The Konami Code Began as Kazuhisa Hashimoto's Own Cheat Because He Couldn't Beat Gradius While Porting It

Gradius started as a Konami arcade shooter, and the home version wasn’t anyone’s passion project. “Gradius was something we were ordered to port,” Hashimoto told Shigeharu Umezaki in the discussion, which GlitterBerri translated from Japanese. “I don’t think Gradius took even half a year with a team of 4 people.”

The arcade original was the problem. Hashimoto had one coder under him who “played through the coin-op version. That one’s really tough.” Hashimoto hadn’t put in those hours. To test his own port, he needed a way to skip the struggle, so he wrote one: enter the sequence and your ship gets a full set of power-ups.

Umezaki asked the obvious question. “What’s the story behind the Konami Code, anyway?” Hashimoto’s answer: “There isn’t one, really.” The only design goal was memory. “Because I was the one who was going to be using it, I made sure it was easy to remember.”

The code shipped. Konami’s 40th anniversary page for “↑↑↓↓←→←→BA” calls it the world’s most famous hidden command and dates its first appearance to the Famicom Gradius, released April 25, 1986. Reporting Hashimoto’s death in February 2020, VGC wrote that the code stayed in the game because Konami “believed it was too hard to enter accidentally,” and that it “features in hundreds of video games.” Konami’s own tribute called him “a deeply talented producer who first introduced the world to the ‘Konami Code’.”

Hashimoto was also blunt about how the port did commercially. “Gradius saw an incredibly poor reception, however,” he said in the same conversation. “The company made almost 1,000,000 copies in anticipation of its release, but we were only able to sell 500,000 ~ 600,000.” The translation doesn’t say which market those numbers cover. It also leaves open whether anyone at Konami knew the cheat was still in the cartridge before the copies were pressed, or found out after players did.