This is the tale of the Konami Code!
It all began when a small team of developers at Konami were then given the task of porting the arcade game Gradius- a tough side scrolling shooter released in 1985, onto the Nintendo Entertainment System.
But, one of the developers, Kazuhisa Hashimoto, hadn't played much of the notoriously difficult arcade game and found it too hard. So, he cheated. He programmed in an easy to remember, magical combination of button presses to grant him every power up in the game: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A - the Konami code!
Legend has it, he simply forgot to take the code out when the game was released, and whether it was through sheer random chance or simple fate, players soon discovered the powerful code, and knowledge of it slowly began to spread.
However, Gradius never was that popular. And it wasn't until the much more successful, but equally brutal game, Contra, that the code found its real fame after being published in a magazine.
In Contra a single shot could end your game, which was excellent for getting spare change pumped into arcade cabinets, but slightly more frustrating when you owned the game at home. So with the power of the Konami code, NES players were granted the ability to instantly receive thirty extra lives.
Due to its popularity in Contra, it also became known as the 'contra code', and the 'thirty lives code'. And due to its power and easy to remember inputs, it has since gone on to feature hundreds of times in games, websites and throughout pop-culture.
