Kazuhisa Hashimoto, Creator of the Konami Code dies at 61

These are some sad news in the world of gaming. Being one that grew up using this code in multiple konami games (don't use it in Gradius 3) I am saddened to say that  Kazuhisa Hashimoto has passed away at the age of 61. It definitely is a shock as he was still quite young but that's life, things just tend to happen. Anyways, why don't you go and play some Contra and use his code to honor his work and spirit.
Here is some History: The code was first used in the 1986 release of Gradius, a scrolling shooter for the NES[9] and was popularized among North American players in the NES version of Contra, for which it was also dubbed both the "Contra Code" and "30 Lives Code", due to its near necessity in-game.
The Konami Code was created by Kazuhisa Hashimoto who was developing the home port of the 1985 arcade game Gradius for the NES. Finding the game too difficult to play through during testing, he created a cheat code to give the player a full set of power-ups (normally attained gradually throughout the game).[2] After entering the sequence using the controller when the game was paused the player received all available power-ups. The mistake was discovered after the release, but developers decided to leave it there, as removing it could result in new bugs and glitches. The sequence was easy enough to remember for testers and simultaneously sufficiently hard to enter accidentally during the gameplay for unsuspecting users.
The Konami Code was thus included in the series' other sequels and spin-offs, with some key differences:
In the Super NES version of Gradius III, the original code destroys the player's ship. However, replacing ← and → with the L and R triggers of the SNES controller powers up the ship. In the most recent iteration of the series—Gradius Rebirth on the Wii—the Wii Remote's 1 and 2 buttons fill in for A and B, respectively. The code has been subsequently re-used in a large number of other games and a varied version of the code is now used in the Opera Browser to activate hidden advanced settings.