmosphere. The Moai served a similar purpose, although the team apparently had no idea that the stone heads would become recurring figures in the series and recognizable Konami imagery in their own right.
Other environments emerged from experimentation just as naturally. Nakamura recalled that the development team once inverted the volcano stage while testing the hardware’s vertical inversion capabilities. The upside-down landscape looked strange enough, and played differently enough, that the experiment became the Reverse Volcano stage. A biological stage emerged because the designers worried that a game composed entirely of ruins and mechanical environments would become visually predictable, so they created something filled with squirming organic material instead.
The result was a shooter in which players could remember locations almost as easily as enemies. Volcanoes, ancient stone heads, living tissue, fortresses, and other environments gave Gradius a rhythm closer to an adventure through different worlds than a simple sequence of increasingly difficult shooting galleries.
The Power Meter Changed What a Power-Up Could Be
The most important design decision in Gradius may have been the system running along the bottom of the screen.
Many arcade games already included forms of weapon improvement, but Gradius turned the process into a continuing series of choices. Destroying certain enemies or formations produced capsules. Each collected capsule advanced a highlight along a power meter containing upgrades such as Speed Up, Missile, Double, Laser, Option, and Shield. The player could activate the currently highlighted selection or continue collecting capsules in hopes of reaching something farther along the meter.
The difference was subtle but profound. A power-up was no longer simply whatever item the game happened to drop. Players were deciding how and when the Vic Viper became stronger.
Machiguchi remembered that the system began in a more conventional form, with individual items representing specific upgrades. The team found that approach unsatisfying because it did not give players enough control. While searching for a better method, the developers drew inspiration from the arrangement of function keys on contemporary personal computers. That visual idea eventually contributed to the horizontal power gauge.
Another Konami developer, Nagata Akihiko, later explained that Western computer role-playing games were entering Japan at the time and that the concept of building or developing a character was attracting attention. The Gradius staff considered how something resembling character development might work inside a shooting game. In this case the character was a starfighter, and its development happened through the player’s choices about speed, weapons, protection, and supporting firepower.
That decision created one of the game’s most important tensions. A player might spend a capsule immediately to increase speed, or wait for a more expensive upgrade. Reaching the Laser or an Option required surviving long enough to move farther along the meter. Waiting could make the ship much more dangerous, but dying before activating the desired power-up meant that patience had accomplished nothing.
Once several Options followed the Vic Viper and duplicated its fire, the small fighter could fill the screen with weapons. Yet all that power remained fragile because a single death could strip away the carefully assembled arsenal.
Why Gradius Needed Three Buttons
The power meter also created a problem for the arcade control panel.
Machiguchi remembered that two-button games were still the norm when Gradius was being developed. The team originally prepared its own two-button version, but combining all the necessary actions made the game less satisfying. Location testing convinced the developers that activating power-ups deserved a separate control.
The final arrangement used three buttons, separating the game’s basic attacks and power-up selection. Machiguchi later described the choice as unusually bold for the period and recalled that different departments inside Konami debated it. The development team nevertheless believed that the additional button made the game more strategic, and it remained.
It was a small physical change that reinforced the larger philosophy behind the game. Gradius was not asking players merely to shoot and dodge. It was asking them to manage a machine while shooting and dodging, deciding when to transform the Vic Viper into something faster, better armed, or more heavily defended.
How a Hardware Limitation Created the Recovery Game
One of the harshest parts of Gradius was not originally intended as a major feature.
When the Vic Viper was destroyed, the player could be sent backward to an earlier checkpoint rather than simply reappearing in place. Because death also removed the ship’s accumulated upgrades, a player who had entered a dangerous section with a powerful collection of weapons might suddenly have to survive it again with little more than the Vic Viper’s basic equipment.
Machiguchi explained that the checkpoint behavior grew partly from technical necessity. Background information was loaded in sections, and when a death interrupted that process the game needed time to retrieve the necessary data. Sending the player backward gave the hardware the opportunity to prepare the stage again.
What began as a limitation became one of the central skills associated with the series. Experienced players learned what could be called recovery patterns, methods of rebuilding the Vic Viper from a nearly defenseless state after losing a life deep inside a stage.
The system also helped create the unusual difficulty curve for which Gradius became famous. Success made success easier. A fully upgraded Vic Viper carrying multiple Options and a strong weapon could overwhelm large portions of the game, but a single mistake could transform that dominance into desperation. Players were not merely trying to reach the end of a stage. They were trying to protect the investment represented by every capsule they had collected.
Miki Higashino Gives Gradius Its Sound
The visual identity of Gradius was accompanied by music that refused to treat outer space as quiet, ominous, or empty.
Composer Miki Higashino joined Konami in 1984 after hearing that the company was seeking a part-time composer. She later remembered that she had little familiarity with game music when she applied. Only a short time later she was helping create the sound of one of Konami’s defining arcade releases.
For Gradius, Higashino associated outer space with computers, robots, and the future. She used techniques including the Lydian mode, rapid arpeggios, and unusual meters to capture that image. Her musical background also differed somewhat from the generation of Japanese game composers commonly associated with Yellow Magic Orchestra. Higashino pointed instead to Kraftwerk as an important early exposure to synthesizer music and believed some of that influence could be heard in Gradius.
The result was energetic rather than bleak. Tracks accompanying the stages gave the game a melodic personality that stood comfortably beside the graphics and power-up system. Higashino later admitted that she did not expect Gradius to become the success that it did. At the time she was more immediately struck by the combination of futuristic sounds and colorful graphics appearing on the screen.
Her music became another element that later entries could inherit, rearrange, reference, and build upon as Gradius became a franchise rather than a single arcade release.
The Bubble System Experiment
The original Japanese Gradius also belonged to a brief technological experiment in Konami’s arcade history.
The Bubble System stored game data using magnetic bubble memory rather than relying entirely on the conventional ROM arrangement that later became associated with many arcade boards. Machiguchi remembered the new 16-bit hardware as an important technological step for Konami, even though its memory still imposed limitations that shaped the finished game.
Konami eventually moved away from the Bubble System, and ROM-based editions of the game followed. The hardware might have become a historical curiosity if the games created for it had not survived.
Gradius did much more than survive. Modern Konami preservation efforts distinguish between the Japanese ROM and Bubble System releases and the North American and European versions. The company’s Gradius Origins collection even preserves several of these regional variations separately rather than treating the 1985 arcade game as a single universal program.
Gradius Becomes Nemesis Overseas
Players outside Japan often encountered the game under another name.
For North American and European arcade distribution, Gradius appeared as Nemesis. Surviving Konami material and modern preservation releases document both names, and the international title continued to appear on some later conversions and related games.
The overseas release did not prevent the game’s unusual mechanics from attracting attention. The October 1985 issue of Computer + Video Games devoted arcade coverage to Nemesis, placing the game before British readers only months after its Japanese debut. By February 1986, Computer Gamer was explaining the capsule and power-selection system to its own audience, showing how central that mechanic had already become to descriptions of the game.
Back in Japan, the reception was visible in contemporary arcade trade reporting. The July 1, 1985 issue of Game Machine, published only a little more than a month after the game’s debut, placed Gradius first in its table-video “Best Hit Games 25” ranking with a rating of 8.50. The chart offers unusually direct evidence that the game’s reputation was not something constructed years later by nostalgic players. Gradius had become a significant arcade title almost immediately.
Bringing Gradius Home
The next stage in the game’s history began when Konami attempted to fit the arcade experience into Nintendo’s Famicom.
The Japanese Famicom version appeared on April 25, 1986. Reproducing the arcade game exactly was impossible on the more limited hardware, so the conversion involved compromises. The number of Options was reduced, the famous long arcade Laser could not be reproduced in the same manner, and other visual details had to be reconsidered. Yet the power meter and essential structure survived well enough for the home version to become one of the most historically significant adaptations of Gradius.
Programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto later described how small Konami console teams were during this period. According to his recollection, Famicom projects could be created by only a handful of developers working for several months, and Gradius had to be approached realistically because the Nintendo hardware could display far fewer sprites than the arcade system.
One development convenience placed inside that conversion eventually became more famous than most of the compromises.
The Birth of the Konami Code
Hashimoto needed to repeatedly test the Famicom version of Gradius, but there was a practical problem. The arcade game was difficult, and he could not reliably finish it.
His solution was to place a secret command in the game that would provide the power he needed for testing. Hashimoto later explained that he chose a sequence that would be easy for him to remember. The command remained in the finished game.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A became the Konami Code.
Entering it while playing the Famicom version of Gradius provided a dramatic power boost, turning what had begun as a developer convenience into one of the most recognizable secret commands in video game history. Hashimoto’s own account is refreshingly ordinary. There was no grand plan to create a piece of gaming folklore. He needed help testing a difficult game, created something useful, and the code survived into the version sold to players.
Konami later reused variations of the command in other releases, and its fame eventually expanded far beyond the company’s shooting games. Four decades after the original Famicom conversion, Konami was still highlighting the code when presenting Gradius history to a modern audience.
It is difficult to imagine a more fitting legacy for Gradius. One of gaming’s most famous secrets grew directly from one of the game’s defining characteristics: it was hard enough that even the programmer working on the home version wanted a little extra help.
From Gradius to a Konami Shooting Dynasty
The success of Gradius gave Konami a foundation that could be expanded rather than simply repeated.
Salamander followed in 1986, experimenting with two-player action and a different approach to power-ups. Gradius II arrived in 1988 with expanded weapon selections and increasingly elaborate stages. Gradius III, later console installments, portable games, spin-offs such as Parodius, and numerous rereleases carried pieces of the original design into new hardware generations.
The vocabulary established in 1985 kept returning. Vic Viper remained recognizable. Options followed the player’s ship. Moai heads resurfaced. Capsules and power meters continued to define decisions about weapons. Bosses protected vulnerable cores. Players learned stage patterns, accumulated extraordinary firepower, lost everything to a single mistake, and struggled to rebuild.
That consistency is one reason the original game remains more than a primitive first attempt. Later entries became larger, faster, and technically more complicated, but the foundation was already remarkably complete. The core systems that made Gradius recognizable were present in the first arcade release.
The Bugs Players Made Part of the Game
Not everything players remember about Gradius was carefully planned.
Machiguchi later acknowledged that players discovered safe spots and behavior that the development team had not intentionally placed into the game. Slowdown, which could occur when the hardware struggled with everything happening on screen, could also alter the rhythm of difficult sections. Developers might normally regard such things as faults, but in Gradius some became incorporated into the way expert players understood and mastered the game.
Machiguchi considered the team fortunate that these imperfections often improved the experience instead of destroying it. Players transformed hardware behavior and programming accidents into techniques, adding another layer of knowledge to a game already built around memorizing enemy formations, managing power-ups, and preparing for difficult recovery situations.
That relationship between developer intention and player discovery became part of the character of old arcade shooters. A game might have official rules, but arcade regulars gradually uncovered another set of rules hidden inside the program.
Why Gradius Still Matters
The importance of Gradius is not that it single-handedly invented every idea associated with the shooting genre. Earlier games had scrolling landscapes, weapon improvements, science-fiction worlds, and other elements that would appear in Konami’s arcade release.
What Gradius accomplished was the combination of those ideas into a remarkably coherent system.
Its power meter made upgrading the ship a strategic choice. Its Options created both additional firepower and one of the most recognizable visual effects in arcade shooting. Its stages turned environmental identity into part of the challenge. Its checkpoint system made recovering after death almost a separate game within the game. The soundtrack gave outer space an energetic musical character, while strange ideas such as ring-firing Moai heads ensured that the world never became another anonymous collection of stars and metal corridors.
Perhaps most importantly, the developers themselves described Gradius as a product of experimentation. The team tested numerous Option movements. The power meter evolved from a less interesting item system. Three-button controls emerged through location testing. The Reverse Volcano stage grew from playing with an inversion feature. Hardware limitations created the checkpoint structure. An arcade conversion later gave birth to the Konami Code because its programmer needed an easier way to test it.
That history makes Gradius an unusually revealing example of how classic games were actually made. Its most famous qualities did not all arrive fully formed in a design document. They were argued over, tested, altered, discovered by accident, or forced into existence by technical limitations.
Forty years after its arcade debut, Konami returned to that history with Gradius Origins, preserving the Japanese Bubble System and ROM editions alongside regional Nemesis versions and later arcade games. The care given to preserving those variations is a reminder that Gradius is no longer merely an old shooter available through emulation or compilation. It has become an artifact of video game history whose different releases, hardware, music, development stories, and even mistakes are worth documenting.
What began inside Konami as Scramble 2 ultimately became something far more important. The Vic Viper escaped the shadow of its predecessor, survived the Bubble System that first carried it, crossed from Gradius to Nemesis and back again, entered millions of homes through console conversions, and accidentally carried one of gaming’s most famous codes with it.
The developers had set out to make a horizontal shooter capable of standing beside Xevious. In doing so, they created another standard against which the shooters that followed would be measured.
Sources & Further Reading
Konami Digital Entertainment. “GRADIUS ORIGINS.” Konami. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.konami.com/games/gradius/us/en/
Konami Digital Entertainment. “Happy 30th Birthday Gradius!” 2015. https://www.konami.com/games/eu/fr/topics/4838/
Konami Digital Entertainment. “Arcade Archives GRADIUS.” Konami. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.konami.com/games/jp/ja/products/dl_ps4_gradius_arch/
Konami Digital Entertainment. “Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection.” Konami Support. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://eu-support.konami.com/hc/en-gb/articles/9647845443479-Arcade-Classics-Anniversary-Collection
Konami Digital Entertainment. “GRADIUS ORIGINS Announced for August 7.” March 27, 2025. https://www.konami.com/games/us/en/topics/2835/
Konami Digital Entertainment. “GRADIUS ORIGINS Launches Today.” August 7, 2025. https://www.konami.com/games/ca/en/topics/2963/
Nintendo. “Arcade Archives GRADIUS.” Nintendo eShop. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/arcade-archives-gradius-switch/
Nintendo. “Arcade Archives VS. GRADIUS.” Nintendo eShop. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/arcade-archives-vs-gradius-switch/
Konami. Gradius/Nemesis Operators Manual. 1985. International Arcade Museum. https://www.arcade-museum.com/manuals-videogames/N/Nemesis.pdf
Konami. Nemesis. U.S. sales flyer. 1985. International Arcade Museum, Arcade Flyer Archive. https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/videogames/show/681
Konami. Nemesis. European sales flyer. 1985. International Arcade Museum, Arcade Flyer Archive. https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/videogames/show/680
Konami. Nemesis. German sales flyer. 1985. International Arcade Museum, Arcade Flyer Archive. https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/videogames/show/5895
Nintendo. VS. Gradius. Sales flyer. 1985–86. International Arcade Museum, Arcade Flyer Archive. https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/videogames/show/1267
Konami. Gradius / Last Mission. European sales flyer. 1986. International Arcade Museum, Arcade Flyer Archive. https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/videogames/show/4599
Game Machine. No. 260. May 15, 1985. https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/pdf/19850515p.pdf
Game Machine. No. 262. June 15, 1985. https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/pdf/19850615p.pdf
Game Machine. No. 263. July 1, 1985. “Best Hit Games 25.” https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/pdf/19850701p.pdf
Game Machine. August 15, 1985. “Best Hit Games 25.” https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/pdf/19850815p.pdf
Game Machine. July 15, 1986. First-half 1986 rankings. https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/pdf/19860715p.pdf
Game Machine. January 15, 1987. Second-half 1986 rankings. https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/pdf/19870115p.pdf
“Arcade Action: Nemesis.” Computer + Video Games, no. 48, October 1985. https://solvalou.com/arcade/reviews/219/595
“Coin-Op Connection.” Computer Gamer, no. 11, February 1986. https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gamer_Issue_11_1986-02_Argus_Press_GB/page/n53/mode/2up
“1986 Best Hit Game Awards.” Famicom Tsūshin, February 6, 1987. https://retoge-mag.websa.jp/archives/211
“1986 Top Ten Coin-Ops.” Sinclair User, no. 59, February 1987. https://archive.org/details/sinclair-user-magazine-059/page/n94/mode/1up
Headley, Eric. “Nemesis.” Commodore User, no. 42, March 1987. https://archive.org/details/commodore-user-magazine-42/page/n17/mode/2up
Nintendo. VS. Gradius advertisement. Play Meter, February 1987. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter/1987-February/1
Machiguchi, Hiroyasu. “Gradius: 1999 Developer Interview.” Game Hihyou, September 1999. Translated by Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/gradius/
Machiguchi, Hiroyasu. “Gradius: 1996 Developer Interview.” Translated by Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/gradius/
Nagata, Akihiko. “Konami Shooting-Game Interview.” 1993. Translated excerpt by Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/gradius/
Nakamura, Kengo. “Gradius I.” In Gradius Portable Guide developer interviews. 2006. Translated by Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/gpg-gradius/
Higashino, Miki. “Interview with Miki Higashino.” Video Game Music Online. https://vgmonline.net/mikihigashinointerview/
Hashimoto, Kazuhisa, and Shigeharu Umezaki. “Good-Bye Family Computer.” 2003. Translated by GlitterBerri. https://glitterberri.com/developer-interviews/konami-the-nintendo-era/
“Konami History.” Retro Gamer, no. 53, July 2008. https://electronicsandbooks.com/edt/manual/Magazine/R/Retro%20Gamer%20UK/53.pdf
“The Definitive Gradius.” Retro Gamer, no. 24. https://electronicsandbooks.com/edt/manual/Magazine/R/Retro%20Gamer%20UK/24.pdf
Jones, Darran. “The Retro Gamer Guide to Gradius.” Retro Gamer, no. 251. https://pocketmags.com/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-251/articles/the-retro-gamer-guide-to
Kalata, Kurt. “The History of Gradius: A Look Back at 30 Years of Konami Shooting.” Game Developer, April 30, 2015. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-history-of-i-gradius-i-a-look-back-at-30-years-of-konami-shooting
Kalata, Kurt. “Gradius.” Hardcore Gaming 101. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/gradius/
Famitsu. “The Day the Arcade Version of Gradius Began Operation.” May 29, 2024. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202405/6202
Famitsu. “The Day the Famicom Version of Gradius Was Released.” April 25, 2024. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202404/3124?page=1
Game Culture Preservation Institute. “Gamest Writers Roundtable on Gradius.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://igcc.jp/gwc-01/
Game Culture Preservation Institute. “Interview with Arcade Operator Kenji Ishii.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://igcc.jp/ntk_int-02/
International Arcade Museum. “Nemesis.” Killer List of Videogames. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videogame/nemesis
System 16. “Konami Bubble System Hardware.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=559
System 16. “Konami Nemesis Hardware.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=558
Akagi, Masumi. Arcade TV Game List: Domestic • Overseas Edition (1971–2005). Tokyo: Amusement Press, 2006. https://archive.org/details/ArcadeGameList1971-2005/page/n123
Famitsu. “Gradius Origins Interview.” March 2025. https://www.famitsu.com/article/202503/37797
Alpert, Ron. “Retro Game of the Day! Gradius.” Game Developer, 2009. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/retro-game-of-the-day-gradius
“40 Years of Gradius: Konami’s King of Arcade Shmup.” Old School Gamer Magazine, 2025. https://www.oldschoolgamermagazine.com/40-years-of-gradius-konamis-king-of-arcade-shmup/
“Portable Pedigree: The History of Gradius, or Was That Nemesis?” Pocket Gamer, 2009. https://www.pocketgamer.com/portable-pedigree/portable-pedigree-the-history-of-gradius-or-was-that-nemesis/