Players ended up discovering a secret code in an old Castlevania game, released 25 years ago on Nintendo 64. It is a Konami Code of a rather special kind.
Who said that vintage games have nothing left to offer, no more secrets to find? Certainly not Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness. This video game, released on Nintendo 64 in 1999, still contained a little surprise, which clearly no one had discovered. It took twenty-five years for someone to finally come across it and talk about it.
This mystery was actually a Konami Code. For those who are not very familiar with this expression, it is in fact a sequence of buttons to press on your console controller, in a very specific order. This sequence was as follows: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A (↑↑↓↓←→←→BA).
We talk about Konami Code because the first time this combination appeared was in 1986 with Gradius, a video game for the Nes console developed and published by… Konami. It is the developer Kazuhisa Hashimoto who is at the origin. He wanted to make it a sort of cheat to unlock in-game advantages or special functions.
The Konami Code found 25 years later
Gold, Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness was also a game developed and published by Konami. It therefore contained a Konami Code, but of a somewhat particular kind. You had to type ↑↑↑↑↓↓↓↓←←→→←←→→LRZ, instead of the classic sequence. For the arrows, you had to use the auxiliary buttons (yellow); then, the two side buttons (LR) and the trigger (Z).
In short, it was necessary to “double” the basic combination and use buttons other than the classic A and B – which are also found on the N64 controller. It was also not necessary to use the central joystick, and even less so the directional cross – these two elements were however more crucial in the N64 games.
Perhaps it was both the unusual length of this Konami Code, coupled with the use of secondary buttons, that hampered this find for a quarter of a century. As reports it the internet user JupiterClimb on
Precisely, Moises discovered the code by digging through the game files, while Liquid Cat understood its role — in this case, unlocking all the characters (Carrie, Cornell, Henry and Reinhardt) and entry costumes. It is on the home screen, where the main menu appears, that you must enter the Konami Code.
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