The inventor of the Konami Code has passed away

Kazuhisa Hashimoto has passed away. You may not know the name but you absolutely know the button sequence: ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? B, A, Start

That the code is so well known is an accident. Hashimoto was working on converting a game from the arcade to the Nintendo Entertainment System. 

The game was too hard to beat, so he made the code to give himself more lives. Like a lot of things, sometimes what you put in development code escapes out into the world. You don't realize it, but it ships. This happens all the time, but rarely are examples as famous as that. 

Hashimoto was 79. But that code is going to live on forever, appearing in countless games, and even showing up in mobile phones like the Palm Pre.