The original Konami code (Picture: Know Your Meme)
A variant of the iconic Konami code has been found lying dormant in Castlevania: Legacy Of Darkness for all these years.
Back when difficulty levels were rare and dying meant restarting a level, or even the whole game, from scratch, the Konami code was a vital secret shared by gamers, enabling such cheats as infinite lives or activating all power-ups at once.
The iconic sequence of button presses was first used in the NES version of Gradius, in 1986, but the code ended up being used in multiple other Konami games from the era and eventually titles from other companies. Today it’s often still a hidden secret in everything from Fortnite to Twitter.
It was assumed that all the older uses of the code were already known about but somehow nobody seems to have tried it on 1999 Nintendo 64 game Castlevania: Legacy Of Darkness, which it turns out had been set up to use it all along.
The reason it was never found is because it’s a little different than the usual sequence and requires you to press C-Up four times (instead of just twice), C-Down four times (instead of twice), C-Left twice and C-Right twice (usually it’s just once each), C-Left twice and C-Right twice, and then the ‘L’, ‘R’, and ‘Z’ buttons.
The Konami code did have some variations even back in the NES days and this is close enough you would’ve thought someone would’ve found it by now, but then Legacy Of Darkness wasn’t particularly popular at the time.
In the end, it was only discovered because of hackers going through the game’s programming code, where they found that using the cheat unlocks all characters and costumes in the game from the start.
Back in the day, cheat codes were primarily used by developers to test the games, rather than being intended for use by ordinary players, but by the N64 era that practice was dying out and with modern devkits it’s no longer necessary – except as an occasional in-joke (naturally, it’s in Konami’s recent Contra: Operation Galuga).
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The fans that discovered the code claim that there are more variants hidden in the game and that they could be used to break some of the current speedrun records for Legacy Of Darkness.
Although some speedruns records are au naturel others often take advantage of built-in cheat codes, when dealing with older games – as long as it’s made clear that’s what’s going on.
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