The Super Play Top 100 was the 1990’s SNES culture magazine’s final ranking of the 16-bit system’s catalogue, mere months before the publication ended. This regular monthly feature takes a look back at each title, how it fared back then and how it fares now. This month: Side-scrolling shooter manic mayhem.
Game Title: Parodius
Developer: Konami
Release dates:
3rd July 1992 (JPN)
1st December 1992 (EU)
The Super Nintendo had no shortage of games that took themselves very seriously indeed. Their spaceships were aerodynamic, their explosions orange, and their pilots were forever saving galaxies that had done nothing special to deserve it. Parodius arrived like a custard pie to the face of that entire tradition — and, miraculously, it flew better than a lot of the serious ships.
To describe Parodius as a parody of Gradius is rather like describing Don Quixote as a parody of chivalric romance. Technically correct, but missing the point, which is that the joke keeps going long after it stops being funny, in theory. What Konami produced — and then somehow kept producing with future sequels — was a shoot ’em up whose real subject wasn’t space warfare, but the genre itself: its pomposity, its musical bombast, its belief that the presence of lasers automatically entitles you to grandeur. But what did Super Play have to say, to ensure its inclusion in the top 100 games of the Super Nintendo?
“Essentially Gradius on hallucinogens, with delightfully remixed versions of a number of well-known pieces of music and boss characters to make you weep with disbelief, this is an old shoot-’em-up with lots going for it. If you’re not familiar with Gradius, well, what the hec have you been doing for the last ten years? Pressing flowers? We shall explain: It’s a forced horizontally scrolling shooter whose most novel contribution to the genre is the concept of ‘multiples’ - little pods which follow your ship and act as companions. Do you see?”
The Super Famicom version is the point at which the series became domestic, intimate — the sort of thing that could be absorbed in a bedroom rather than an arcade. This matters. Parodius is not a game you confront. It’s a game you live with. It wants you relaxed, alert, and just slightly incredulous.
On the surface, it behaves impeccably. The power-up bar is straight Gradius: speed, missile, double, laser, option. Anyone who has ever spent too much money learning that system will feel instantly at home. But before the comfort has time to become complacency, you realise you are firing bells, fighting penguins, dodging pastel cherubs, and being menaced by bosses that look like escaped props from a deranged pantomime. Your Vic Viper may be replaced by an octopus, a penguin, or something best described as a floating joke with hit points.
The genius of Parodius is that it never relaxes the difficulty to compensate for the silliness. The bullets come just as fast. The patterns are just as cruel. The penalty for cockiness remains instant annihilation. The game laughs at you, but it never lets you off. This is not comedy as mercy; it’s comedy as misdirection. The music deserves special mention, not because it’s funny (although it absolutely is), but because it’s cultured in a way video games rarely dared to be at the time. Classical themes are rearranged with a knowing wink that assumes you might recognise them — or at least feel that you ought to. Wagner, Offenbach, Khachaturian: all repurposed to accompany scenes of airborne nonsense. It is as if the orchestra pit has been tipped into the funfair, and no one bothered to pick it back up.
What Parodius demonstrated is that genre mastery allows satire without sabotage. Konami could only make this joke because they knew exactly how the straight version worked. The game doesn’t mock Gradius from the outside. It inhabits it, rearranges the furniture, and then puts a rubber chicken on the mantelpiece. There is also, in retrospect, a melancholy undertone. Parodius comes from an era when big publishers were willing to be frivolous with their own intellectual property, before branding departments developed the sort of humourlessness usually associated with minor dictators. Today, this kind of self-parody would be focus-tested into extinction. Back then, it was simply allowed to happen.
Which brings us neatly to why Parodius endures, while many technically superior shooters have become museum pieces. It understands that games are not remembered for their systems alone, but for their tone. Parodius has tone in abundance: anarchic, confident, faintly smug, but justified. It knows it’s clever. Worse — it’s right. If Super Play’s Top 100 list exists to remind us why the SNES mattered, Parodius earns its place by proving that the console could host games that were not only good, but knowing — games that recognised their own absurdity and weaponised it. It is a shoot ’em up that shoots holes in the seriousness of shoot ’em ups, and still hits every target. You can’t really ask more than that.
