Kazuhisa Hashimoto

Career Hashimoto joined Konami along with several other recent college graduates in 1981. At the time, Konami was focused on coin-operated (coin-op) products such as medal games, and Hashimoto started by helping to develop the circuit boards for these games. Konami expanded over the next few years into arcade games with successful games like Scramble and Super Cobra, and later into bringing these games into versions for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). According to Hashimoto, the company's focus at the time still remained the coin-op machines, with experienced staff assigned to that area of the business. The newer hires were pushed off onto development of the video game side of Konami with little formal training or instruction. Once the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) had arrived in 1990, Konami had brought in experienced video game developers and helped establish more rigor to the development process. Among other titles he worked on included the International Superstar Soccer series. He was also the executive vice president of Star Online.

Hashimoto died on February 25, 2020, as reported by both Konami and by Hashimoto's friend Yuji Takenouchi.

Konami Code

Hashimoto is most widely recognized as the creator of the Konami Code. Hashimoto had inadvertently created it while bringing the arcade version of Gradius to the NES in 1986. Hashimoto knew the arcade version of the game was hard and he would likely not finish it, so he added a sequence of button presses that he could easily remember that gave the ship he controlled in the game the full range of power-ups so that he could easily complete the game for in-house testing purposes. He had intended to remove the programming code for that sequence before the game was shipped, but the game had shipped with the code included. Some players of Gradius had discovered Hashimoto's sequence and reported it back to Konami, and it became popular to use Hashimoto's sequence in future Konami titles by other developers. Larger public awareness of this Konami code came with the worldwide popularity of Contra in 1988, in which entering the code gave the player additional lives. Since then, the Konami code is not only used across other video games from other developers and publishers in similar manners, but as Easter eggs in other forms of media.