The One That Started It All... by Jedekai on December 14, 2008
Rating: 8/10
For those of you that don't know, Scramble is better known by its Stateside name - Gradius Zero.
It was the original Sh'mup (Shoot-'em-up) and debuted in 1981 at CES in Las Vegas, NV courtesy of an unknown Japanese company riding the coattails of Taito's Space Invaders and holding the booth next to the soon-to-be-juggernaut Nintendo. While The Big N's offering that year was an ape chucking barrels down an uncompleted high-rise (you know it as Donkey Kong) Konami was trying something far more experimental.
They were trying a method where instead of the usual, "Pump a new quarter in every 3.5 minutes" strategy of game design that every other company was trying to perfect, they decided to do something incredibly forward-thinking for the time:
Reward the player for playing well with power-ups and upgrades instead of just more lives to lose.
The combination was met largely with skepticism from arcade owners and, most importantly, chain owners, but Konami was certain that they had something here. So some small chain of arcades called Chuck E. Cheese decided to buy 100 of the units and stick them in their mall and strip mall locations throughout the Plains and Midwest regions. The machines were so popular (and, showing Konami's less-than-bottomless bankroll) that the actual joystick mounts were breaking from overuse.
Realizing that what Japan had missed out on that same year (the game did VERY poorly over there) and the United States had loved they kept pumping th machines out until mid 1983 when development went to work on "The Viper", a sequel to the game which was completed and renamed Gradius (though Vic Viper is still, to this day, the protagonist ship/pilot in the series).
The game, however, held up to Gradius 1 does not offer the same twitch-based gameplay the successor does, it is a clunky and slow-moving affair until you get your third "Speed Up". Also, the bosses are frightfully easy and the graphics look like the then-mythically powerful Z80 was told to make them out of Lego blocks.
All in all, this game isn't a very good aging one, but it is the definitive start of unarguably the most "Hardcore" of video game genres and is well worth checking out to see what the origin of what is frequently called "The Genre That Will Not Die" (it deserves the capitalization after being resurrected more times than an MMO character, thank you) created in it's indisputably mighty and historic wake.
