Konami
From jukeboxes to the Konami Code
Japanese arcade pioneer Konami created Frogger, Gradius, and Castlevania, plus gaming's most famous cheat code.
Konami began in 1969 as a jukebox rental and repair business in Osaka, Japan. By the early 1980s, they had pivoted to arcade games and never looked back. Their output—Frogger, Scramble, Gradius, Castlevania, Contra, Metal Gear—defined genres and spawned gaming’s most recognisable secret code.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1969 in Osaka by Kagemasa Kozuki.
- Name origin: disputed, but possibly derived from the founders’ names.
- Arcade breakthrough: Scramble (1981) pioneered the side-scrolling shooter; Frogger (1981) became a cultural phenomenon.
- Console dominance: NES-era classics like Castlevania (1986) and Contra (1987) cemented their reputation.
- The Code: ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA—first used in Gradius (1986), immortalised in Contra for granting 30 lives.
The Konami Code
Programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto added the code to the NES port of Gradius because he found the game too difficult to test. It was never removed. When Contra shipped with the same code granting 30 extra lives, players spread the secret through playgrounds and magazines. The sequence has since appeared in hundreds of games, websites, and even Netflix.
Home computer ports
Konami’s arcade hits were ported extensively to home platforms:
- Frogger: the home rights were split, and both licensees reached the C64. Parker Brothers held the console side — VCS, ColecoVision, Intellivision — and issued a C64 cartridge as well; Sierra On-Line, under its Sierravision label, published the computer versions on the Atari 8-bits, Apple II and C64. Two different Froggers were being advertised for the same machine in 1983, each by the company that had programmed it.
- Nemesis/Gradius: Spectrum and Amstrad ports captured the side-scrolling shooter formula.
- Licensed vs. in-house: quality varied wildly depending on who handled the conversion.
Why it mattered
- Genre definition: Scramble and Gradius established the scrolling shooter template. Castlevania refined action-platformers. Metal Gear pioneered stealth.
- Cross-platform reach: Konami’s games appeared on nearly every system of the 80s and 90s, from arcade cabinets to home computers to consoles.
- Cultural impact: the Konami Code transcended gaming, becoming a symbol of hidden secrets and insider knowledge.
How Konami reached Britain
For most of the eighties a British player did not buy a Konami game from Konami. They bought it from Ocean, under the Imagine name Ocean had acquired.
That arrangement produced the highest-scoring games ever to carry the Imagine label — Mikie 93%, Movie 93%, Hypersports 92%, Green Beret 88% in CRASH’s issue 48 index — all of them Konami coin-ops converted in Manchester. See the Imagine entry for what that says about the label.
Amtix got David Ward and Colin Stokes of Ocean to discuss it in April 1986, and the candid part is about how little the licence guaranteed. On Hypersports, which Ocean had picked as “the real blockbuster” of the deal, a freelance programmer “nearly gave up programming the game” — so that “by the time it came in we were so relieved to get the flipping thing out on the streets”.
The relationship outlived the 8-bit machines. Amiga User International, July 1988:
Nemesis, the classic Konami coin-op, will soon be appearing on the Amiga, courtesy of a new agreement between Konami U.S. and Ocean … the deal will mean that Amiga conversions of [other] Konami games such as Gradius, Russian Attack [follow].
Konami did begin publishing under its own name in Britain — CRASH’s index carries Nemesis as a Konami release at 47% (issue 38) and Konami’s Golf under Imagine at 58% — and the comparison is unkind. The Konami games that reviewed best in Britain were the ones a British publisher converted; the ones Konami shipped itself did not.