Konami

Japan · Founded 1969 · Developer / Publisher

Konami's golden era produced a run of enduring, much-loved franchises: Castlevania, Contra, Gradius, Metal Gear, and TMNT. The Konami Code became gaming's most famous cheat.

Founded in Osaka in 1969 as a jukebox rental and repair company, Konami entered the video game business with coin-operated arcade titles before becoming a dominant force in NES publishing. Kazuhisa Hashimoto's Konami Code — Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A — originated in Gradius (1986) as a developer testing cheat and passed into gaming culture as a reflex sequence. Konami's NES output was remarkable in breadth and quality: Contra, Castlevania, Gradius, Life Force, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Metal Gear, and Bayou Billy all appeared between 1985 and 1990. Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear series, which began on MSX2 in 1987, grew into an unusually ambitious narrative project, with Metal Gear Solid (1998) on PlayStation elevating the franchise to mainstream cultural prominence.