The other night as I was walking into Trader Joe’s, the gentleman minding the door shouted out “The Contra Code!” We exchanged a knowing look and a thumbs up.īut I digress. When you see it, you either know what it is or you don’t. (This is the only “buy” recommendation I’ll ever make in the Brief!) Wearing this shirt makes me feel part of a small community.
I hadn’t thought of Contra or the cheat code in years, maybe decades, until last week when I stumbled across this shirt and, of course, immediately bought it. It was the ultimate cheat code and it allowed me and Jon to beat Contra every time. While the game was loading, if you pressed the following combination of buttons on your controller you would be rewarded with 30 lives: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start. It wasn’t an easy game to beat: There were eight stages, each with their own boss, and you only had three lives. Nowadays, we’d call Contra an “RPG” style game but back then I just thought of it as a couple of soldiers running through the jungle blasting bad guys. We played Duck Hunt, all the Super Mario Bros., and Paperboy, but our favorite game by far was Contra. Prior to that, the only way for me to get my fill was to head over to Jon Jackson’s house to play the original Nintendo. My parents didn’t allow video games in the house until I was a teenager.
