(laughs)Įarly enemy sketches, after the switch to a mecha design. One of our earlier designs looked like the manbow fish. The character design for Big Core underwent numerous changes, however. Since Salamander, we’ve had different bosses for each stage, but we had no plans for that with Gradius. (laughs) By the way, the reason the final boss doesn’t fire anything is because we felt it was hard enough just getting to this final point, so let’s just give the programm–I mean, the player, a break… (laughs) Big Core

The idea was that you’d get so excited seeing it, like “huh, what the hell is this!”, that you’d get nervous and run into it, losing a ship! Well, that would only work once of course. The reason the last boss is a brain is because none of us could come up with any other designs. We actually had wanted to make you go inside the barrier and dodge a bunch of things. The magnetic barrier poses almost no threat, (laughs) since you can just avoid it by going to the edge of the screen. Well, this will be nothing but excuses, but… we were working on this stage up till the very last minute and had no time at all, so it was almost entirely a rush job. At first it didn’t go toward the players, and it didn’t shoot bullets either, so it was a pretty useless enemy. One problem we had was that, while it looked visually impressive, it was very difficult to incorporate into the game. We made each little pachinko ball (cell) in his arm move individually, and everyone was amazed at how, in a short time, the design had become so realistic, disturbing, and gross.

Then one day, the director told us “make a character that looks like a pachinko ball.” Then, after about two days I believe, we came up with the creeping movement of the tentacles.

But we were very worried whether our hardware at the time could properly convey the right popping, writhing organic feel for the cells. My boss, who was both programmer and director, had been saying that he really wanted to include an organic stage in Gradius. I think that Tentacle stage was completed more by the determination and technical expertise of the programmers than the designers. We wanted something weirder, so we decided to make a stage with organic cells squirming all around. We thought the game would be too plain if the stages were only ruins. The programmers did complain a lot though. In the end, Gradius wasn’t developed by just following pre-existing rules and specifications rather, many of our insights were the result of experimentation, and we wasted a lot of time, but that’s how the game was created. It also looked like you were in outer space, and the gameplay was fresh too, so we used it as the “Reverse Volcano” stage. When we did that, we realized that having everything “upside down” conveyed a certain feeling of discomfiture, in a good sense. One day we were testing the vertical inversion hardware feature, and we tried inverting the volcano stage as an experiment. Though now when I think of it, I don’t really know why I thought they should be shooting rings from their mouths. (laughs) I said we can’t just leave it like this, and so I worked hard with the background designer, suggesting they shoot rings from their mouths and can be destroyed. But I personally thought the Moai were memorable characters and I really wanted to add them. Stage 3: MoaiĪt first the Moai were just part of the background, and I remember it wasn’t very interesting. From that we got the image for Moai or Stonehenge floating on a continent in outer space, and everyone thought “this is cool!” That was the origin of those creative stage designs.

As we talked about what the theme for each stage would be, the idea came up for ancient ruins and mysterious fantasy worlds. Originally, we had the basic idea for Gradius that you would warp to a different dimension for each stage. His major works for Konami include Contra, Ajax, and Kyuukyoku Sentai Dadandaan. Responsible for the basic world setting and enemy characters. Participated in Gradius from the planning stage.

Gradius gaiden