Gradius began as a 1985 arcade shoot ’em up from Konami, developed under the working title Scramble 2 as a spiritual successor to the studio’s earlier Scramble, and it became one of the biggest arcade hits of the following year. Konami ported it to the Famicom in April 1986 and brought it to the NES in North America that December as the company’s first NES release in the region, with the Famicom version alone selling over a million copies in Japan. The console hardware forced some real cutbacks, including simplified level layouts and dropping the maximum number of Options, the ship’s orbiting drone weapons, from four down to two, and it was during this port that developer Kazuhisa Hashimoto, finding the game too punishing to test repeatedly, built in a pause-screen cheat that grants nearly every power-up at once. That code went on to appear in later Konami NES games including Contra, eventually becoming famous worldwide simply as the Konami Code. Players pilot the Vic Viper starfighter through Gradius’s iconic segmented power-up meter, choosing exactly which upgrade to activate next as they blast through waves of Bacterion forces and the series’ signature environmental hazards like the Moai stage.