A Konami code variant in Castlevania has been discovered after a quarter of a century

GamesActionCastlevaniaA Konami code variant in Castlevania has been discovered after a quarter of a centuryWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Konami)

The Konami code.

The Konami code is one of those Easter eggs that has long since travelled outside of its origins. It first appeared in the seminal shooter Gradius in 1986, but came to prominence in the west thanks to the NES release of Contra (it is sometimes called “the Contra code”), and basically gives the players bonuses depending on the game: in Gradius you got all the power-ups, in Contra you got 30 lives.

Funnily enough, the code was intended as a debug tool, but someone forgot to remove it and, with Gradius in the latter stages of production, the decision was made to just leave it be. Konami’s developers, recognising it was hard to input accidentally but easy if you knew the secret, adopted it as something of a trademark and began including bonuses in many of its games based on the code (usually on the title screen).

I wouldn’t say Legacy of Darkness is a lost classic, exactly, but it’s much better than Castlevania 64. Some of its additions are unlocked through multiple completions of the game, and herein lies the newly discovered use for the Konami code. On the Legacy of Darkness title screen, the Konami code can be used to unlock all four of the game’s characters and their outfit variants, as well as the game’s hard mode.

Instead, and for whatever reason, the developers doubled every input. So the Konami code for Legacy of Darkness is: C-up x4, C-down x 4, C-left x 2, C-right x 2, C-left x 2, C-right x2, and then pressing the N64 pad’s L+R shoulder buttons alongside pulling the Z-trigger. Put like that, you can see why even people trying out the Konami code everywhere on this game hadn’t found it till now.

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The hand contortions that some of these require suggest that, appropriately enough, they were intended more as debug tools than a variant of the Konami code players were expected to discover. It’s nevertheless surprising they stayed buried so long, especially in a game that has since had its own afterlife thanks to a modding andspeedrunning community(in fact, Moises made the discovery while looking through the game’s code).

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