The player controls the Vic Viper in Konami’s 1985 arcade game Gradius. This blue spacecraft travels through side-scrolling stages and gains equipment by collecting power capsules and selecting upgrades along a power meter.
The Vic Viper’s available enhancements include missiles, multiple options, a force field, and speed improvements. The “Options” are floating satellite units that imitate the ship’s movement and fire alongside it, giving the player a major offensive advantage. Managing the power meter is central to surviving Gradius’s increasingly difficult stages.
Gradius was released in Japan in 1985 and became a major example of the horizontally scrolling shoot-’em-up genre. Its Japanese title was Gradius, while the series used different names in some regions. The ship is sometimes confused with spacecraft from other Konami shooters, especially R-Type’s R-9, but the Vic Viper is specifically associated with Gradius.