Konami Code Creator Kazuhisa Hashimoto Has Died

Kazuhisa Hashimoto, the video game developer responsible for making video games a little easier on players of the 1980s, has died at age 79. (Some reports, however, place his age at 61.) The news comes from video game manufacturer Konami, which posted about his death on Twitter Wednesday morning.

Hashimoto created the “Konami Code,” a button-pressing sequence on the Nintendo Entertainment System controller, that granted users advantages in games like Contra. The sequence (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start) was originally put in the 1986 NES port of the arcade game Gradius, because Hashimoto realized the difficulty level was high, and he wanted a way to make it easy to play through to check for bugs during testing. The code gave the user a full cache of weapons.

No one bothered to take the code out of the game when it shipped, and word eventually leaked that the sequence could make playing through it easier. The code subsequently showed up in other games, most notably 1988’s NES release of Contra, where it granted players 30 extra lives. Hashimoto said he used the sequence because it would be almost impossible to input it by accident while handling the controller.

Hashimoto joined Konami in the early 1980s and worked on circuit boards for coin-operated games. When he began developing games, like 1984’s Track and Field, he was prone to inserting Easter eggs. In Track and Field, a player tossing a javelin too high might discover they've hit a passing UFO.

The Konami Code has entered pop culture in a major way, appearing everywhere from other games to movies like 2012's Wreck-It Ralph.