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The NES port of Gradius was one of the first home versions of the popular arcade game released. It was also Konami's first NES game. Unbeknownst to most people (but knownst to us) Konami included a secret message in the game. It was only accessible by holding the A and B buttons down while turning on the power. The screen would flash grey, then the following would come up, followed by the title screen:

I think it's fairly obvious what this means. KONAMI ONE = Konami's first NES game. GRADIUS ONE = Gradius #1. The puzzler here is why would Konami include this message in the game in the first place? There's no purpose to it. It doesn't open up any extra things in the game. It serves no purpose whatsoever other than to tell you that Konami's first NES game was Gradius.

Of course, maybe that's why they put it there. We may never know.

UPDATE 03/03/03 - Hotaka has some new info that seems to explain the true meaning behind this message:

Gradius for Famicom also has the hidden message. The hidden message is actually a ROM-CHECKING program. If the CRC ROM is wrong, the displayed message is "TEN". Maybe, the KONAMI part of the message is PRG-ROM checking and the GRADIUS part of the message is CHR-ROM checking.

Your explanation sounds better than mine, Hotaka. ^_^

UPDATE 02/16/04 - Another hidden message has been found! The time, it's in the game The Goonies II. To activate it, just follow the same procedure as you would to activate the Gradius message.

Thanks to davidbrit2 for the heads up on this one!