The original Gradius arcade game, officially released May 29, 1985 to arcades, is a milestone to both the genre and the industry at large. Outside of Japan, though, I think a lot of people are more likely familiar with the NES port, which is frankly not all that great when compared to the other ones that hit Japan home systems — the MSX version is wonderful, for example, but I’ll get to that later.

Gradius is also the sort of game where nothing random ever occurs, and you can therefore put together patterns to get your ship through the entire game without going anywhere near danger. You can see the basic pattern for the first loop through the game in the video above, a simple “I busted out my PCB for the first time in a while” job that thankfully includes the entire “Morning Music” startup sequence.

In the mid-80s, achieving a score of 10,000,000 points in Gradius was seen as something of a status symbol. The feat takes about 7-8 hours of straight playing and requires you to beat the game and loop through the stages 20 to 21 times, depending on how diligent you are with padding your score when possible.

What red-blooded ’80s boy, no matter which side of the ocean he lived near, didn’t have a poster of the Ferrari Testarossa in his bedroom? One that always depicted the supercar of all supercars framed around a matte-black background, maybe with a few white clouds of smoke around the sides for effect? Anyone who didn’t was a dweeb, a dork, a Sega Master System owner, and no doubt they’re the ones busing your table at the Steakountry Buffet this evening. Make sure to give them a decent tip, because c’mon, man, they had a hard life, they’re driving beige Camrys, they don’t know no better.

Since few of us have actually sat inside a Testarossa, it’s not well-known that the Italian speedster can operate at its top spec speed of 294 km/h on literally any type of road surface — tarmac, sand, grass, the Pacific Ocean. Yes, the Ferrari Testarossa is fully submersible. Italy, you know, it’s a very high-water-table country. Flash floods kind of creep up on you. It’s a safety feature.

Yu Suzuki, being a man of refined automobile tastes, naturally knew that. That’s why, if you carefully shift gears in a high-low-high pattern on the edge of the road, you can run over any sort of terrain you like in Out Run for up to seven seconds without any speed penalty while the game tries to figure out where you’re going. It’s a feature (I wouldn’t dare call it a bug, for doing so would suggest that the Testarossa is not the divine vehicle for the soul which it is) that became household knowlege in Japan after Gamest and other mags brought it up in their strategy guides in 1987.

Unfortunately, the timing behind this move can be pretty tricky, and most gamers flailed away at the arcade cabinet’s gearshift like a hummingbird trying to search for just the right technique. This led to a lot of broken gearshifts and signs in Japanese arcades threatening to kick punters out of the establishment for gia-gacha (gear-rattling) play. MAME, and automatic rapid-fire, make it a lot easier these days.

The same trick can also be pulled off in Turbo Out Run, but in no other Out Run game after that — an homage to the original Testarossa model getting phased out of production in 1991, no doubt. Right? Right?

I’ve got fond memories of this. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that it’s my favorite “sprite-scaling” arcade racer of all time; certainly it’s the pinnacle of the sub-genre, which got its start with Out Run back in 1986. It’s packed with awesome little details, from the hilarious voice work to the way your avatar adjusts his gloves right after the start of the game — and no, you can’t control the car while he’s doing this.

The first game on Sega’s System 32 platform (and therefore the first 32-bit arcade game ever), Rad Mobile is neat partly because of its sheer length. A successful trip through Out Run takes about six to eight minutes; crossing the USA in Rad Mobile takes up to eighteen. It’s a test of concentration, especially in the later stages where the roads narrow and get packed full with cars driving at high speed and switching lanes without signaling — a very realistic simulation of East Coast traffic, even today.

Sega released a port called Gale Racer for the Saturn in Japan, but it’s not very good — I mean, the cars are 3D models, for Chrissakes.

Also worth noting: This game actually beat out Sonic the Hedgehog, the Genesis game, to market by about five months, making this (believe it or not) the character’s video-game debut. Wikipedia has no citation for this, but my copy of Famitsu DC’s Sega Arcade History — itself a collector’s item these days, going for 5000 yen or so in the aftermarket shops — confirms the dates.

As if to answer yesterday’s prayers, I managed to track down a video of someone (Japanese, of course) finishing Marble Madness, the arcade original, at very high speed while recording his hands working the trackball. The three minutes and change it comprises are jaw-dropping.

“Recorded 12/30/2008 at Shinjuku MIKADO. ‘Marble Madness is a sport,’ as they say, so I threw up a video I had handy. An utterly stupid mistake on the last stage keeps me from finishing with 99 seconds, but otherwise it’s a relatively decent run. If I can get a flawless run on video, I’d like to update this.”

I knew about the Silly Maze shortcut, but not the one right at the very end. Sheesh!

THE BLUE CRYSTAL ROD
  KEPT THE KINGDOM IN PEACE

BUT THE EVIL DEMON DRUAGA
  HID THE ROD
   AND THE MAIDEN KI
     IN A TOWER

THE PRINCE GILGAMESH
 WEARED GOLD ARMOR
  AND ATTACKED MONSTERS
   TO HELP KI IN
    THE TOWER OF DRUAGA

The Tower of Druaga is quite possibly my favorite Namco game of all time. It introduced the concept of role-playing games to a wide Japanese audience before Dragon Quest existed; it has neat characters and audiovisuals; it’s oddly addictive; it’s a direct challenge to hardcore players from hardcore game developers.

Masanobu Endo, designer of Druaga, began working on the game as a side diversion while he was busy learning assembly language on the 6809, the chip Namco was slated to use in their arcade boards starting with Super Pac-Man. From here I’ll let Endo explain the rest, from when he answered questions publicly on 2ch in 2001:

“In order to get this game released to the public, I wanted to follow these core concepts:

So, really, the difficulty of the game didn’t affect the project getting greenlit one bit — I mean, this was a C-grade ROM swap, after all. It wasn’t going to make or break the company either way, and the fact that such an epoch-making title got created in that situation really shows how much Namco cared about the craft of video games, I feel. The only mistake, if you could call it that, is that we had planned to install the game only in Namco-owned arcades, but it wound up earning so much that we actually had to manufacture new boards to satisfy demand.”

Yes, Druaga is ridiculously difficult. No, there’s no way you could ever figure out how to get all the treasures singlehandedly. But Druaga succeeded in 1984 because it forced arcade rats to work together, writing down their discoveries in public notebooks and pooling their wits (and 100-yen coins) together to get to the end. It created a community, in other words, just like Street Fighter eventually did — one that wrote strategy guides and dojinshi in droves. In a way, Druaga solidified the concept of a “game fandom” in Japan more than any other individual game.

It’s a game I like enough that I beat it on Virtual Console Arcade back when it came out — and I figured I’d take a Japanese walkthrough of the game and annotate it for your entertainment. The video’s in 4 parts and each part should play automatically after the previous one ends. Hope you enjoy watchin’ it.

One of my favorite Taito arcade games, and also one that had a lot of okay home ports (I memorized all the warps in the NES’s Kiwi Kraze back in the day) but no really definitive ones until MAME. The PC Engine version is missing assorted enemies and the Heaven stages; the Mega Drive version features different stages; the Amiga version, probably the most commercially successful one ‘cos it was packed in with the computer in the UK for a while, has nerfed balloons (hah); even the X68000 version sports weapons and enemies that work a little different from the original.

This is one of those games that punishes you because it loves you. The controls when riding balloons are ridiculously difficult. Learn the warps, and things get easier — as you’ll see, you don’t need to actually complete a level until 3-1.

A lot of people don’t know about Heaven because it tended not to show up in the home ports we got out West. After 2-4, if you lose your last life by getting hit with a projectile weapon, Tiki will be sent to one of three Heavens depending on what stage you reached. For “heaven,” it’s a pretty dangerous place. If you can reach the goddess at the end of the Heaven stage, you’ll get a special sort of Game Over; if you can find the secret exit out, you’ll fall all the way back down to Earth, get rewarded with one more life, and warp on to the next stage. (The player in this video takes advantage of this to skip most of 4-4, which is a huge pain in the ass and definitely the hardest stage in the game.)

The slightly unforgettable music, so lovingly remixed by Tim Follin for Kiwi Kraze, was composed by Yasuko Yamada, her first work in games. She hasn’t done much for the game business lately; her most well-known credits are probably Bust-a-Move 1 and 2. (Randomly, she also seems to be responsible for the soundtrack from the first Flintstones NES game.)

This means that I can now link lovely, long, full-sized TAS and classic video-game clips (of which Nico has about a million) without requiring you to fill out a complex Japanese-language form in order to get an account. Great news for everyone, I think you’ll agree. (Don’t forget to click the “…” balloon on the lower right to turn off scrolly Japanese reader comments.)

To celebrate I want to talk about Baraduke, a 1985 game that Namco never ported to anything until Namco Museum Volume 5 in 1997. The game was designed by Yukio “Takky” Takahashi, who also worked on Genpei Tōmaden and later contributed to assorted D3 Publisher games; the programmer was Yoshihiro “Kissy” Kishimoto, who later became famous as the chief mind behind the Family Stadium series. Yuriko Keino, who (along with Junko Ozawa) revolutionized the concept of “game music” in arcade titles like Dig Dug and Xevious, handled sound in this game; Ozawa herself is the voice behind “I’m Your FRIEND-O” at the beginning.

As you watch the above video, you’ll probably note that Baraduke looks a lot like Metroid, from the atmosphere to the color of the hero. This game came out a year before Metroid, and considering the similarities (including the twist at the ending if you stick around for it), you can’t help but wonder if Nintendo took at least a weensy bit of inspiration from this game.

This runthrough is all about getting as high a score as possible, which means two things: the player racks up extra lives like a fiend (since they’re transformed into points at the end), and he also shoots down the first 20 Paccets he sees, which unlocks hidden pickups — actually unflattering portraits of Kissy and Takky — worth a total of 30,000 points. That’s nothing to sniff at in Baraduke, which is pretty frugal with the points, but shooting all these Paccets means going without any shield upgrades whatsoever for the opening of the game, which makes things extremely difficult around Floor 10 or so. (This was one of the few arcade games, really, where enemy bullets were as quick as yours. That makes things seem nearly impossible for beginners, then and now. If you don’t believe me, try it.)

Here’s the second half, starting at Floor 31. Note how the largest level in the game (31) is immediately followed by the smallest (32). Also note the Pac-Man stage a little before the halfway mark.

This game is so cute. I can’t stop watching for some reason.

One of the two games that inspired SonSon II, which I covered last week. Yep, again.

For a 1987 arcade game, this one has a great deal of RPG elements. The setting is pure, hard, manly fantasy, with you bashing up enemies and opening treasure chests and all of those stereotypically RPG-y things. You can also buy weapons, armor and medicine at shops, something that it seemed like every video game in 1987 fell over themselves to implement somehow.

Remarkably, Black Dragon (the Japanese name for Black Tiger) and Sega’s Wonder Boy in Monster Land hit Japanese arcades on the same month, sharing a lot of the same RPG/action fusion elements. Sega’s game is a fair bit cutesier than this one, though, the game that served as the foundation for later titles like Magic Sword and the D&D series.

SonSon featured a few hidden characters, but Black Tiger is packed to the gills with ‘em — cows, Yashichi (and its cousin Sakichi), “Pow,” bamboo sprouts, barrels, dragonflies, the main character from Sidearms, and so on and so on and so on. There’s also a hidden octopus, which (rare for Capcom titles) made an appearance in this game and this game only. See if you can find it in the videos!

The music of Black Tiger is another Tamayo Kawamoto work — a very interesting soundtrack, one that takes a common theme and produces variations on it as you go through the levels. Very movie-like for 1987.

One of the two games that inspired SonSon II, which I covered last week. Capcom was born as an independent entity in 1984, when Irem founder Kenzo Tsujimoto left his company after a hostile takeover and created a new one chiefly with ex-Namco employees; this is their second game ever and the first one that Yoshiki Okamoto (fresh from Konami, where he did Time Pilot and Gyruss) created for them.

In an interview segment aired on an episode of Game Center CX, Okamoto explained that SonSon didn’t start out as a Journey to the West-themed game, exactly. Instead, the concept began as simply a game that featured a pig (because Capcom thought that a pig character would be readily accept among American and European audiences) and a monkey (because they figured Japanese people would like monkeys more).

I’m not sure it amounted to anything, considering I never heard of SonSon until I started collecting Famicom games in Japan. The Micronics-developed Famicom port is an awful, flickery mess, but the arcade game is much better.

Like pretty much all Capcom titles in the ’80s, SonSon features the “Pow” and Yashichi symbols prominently. Okamoto stated that these symbols were part of an effort to give Capcom’s games something unique and immediately identifiable. That worked a lot better, I think. Some power-ups from this game, including the bamboo sprout, would themselves become regulars in subsequent Capcom titles as well. (The “Yashichi,” by the way, is meant to be a pinwheel. It’s named after Kazaguruma no Yashichi, a ninja that appears in Mito Koumon and uses shuriken with pinwheels on ‘em as his weapon.)

SonSon is a simple co-op shooter with deceptively complex scoring rules. The entire playfield is littered with non-random small foods worth 10-100 points each. Pick up six of these, and a “jumbo food” worth 1000-10,000 points appears depending on the point value of the small food you grabbed. “Pow” (which turns all enemies onscreen into jumbo food) appears in certain rare locations or if you eat 8 jumbo foods; the bamboo sprout shows up when you walk over certain locations. The Yashichi, worth 4000 points (it’ll sometimes display other point scores up to 10,000, but a bug prevents you from actually earning anything besides 4000 points), shows up if you can clear out a fortress within 20 seconds.

Click on the above video to see what co-op play meant in 1984-era video arcades. Also click it to hear some early work from Tamayo Kawamoto, a lady who handled a lot of Capcom’s soundtracks around this era (Commando, Black Tiger, Legendary Wings, Tiger Road, Ghouls’n Ghosts, Forgotten Worlds, etc).