Kick Off Your Week With a Little Morning Music

Kick Off Your Week With a Little Morning Music

The perfect cure for a sluggish Monday morning start.

New day. New week. New month. Why not get things started the right way with some “Morning Music”?

It seems only fitting, in light of Gradius’ recent anniversary and the arrival of the Gradius Origins set. “Morning Music” is a major part of Gradius’ identity—though of course you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you’ve only played home ports.

“Morning Music” was a tune built into the original Gradius arcade cabinet (as well as a handful of other Konami coin-ops, including TwinBee). You know how some cars require a little bit of a post-ignition warmup before they hit the road? The Gradius arcade machine was kind of like that. Except that instead of just bombarding you with the sounds of, say, a Skyactiv engine warming up, Gradius serenaded you with this charming melody.

The developers included “Morning Music” to mask the fact that the 1985 Gradius machine used an innovative storage system called Bubble Memory. The idea was to create a substitute for costly integrated ROM chips that would be less susceptible to magnetic erasure than diskettes or tape. According to System-16, that plan didn’t precisely work out; the Bubble Memory system ended up being fairly pricey in practice, and it didn’t respond well to electromagnetic radiation. So it proved to be a short-lived experiment, though no less admirable an attempt despite its failure.

Anyway, like a lot of magnetic analogue technologies in the 1980s, Bubble Memory had fairly slow access speeds, so it couldn’t be used like a ROM chip (which moves memory around at the speed of electricity along a circuit). In order to run a Bubble Memory machine, an arcade operator needed to warm up the hardware to its optimal temperature—standard room temp being too low for ideal performance—and then load the entire game program into volatile RAM. This process took a few minutes, which left a Gradius machine sitting idle for longer than the boot cycles of other cabinets. Thus: “Morning Music”, a pleasant little ditty that would loop during the startup process and give you reason to sit through the longer-than-usual launch period.

And you know what? It worked! Aging arcade rats speak of “Morning Music” fondly. And why wouldn’t they? It’s a wonderful little bit of chiptune magic. But would you expect anything less from the Konami Kukeiha Club?