The 1980s were all about action, aliens, and arcades. While both Schwarzenegger and Stallone were at the adrenaline-pumping peaks of their careers, science fiction films like E.T. and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi topped the box office and sparked the imaginations of audiences everywhere, including game makers. Sci-fi games took off! Hyper-masculine soldiers and other-worldly threats plastered arcade cabinets, and by the end of the decade, these same games were playable at home, too, thanks to consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System and Atari 7800. Action-fueled sci-fi was everywhere. And nothing encapsulates that classic 80s love for explosions, extraterrestrials, and entertainment more than the 1987 game Contra.

These buff dudes are named Bill and Lance, btw. Killer!

80s action in a video game

Developed by Konami and first released as a coin-op arcade game in 1987, Contra came to the NES in 1988. It’s a run-and-gun, action platformer that follows two guerilla commandos who infiltrate a fortified, jungle island where an alien race is planning to begin its invasion of earth and annihilation of humanity.

If that short synopsis isn’t enough to convince you of Contra’s top-tier 80s-ness, just look at its cover art! Drawn by legendary video game artist Bob Wakelin, it’s essentially a collage of 1980s action icons, featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger from Predator, Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo, and the Xenomorph from the Alien movies, each design altered just enough to skirt copyright infringement. If only just barely.

Classic games have a lot of cool, expressive cover art like this, which I love!

(even if it did oversell the games)

Coin-hungry difficulty

While the art and design of Contra helps make it such a nostalgic game, its gameplay is what makes it truly memorable. In Contra’s case, one of its most important attributes is its notorious difficulty. The game can be frustratingly hard. For being big buff commandos, the player characters die in only one hit from an enemy; no matter if they’re a random grunt or the level’s boss, all of their shots hit equally as hard. Add in the environmental hazards across each level-- falling bombs, spitting flames, annoyingly-patterned, grabby claws-- and Contra becomes pretty dang tough.

Did I mention players only start with three lives? All three of those lives can easily get wasted on traps or lost at the end-of-level boss fights. And even though Contra can be beaten in 15-25 minutes on a good run, getting good enough to do that with only three lives can take hours and hours and hours of practice.

This is a screenshot from one of the boss fights which flips the player's perspective to something closer to a corridor shooter. It's a cool design move!

Luckily, players can enlist their friends or younger siblings in the fight against aliens, but there’s one other thing they have that makes Contra special: the all powerful Konami Code. The Konami Code was a developer cheat that first appeared in Konami’s 1986 game Gradius but became popular thanks to Contra. In Contra, if a player punches in the Code at the main menu (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start), instead of starting the game with three lives, they begin with 30 lives.

In a game as difficult as Contra, starting with that many lives is an incredible boon. Reaching the end of the game suddenly becomes possible for many players. All of this comes from a cheat code that had to spread between players during a time when there was no internet to easily share game knowledge. This means the Konami Code was either something someone told you about in the arcade or was something you read in the first edition of the Nintendo Power magazine. Coming from someone who grew up with the internet, this sort of information-sharing makes the spread of the Konami Code a special thing.

Now over 30 years old, Contra represents a time all its own. From its place as a star-inspired action epic, to its unforgiving difficulty, and its secrets shared by gossip and Nintendo Power issues, Contra is a one-of-a-kind explosion of classic gaming.

The legend of the * Konami Code *

I absolutely adore this cover art. Clay Mario is so cute :)

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