The last week I’ve seen a dozens of blog posts related to Facebook’s, Jquery’s and many others hidden implementation of the ‘Konami code’ and how to implement one yourself.

One of the things I noticed was that people tend to write very verbose code, meaning, they tend to write a lot more code then they need too. Take a look at Abhi’s 30-rows implementation or Trevor’s Cheat Code Jquery plugin(!).

There are numbers of valid explanations to why people write verbose code; to be overly clear for educational purposes is one. But if you do that, I think you should also teach people that they shouldn’t make a habit out of it, especially when it comes to something so small that it fits inside a Twitter tweet.

// Tweetable Konami code
var k=[];addEventListener("keyup",function(e){ k.push(e.keyCode);if(k.toString().indexOf("38,38,40,40,37,39,37,39,66,65")>=0)cheat()},true);

The code above will fire the function cheat() when you enter the Konami Code (up,up,down,down,left,right,left,right,b,a). The code might be a bit too concies, but I was mainly trying to make a point.

Haven’t seen the Konami Code in action?

Go to www.facebook.com and login. Click once anywhere on your home page and type the following sequence using your keyboard: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Enter Key. Click again or scroll the page.