The classic video game lineup would not be complete without the addition of Contra. In 1987, Konami released this run-and-gun platformer that mixed nostalgia and dread in a way that only old-school video games can. For a multitude of gamers, it didn’t matter if you played on the arcade version or the home release on the NES: Contra was bound to test your skills and patience. And usually, those playthroughs ended in lots of game overs. (I know; I’ve been there.) But back to the part about dread (with just a bit of nostalgia mixed in). This is the true starting point of the masochistic trend in video games.
My initial Contra experience took place on a muggy summer day at a chum’s house. The neighborhood adolescents, who lived under a self-imposed vow of omertà, had whispered it among themselves: Contra was the hardest game now around. One of the commandment’s of the 1980s was “Thou shall not snitch.” And so it was with Contra.” If anything, its difficulty level made it more alluring to us, I suspect. We spent the rest of that ’80s afternoon indoors, attached to the NES like limpets to a rock, wondering what the hell was now coming at us.
Contra is a game that requires fast, accurate twitch responses and intense concentration. At heart, it is a side-scrolling action title where the player takes on the role of one of two commandos, either Bill Rizer or Lance Bean, called upon to battle through an invading alien force. The gameplay is the same sort of run-and-gun affair that a player of the original Super Mario Bros. has to fuel with power-ups. Mario could shoot fireballs with his cart heel; Contra’s guys spit bullets while doing a neat half-roll. Even with the kind of in-game advantages, though, success in this title usually means having that quasi-assurance that you will still be alive in two seconds.
The first thing Contra did right was giving the player tight controls. Everything from running to jumping felt right. No animation frame went to waste when the hero was in motion. Players would press a button, and the character would act accordingly. In an era when “realism” is so often the word of the day and developers will tout their creations as much “closer to life” every chance they get, allow me to digress and ask a tangential question: Isn’t finding a game that gives a player a sense of control, power even, the first thing you’d want in a video game? In the next paragraph, you’ll find a few other key ingredients that made Contra special.
The sharp increase in difficulty level was within reason. Contra didn’t coddle the player or give out extra lives like candy. Making it from checkpoint to checkpoint was an arduous task that was only accomplished if you could go without being hit by anything. One of the game’s most notorious elements was the “one-hit kill” system it employed. Any universe in which you take a single hit, where one point of damage equals one death, exists in a parallel to the world of Super Meat Boy. But Contra was the original world of hard.
Contra’s gameplay relied heavily on power-ups, and for good reason. Throughout each level, you could find different weapon upgrades. If you already had a good weapon, say, the spread gun, you could still pick up a power-up, and it would just make your good weapon better. Plus, the power-up could also do something called Burst Fire, which was a way of making the player’s good weapon fire two good rounds in rapid succession, for twice the good effect. If good single-round (meaning nonrapid succession) shots took down an enemy, Burst Fire could do the same thing, but a lot faster.
Adding a second player in Contra raised the stakes and the excitement level. Suddenly, we had to work as a mini-team to beat back the weird alien force that had taken over the natural world. We also had the perfect opportunity to come up with some awesome, cheesy ’80s one-liners since there was no in-game dialogue. (“Eat lead, slimeball!” comes to mind.) Contra remains a pinnacle of sorts in my life as a gamer. It was also a nice bonding moment between my parents and me when I was growing up.
Talking about Contra would certainly not be sufficient without bringing up the Konami Code. As we all know, this extremely efficient cheat code, moving up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, and then pressing Start—gifts players with 30 lives to get the young hero through the eight energy zones on the archipelago, over the ocean and inside the fortress within fifty-five opulent minutes of striving, high paced 8-bit moments. The extremely famous code started here, in Contra, and then moved on to the next game and the next, right? Also, the code is so famous that I believe it was recently elected to a second term of office, serving the function with which it replaced the continuing soft governability of Lady Liberty’s torch in the heady, exuberant times in which this largely popular and efficient cheat code has, in one way or another, installed itself throughout human history. Unpacking all the glorious and inglorious 8-bit moments of turbulence takes a little bit of time. But the story does get a move on, and what a fabulous one it is!
The Konami Code got passed around the 30-useg corridor like a secret handshake. I learned it from a classmate, who held out his hand and showed me the top-secret code by passing his fingers over the edge of my hand. We used that code, good for 30-useg moments of invincibility, to take down the 100-story X-Man. We had boundaries that could be tested by running and jumping and were delimited by the necessary moments of the crouch. That code let us slip under the final few pixel hint of death by jumping and crouching at just the right moment, in just the penultimate and ultimate stories of triumph.
The Konami Code did not turn Contra into a cakewalk. It just gave players a few more chances to figure out what was going on and how to deal with it. And if you think about it, that is all kinds of awesome for a few reasons.
First of all, you have to trust players to put in the time to get good at your game if it is to be enjoyed as you intended. And Contra is no different. Using the Konami Code to, say, buy all the bosses or acquire killer weapons would be a cheat. But giving the player a few more lives than they can gain through the default rules isn’t that—it just bends the rules a little.
In another sense, the Konami Code forged the game’s bonds. Sharing the code with friends or discovering it for the first time was, for many, a bonding experience. As in life, so too, in Contra. Friends were huddled in front of basement TVs, and you just knew that Dad would go crazy if he found out. Sure, there were better gaming codes. But you sacrificed the best one to gain an upper hand in a game. Ultimately, this hack provided you and your friend with more life—many times over. And it’s shared, not just by word of mouth, but by the action of exchanging the game cartridge as though it were propaganda—and then by playing the game together as though you were in it for another lease on life.
The influence of the Konami Code was certainly not tethered to Contra. It was in many other titles produced by Konami, too, and had secretly insinuated itself into the gaming culture as a kind of marker for this cool time when putting in a furtive combination of commands would yield an awesome Easter egg of cheat-mode superweapons, for the player who just desperately needed them and for the player who simply wanted to try them out.
Contra has left an unforgettable impression on the world of gaming. This is no surprise, really. After all, who can forget those fateful words: “You’re nothing more than just a few sprites … you and yer buddies, a handful. And you think you’re all that and a bag of chips because you consider yourself as one of the “elite.” Aw, scratch that, you believe yourself, for some bizarre reason, to be part of not just the first, but the second Contra game. Of that, I can tell you, I am far from envious.
The game has left an indelible mark on pop culture. The characters Bill Rizer and Lance Bean have entered the fraternity of gaming icons. Like space marine Samus Aran, the Contra boys have a way of winning an audience over to their side. I think the character of Rizer has more of a cult following because he’s in the game that’s more popular. But the character of Bean, in my view, really should have achieved the same status. After all, he was in a really good game. And his game didn’t, well… die.
The Contra impact stretches beyond its core as an exceptional action game filled with memorable characters. It features a foundational NES soundtrack led by Kazuki Muraoka and Hidenori Maezawa, who’ve made a fantastic, tense score that propels the onscreen action and pays off for the player in spades. It’s music that holds up today, and the rhythms and beats in the Contra soundtrack have served as prime sample material for a host of modern “chip tunes” musicians.
The original game was so successful that many sequels and spinoffs came from it, with these new entities sticking to the formula that had made the NES original a hit. The player was still a side-scrolling soldier, blasting his way through anything that looked likely to be a battalion of the alien hordes, and in the 16-bit era, some of these games had the good luck to be among the most beloved by fans of the hardware’s library. Whether you are talking about the Genesis or the Super Nintendo, some game from the Contra series was bound to come up if the top ten lists from the “rental era” were to be brought out.
The run-and-gun genre was also significantly impacted by the development of Contra. Its success showed that fast-paced, tough-as-nails action games had a clearly defined, and clearly interested, market. And every one of those Contra copycats just as clearly paid their dues to the original, demonstrating how much they mined from its mechanics and design for their own inspiration. If you can think of a run-and-gun game that was developed after Contra, chances are very good that it was influenced by Contra in some way.
The inheritance of Contra affects me on a profoundly individual level. The times that I’ve spent becoming adept at the game, the elation of lastly overcoming a tough boss, and the strong spirit of fellowship when playing it with friends (in the era before “online” meant something other than “at the end of a string”) are, in sum, experiences that I hold very dear.
To be sure, Contra was more, much, much more than just another game to me.
Many years after it first debuted, the game Contra still captures the attention and tests the reflexes of players. It enthralls on several levels. Some, like me, are deeply engaged by the game’s visual appear, which is action-movie intense. You take the role of either Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, either killer or commando (a politically correct 1980s term that emphasized you were a good guy only assassinating bad people with lots of power).
The lasting charm of Contra comes from its straightforwardness. It’s a very easy game to comprehend, but it’s tough to become good at. Hence, the difficulty experienced right from the onset of the game becomes the gamer’s teacher, the player has to die some in order to learn how to get through. If and when the thrilling opportunity for victory is achieved by squashing one of the extraterrestrial maniacs, a boss, at the end, is a reward worth reaping and proves to be a superb way of testing our worth in the realm of Contra.
The game’s continued pertinence is buttressed by the return to and renewed affection for retro gaming and the classics. Contra is not only memorable, but also currently accessible. Emulators and reissues have brought it intact to a new generation of fans. And fans tend to recreate their beloved properties in ROM hacks, where Contra takes on amazing new colors while still holding to the fun and just-barely-beatable challenge of the original. (I’m thinking in particular of the wonderful urban guerrilla warfare reimaginings of the stage design in Neo Contra and Contra Rebirth on the Wii’s Virtual Console.)
The influence of Contra extends even into the gaming community at large, especially in the area of speedrunning. This event, popular on video channels, involves gamers completing an entire game at record pace. A good example is Contra, considered by many as optimized for the speedrunner due to the twitch controls of the 2D action game. Rumors have even circulated that Konami designed the game with the “30 Lives” cheat code to keep the speedrunners honest.
Contra occupies a special, enduring place in my video game experience, and I’m not alone. For many, it commands an obsession that never seems to waver. Its exciting opening stage, for instance, sees you and a buddy leaping around platforms on a jungle island, running and gunning down waves of gold-armored enemies; a stage clear jingle plays at the end, a life left—the first of many. The next time you interact with whatever your game is, have a try at mashing its first screen and all the bad guys. On a challenge scale, its music is about as unlimited as its predecessor III, more so if you count dying a lot and having to press Continue.
In conclusion, Contra is not just a tough game, but a tough contest. It offers god-awful endurance that leaves a serious mark for any player who dares to master its unmatchable difficulty level. The characters are like cultural dolls, set to be broken against the same endless opposition. The whole thing makes me think of an army on a suicide mission. And us being part of that mission for a fleeting but meaningful accomplishment. By the end, we will have truly wrestled with and experienced every inch of the meatball that is the Konami Code. Elating. Eclipsing. Enlightening.
