Up Up Down Down

There was a time—before talent show television dissolved everyone’s brain into paste—when the most useful thing you could memorize was a sequence of button presses. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. Feed it into Contra and the game handed you thirty lives. Recite it at a birthday party and you were briefly the most interesting person in the room. The Konami Code. It was currency.

Konami was never the biggest studio, but that code embedded itself into gaming culture in a way most actual games never manage. A cheat that became a handshake, then a cultural reference, then a piece of half-forgotten collective memory—the kind that surfaces unexpectedly and makes a specific demographic feel briefly twelve again.

Someone catalogued a list of websites where the code still triggered something. The roster ran longer than expected: Facebook had an easter egg, so did Digg, even Google Reader at one point. The payoff was always small—a visual gag, a hidden mode, two seconds of something useless and then gone. Completely, obviously pointless. And yet.

This journal had its own version tucked in somewhere, apparently. I’m saying nothing more. You know the sequence.