Canada is currently celebrating its 150th anniversary, looking back at a long history of being the planet’s nerdy neighbor to the north. To commemorate the event, the Bank Of Canada is issuing a new version of the country’s ten dollar note, one that’s absolutely jam-packed with all sorts of obsessive details about its history. The bill features not just one, but four notable Canadian statespersons, including its first prime minister, first female M.P., and first First Nations senator, plus a number of artworks, and a holographic watermark listing all of the country’s provinces and their dates of entry, both in English and in French.
It’s a busy, busy, banknote, and to help people familiarize people with it, the Bank put together a web site allowing folks to get a close-up 360 degree view. But there’s another, even nerdier secret hiding in this cavalcade of financial geekdom: a reference to video gaming’s famous Konami Code.
For those of you who never cheated their way through Contra as a kid, the code—up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a—is quite possibly the most well-known cheat code in gaming history, propagating out of Konami’s games and even into web sites like Buzzfeed and Facebook. Entering it on the Bank Of Canada site doesn’t grant you 30 bills, sadly, but it does cause money to rain down from the sky, while a chiptunes take on “O Canada” plays. Just in case you didn’t feel like “getting up close and personal with the new banknote” wasn’t already a sufficiently dorky way to spend an afternoon.