The Code Still Works

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. If you had a Super Nintendo your fingers probably remember this sequence without thinking. Thirty button presses and suddenly you’re invincible, you’ve got infinite lives, you can access whatever the developers hid behind the cheat. It never felt like cheating—more like you’d discovered a password the designers accidentally left in plain sight.

The Konami Code disappeared from popular consciousness years ago, which is why it’s kind of perfect that someone started hiding it in website easter eggs as a callback. Facebook has it. Digg has it. Google Reader buried one somewhere. There’s even a whole site dedicated to tracking them all, which is wonderfully pointless—exactly the kind of thing the internet should be doing. Apparently this site has one too, which is absurd and somehow perfect.

Nothing about this is useful or makes sense, which is part of why it works. You remember the code, you find it somewhere online, you type it in, something dumb happens, and for a moment you’re thinking about being eight years old and feeling clever. That’s the whole transaction. It’s not trying to be more than that, and I respect that.