Thirty Lives, Minus One

I recently learned on Twitter that Konami developer Kazuhisa Hashimoto, creator of the iconic "Konami code," has died at the age of 61. I've got a lot of memories of this lengthy, yet easy to remember series of button inputs... it was essential for less skilled players to finish games like Contra, and when the Super NES was released, it was used to troll gamers who'd gotten too dependent on it. Enter the classic Konami code in Gradius III and it seems to work for a couple of seconds, until your ship explodes. Turns out that you have to change the left and right in the code to the left and right trigger buttons on the top of the Super NES controller to make it work properly. Pretty sneaky, Kaz!

I even slipped the code into one of my own games back in 2005. Press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right on the joystick in Solar Plexus, then flip the left difficulty switch on the back of the Atari 2600 from B to A. Once you press fire, you're taken to a simple game of Pong, where the paddle reads "I am not" and the ball is the classic four flags Konami logo. Admittedly, that space on the cartridge could have been put to better use, but it nevertheless felt pretty good to be the first person to bring the Konami code to such an old console. Even Konami's own three 2600 games didn't have it!

Oh, and one other thing. If you happen to have the Konami Arcade Classics collection for the Game Boy Advance, the code can be used to trigger all kinds of goodies in the cartridge, ranging from extra stages in Rush 'n Attack, Gyruss, and Time Pilot, to remastered versions of Frogger and Scramble with enhanced graphics. These bonuses elevated an already competent compilation into one of the system's most ambitious and rewarding, and it may not have happened if it hadn't been for the work of Kazuhisa Hashimoto.