When it comes to cheating in video games, there are fewer options today than there were 40 years ago. That’s primarily due to the harsh penalties imposed upon players who cheat in multiplayer games, but it wasn’t always like that. Time was, developers purposefully encoded cheats into their games to help players complete them. One popular example is the hidden Warp Zone areas in Super Mario Bros., and another is Metroid’s Justin Bailey Code, which gave the player a powered-up Samus with a new outfit from the start of the game, revealing that Samus is a woman. The most famous code in video game history isn’t any of these; it’s the Konami Code.
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Even if you haven’t used it in decades, odds are you remember exactly how it works: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start. It’s the OG cheat code players used across a myriad of Konami-developed games, and it was literally a game-changer. Entering the code in certain games and at specific times provided a significant boon. The most famous is Contra, as the code unlocks 30 free lives at the start of the game. Seeing as Contra can be a bullet hell nightmare, it made beating the game more accessible. This ensured that the Konami Code would permeate the zeitgeist, becoming a fixture of popular culture.
The Konami Code Made Cheating a Fun Part of Gaming
The Konami Code originated with the late Kazuhisa Hashimoto, the developer of the NES port of Gradius, released in 1986. While playing and testing the game, he found it to be too difficult, and if you’ve ever played it, you know just how hard Gradius is. To get around the game’s high level of difficulty, Hashimoto created a cheat code that provides the player with all of the power-ups at the game’s start. These are normally acquired throughout gameplay, so it gave players a significant advantage. Entering the code backwards also worked, providing the player with 30 lives.
This also made the game easier to beat, and it’s why the Konami Code is sometimes referred to as the “30 Lives Code.” Once the code’s usefulness became known to gamers, Konami coders continued adding it to their games. It became so popular that pretty much every gamer in the late ‘80s and well into the ‘90s knew of the Konami Code and had used it in various titles. The backwards Konami Code wasn’t used as much as the standard version, but entering A, B, Right, Left, Right, Left, Down, Down, Up, Up in a handful of titles rewarded the player with something helpful.
What’s so fascinating about the Konami Code, which turned 40 in 2026, is that it stepped out of gaming and into popular culture. You can find it on T-shirts and referenced in all sorts of media. If you have an Amazon Alexa device, saying the code aloud results in one of several humorous responses. The Konami Code is no longer limited to Konami games, either, as several games developed elsewhere also use it or a variation of the code. Hollow Knight: Silksong also uses the Konami Code, which unlocks “Steel Soul,” a harder game mode with permadeath, so it’s safe to say that the Konami Code continues to influence popular culture.
The Enduring Legacy of the Konami Code
The Konami Code is an example of a game developer realizing that their work was too difficult, so they opened a door to make it less painful to play. This doesn’t take any of the fun out of playing the game, as it isn’t used to unlock God Mode in any of the dozens of Konami and non-Konami games that use it. In a nutshell, it made cheating fun and accessible, which is probably the main reason it’s endured long past most gamers’ memory of an NES port of an arcade game that never outshone the popularity of its contemporaries. The Konami Code’s enduring legacy is a testament to the difficulty of retro games and its use in making them more entertaining.
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