Contra is a 1987 Konami arcade run-and-gun in which one or two players fight through alien-infested jungles, fortresses, and bases, blasting enemies with power-up weapons across side-scrolling and top-down stages.
Developed and published by Konami, Contra hit arcades in 1987 before landing on the NES the following year in one of the most celebrated home ports of the era. Players control commandos Bill Rizer and Lance Bean as they fight through waves of Red Falcon enemy soldiers and grotesque alien creatures across eight stages that alternate between side-scrolling corridor runs and overhead base-infiltration sequences. The core loop is relentless and immediately legible: shoot everything, dodge bullets, grab power-ups.
The weapon system elevates Contra above its run-and-gun contemporaries. Flashing capsules dropped by flying sentries award upgrades — a spread shot that fans five bullets across the screen, a laser that pierces multiple enemies, a rapid-fire machine gun, and the Fireball that arcs in a wavy pattern. Losing a life resets the player to the default peashooter, making every death feel consequential and every power-up precious. Two-player simultaneous co-op, a rarity for side-scrollers at the time, became the game's defining social feature: the difficulty was calibrated for two players sharing the screen and the chaos, and clearing the game together with a friend is one of the NES library's great shared experiences.
The Konami Code — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start — entered popular culture through Contra's title screen, where it granted 30 extra lives and became the most famous cheat code in gaming history. The game's tight controls, iconic pixel art, and pulse-pounding soundtrack by Hidenori Maezawa and Kyouhei Sada made it a template for the genre. IGN ranked it among the 100 greatest video games of all time in 2019.