Parodius began as a Konami arcade game in 1988, an open parody of its own Gradius series that swaps serious spaceships for absurd characters — the penguin Pentarou, the octopus Octopus, a duck-faced Vic Viper — without giving up an ounce of the original's difficulty or power-up structure. Its MSX2 conversion, released as Parodius Da!, brought that visual humor and technical rigor to Japanese home hardware, at a time when Konami already ruled the horizontal shooter genre with barely any rivals. It's proof that Konami could laugh at its own formula without ever taking the design behind it any less seriously.
This system doesn't run in the browser yet (Dreamcast, GameCube, PS2 and Xbox are on the way as web emulation matures). The dossier, media and community are already all yours.
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