Contra

Contra is a run-and-gun action game developed and published by Konami, released in arcades in 1987 and ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988. Players control the commandos Bill Rizer and Lance Bean, two soldiers clearly modelled on the action-movie archetypes of the period, as they battle the Red Falcon organization and its alien allies across jungle, waterfall, base, and alien-lair stages. The game is defined by its punishing difficulty, its two-player cooperative play, and its weapon power-ups, chief among them the beloved Spread Gun. A single hit kills, which made the arcade original a coin-hungry test of reflexes and the home version a rite of passage. The NES port is inseparable from the Konami Code, the button sequence that granted thirty lives and became one of the most famous cheat codes in gaming. Its alternating side-view run-and-gun stages and into-the-screen base corridors showed unusual variety for the hardware, and its imagery of lone soldiers against overwhelming odds proved deeply influential on the genre that followed. Contra was a critical and commercial success and spawned a long-running series, but the original remains its most iconic entry. Its distillation of the 1980s American blockbuster, all muscle, firepower, and forward momentum with no plot the player needs to follow, was conceived and built in Japan, a fact that only sharpens its status as a perfect piece of exported and reimported Americana.