私たちは皆、ビデオゲームをもう少し簡単にしたいだけです

The Konami Code was created by Kazuhisa Hashimoto who was developing the home port of the 1985 arcade game Gradius for the NES. Finding the game too difficult to play through during testing, he created a cheat code to give the player a full set of power-ups (normally attained gradually throughout the game).

After entering the sequence using the controller when the game was paused the player received all available power-ups. The code was meant to be removed prior to publishing, but this was overlooked and discovered as the game was being prepared for mass production. The developers decided to leave it there, as removing it could result in new bugs and glitches. The sequence was easy enough to remember for testers and simultaneously sufficiently hard to enter accidentally during the gameplay for unsuspecting users.

To use the code, players would press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A and the Start button on the controller. It was named after the popular Japanese gaming and entertainment company Konami, where Hashimoto worked.

Kazuhisa Hashimoto, the man who invented the "Konami code" cheat that became pervasive in video gaming and pop culture, has died.

Born: November 15, 1958
Died: February 25, 2020