Kazuhisa Hashimoto, 61, Who Created the ‘Konami Code’ Video Game Cheat, Dies

In the decades since its creation, it has become a famous hack. Many players first used it to get more lives in the 1988 Nintendo game Contra, and it has since been featured in several games, including Dance Dance Revolution, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Fortnite.

In an interview that reportedly took place in 2003 and was translated into English in 2012, Mr. Hashimoto described his early work at Konami developing coin-operated arcade games into console games. “People weren’t separated into positions like ‘programmer’ and ‘planner’ at the time,” he said, “and design tools didn’t really exist yet.”

He added that there was no big story behind the creation of the Konami Code; he simply needed it to beat Gradius, a difficult space shooter game that he was converting, or porting, from arcade to console form.

“Because I was the one who was going to be using it, I made sure it was easy to remember,” he said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/technology/kazuhisa-hashimoto-died-konami-code-.html