U,U,D,D,L,R,L,R,A,B,Select,Start by Deftones

Album: Saturday Night Wrist (2006)

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The title of this song contains one of the most highly guarded and critically important secrets of the 1980s - well, one of the most highly guarded and critically important secrets to gaming nerds, anyway.

"U,U,D,D,L,R,L,R,A,B,Select,Start" is a hypnotic instrumental that appears on Saturday Night Wrist, Deftones' fifth studio album. In modern digital releases it falls right in the middle of the tracks, but in the original vinyl and CD release, it closed out Side A. The song is unlike anything else the band has done, employing none of the soft shoegaze or heavy metal (or the marked contrast of the two) that has come to define Deftones. It just sort of rolls like a mellow jazz number.

The title refers to the infamous Konami Code. The Konami company made some of the most popular games for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, which was revolutionary for home gaming at the time. Starting with a game named Gradius, programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto created a cheat code that would help him make runs through the game easier. The code leaked and was passed from gamer to gamer. It became so popular that several more games were built to allow use of the code - most notably Contra, where it granted players 30 free lives (the game was essentially impossible without the cheat).

The letters in the song's title refer to "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A button, B button, select button, and start button," which was the Konami Code sequence.
Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter didn't play guitar on "U,U,D,D,L,R,L,R,A,B,Select,Start," lead singer Chino Moreno did. Carpenter instead played drums, which was normally Abe Cunningham's job.
The band were in a bad place with the making of Saturday Night Wrist. There was a ton of friction and in-fighting, and Moreno was dealing with drug addiction and the dissolution of his marriage to his first wife, Celeste. The strain comes through in much of Saturday Night Wrist, making the smoothness and simplicity of "U,U,D,D,L,R,L,R,A,B,Select,Start" something of an anomaly.

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