Konami Code poster - Kazuhisa Hashimoto



Up. Up. Down. Down. Left. Right. Left. Right. B. A. Start. Today, the man responsible for the greatest cheat code in history, Kazuhisa Hashimoto, has passed away. He was 61.


The code was originally used in the 1986 game Gradius as Hashimoto was responsible for converting it from arcade to NES. Due to the game's extreme difficulty, he added the cheat code to help him finish. However, he forgot to take the code out before the game was shipped and that's how the legend began.


The code became widely known through its use in the insanely hard 1988 NES classic Contra, where it gave the player 30 lives. It even went as far as being dubbed the "Contra code." In addition to being used in many other Konami games, the code spread through popular culture including many television shows and movies


The company and many fans took to Twitter today to pay their respects.

















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