The Konami Code is a story I’ve told several times and the listeners have all deemed it somewhat of an entertaining story. One friend told me to blog about it, so I will. Let me take you to the Mexico of my childhood, if I may.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles but like many Chicanos I spent a not insignificant amount of time in Mexico. Summers and some winter breaks meant visits to my mother’s home town of Degollado, Jalisco. I ran around with a slingshot and shot pumice and chunks of obsidian at everything that moved. I helped my grandfather feed the pigs and chickens in the early morning, and in the afternoon I played in the fresh air with the neighborhood kids and my cousins. Other than the scorpions and near constant and unmitigated diarrhea, things were peachy.
When I went back as a 20-year-old, I went out eating/drinking with those same neighborhood kids and cousins and generally had a great time since my bowels behaved beautifully. The town truly is stunning and it has a long, sad history. Degollado is well-known for the skill of its stone workers (it shows; you’re greeted at the city limits by an ornate stone arch stretching over the highway and the town is practically an outdoor museum with statues on major intersections), the beauty of its women and increasingly over the years, its tequila production. I went back two years ago with my girlfriend and she came back my fiancée. So, I do love the town and everything about it and I tend to enjoy returning.
My one visit as an adolescent at age 13, however? Dull. As. Shit.
Those were the longest three weeks of my life, or so it felt that way. Looking back, I do remember a few notable events from that visit which were quite rad, like [REDACTED STORY ABOUT UNDERAGED DRINKING BUT IT WAS ONLY LAGERS, NOT LIKE I WAS DOING SHOTS OR ANYTHING ALSO YES SHE WAS SORT OF MY SECOND COUSIN BUT WHATEVER] and falling off a donkey to the street from a 3 foot high curb without getting hurt. Yes, I rode a donkey on the sidewalk. Well, there were four of us on the donkey and the saddle slid sideways. It’s funnier now, right?
Oh, and my cousin not-of-the-redacted-story Mayte and I saved a man’s life. We were outside talking when we heard a shot, then saw a man stagger out of the workshop across the street clutching his leg. He was cleaning a gun and, well there you have it. The bullet had nicked an artery in his leg. We called for help and then used his belt as a tourniquet until he was carefully loaded into a car and taken to the hospital. A few days later, he was home and his wife invited us over because he couldn’t walk, but wanted to thank us personally and make sure we weren’t freaked out by the ordeal.
That was a cool experience that made us both feel a little more grown up. But still, that was nothing. Read on.
Like most teenagers, I hated everything because everything was stupid and also you’re stupid. The one entertainment for a person of my advanced age, level of erudition and general world-weariness in that terrible Purgatory was the arcade in the town plaza. The “arcade” consisted of two video games (Superman and Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair) tucked away in the back of a restaurant. My Google-fu tells me that they were in fact very brand new games for the time period I was in Mexico, which was something considering the offerings at… The Other Arcade.
The Other Arcade was on the other side of the plaza, and it served as a snack shack and convenience store as well as an arcade. It’s where all the local kids went. I decided to investigate it after beating Brainiac and the last monster lair guy handily for the umpteenth. The game choices were vast but laughable. I’m pretty sure I did laugh, actually. They weren’t real arcade games at all. It was one long row of what looked like tiny arcade machines but turned out to be plywood boxes containing NESes connected to (mostly) color television sets. It was sort of ingenious. A simple bit of wiring, maybe some kind of a board or two and voilà… your Nintendo and your old TV set are now a money generating machine!
Shitty as the arrangement seemed, I quickly found out why the kids preferred this arcade over the other one: the price was right. You could play five of these games for what it cost to play two games at the real arcade. Also, real arcade games by design keep you playing for a short amount of time, just enough to make you feel like your quarters weren’t entirely wasted, while you could play 15 to 20 minutes on a single turn on a home console and by the transitive property these arcade games as well. Quite a bargain.
There were a big group of kids piled around Super Mario Bros, watching an older teenager with considerable skill zoom around and warp to level eight with ease. Right next to them was a kid playing… Contra.
If you’re a nerd, you saw “Contra” and you already know how this story will end but I urge you to keep reading.
They couldn’t know, could they? The kid put in a coin and lasted maybe two minutes before losing all three lives so he definitely didn’t know. Being from ‘Murrica and being not a small town rube like these kids (I don’t think that now but remember that back then, I was a teenage dumbshit), I knew some things. I knew the Konami Code. Legend has it that it was put into games by Konami so that their quality assurance teams would have an easier time checking for bugs. The code was immortalized in a song by The Moldy Peaches that you may recall from the movie Juno.
UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A START
Just because we use cheats doesn’t mean we’re not smart
In the case of Contra, entering the Konami Code gave you ten times more lives. Surely, these kids would benefit from my knowledge bomb and accept me as one of their own. I decided it was time for their edification.
I squeezed my way through the throng to the machine and worked my magic. UP UP DOWN DOWN went the clacky arcade stick, which was flimsy and looked like the whammy bar on an electric guitar except straightened out. ¿Que haces? asked the kid who just lost. Vas a ver, I said. LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A, and I smiled as the game made that white noise *crash* that signaled a successfully entered sequence. I smiled and slipped the coin in.
The opening screen read not ‘x 3’ but ‘x 30,’ and the kid shat a small asteroid.
ESTE VATO TIENE TREINTA VIDAS, he exclaimed. Everyone craned their necks over to see.
(edit: OK, translations from here on in.)
“No he doesn’t” another kid said, “maybe the display’s messed up.” Because money meant nothing and to punctuate my vulgar display of power, I proceeded to suicide my character by jumping nonstop into a gun turret. And the lives, they kept on a rolling. The boys gawked and stared. “How did you do it?” one asked.
I showed them the moves slowly and deliberately. Onscreen, my character (who looked like John Rambo, if he moonlighted as the lead guitarist for Ratt) did a macabre Electric Slide whilst the might of the evil terrorist space army shot deadly and slow-moving white balls at him with good effect. The boy playing Mario abandoned his game and pushed one of the smaller kids out of the way. “Can I try next?” he asked. I moved out of the way and walked him through it, since my character finally died. It worked and his friends laughed and cheered.
I only stayed a few minutes longer. They were well pleased and excited by this new development. Some of them peppered me with questions, like how did I know how to do that and where was I from. Somehow, I thought that it would be enough that I had shown them so I gave terse and enigmatic answers, then said goodbyes and went back to my grandparents’ house aglow with smugness. Who was that benevolent being, I’m sure they asked themselves.
The next day I decided to go back and see how things had gone. Perhaps I had ingratiated myself to these children, I thought, and they will accept me as one of their own. When I got there, I saw that the kids were gone and so was the Contra machine. In its place was a void, a few bubblegum wrappers and some sizable dust bunnies. “GET OUT!” shrieked a matronly voice. I turned around and saw the hausfrau-esque proprietress of the arcade standing three paces behind me, arms akimbo, wearing a green apron and a scowl that could peel paint.
She wasn’t three paces from me for much longer; this adult stepped up and pushed me. “You broke my machine!” she growled accusingly. I denied this with as rational but contrite a tone as I could muster. “They were playing that damned game all day and I didn’t make any money!” she said. Then she put both hands on my shoulders and shoved me bodily toward the street. I nearly fell. There were only two children in the arcade at the time and they appeared to be hers so thankfully, there were few witnesses to see me be uncool. Remember, all actions and emotions at that age revolve around two things: shame and shame-avoidance.
I walked back to my grandparents’ house and wondered how I could make an adult that angry. Since then, I’ve learned just how: if someone is being irrationably angry toward you, remaining calm means you’ll win and it’s also the best troll possible. I “U MAD BRO?”d before it was cool.
So takeaways from this story are: the Konami Code and let your upper body go limp if someone shoves at your shoulders.