Contra No-Death Playthrough (Actual NES Capture)

This is a capture of me playing through Contra on the NES. This is not an emulator. This footage was captured directly from my front-loading NES using a real Contra cartridge.

The first time I ever saw Contra was in the late ’80s/early ’90s when I visited a neighbor across the street and saw his family playing the first stage of the NES game. I was just a little kid at the time and only caught a brief glimpse of the game, but I didn’t know what I was seeing, so I mistook Contra for some sort of weird minigame that had been unlocked on the title screen for Zelda II.

Years later, around 1998, a middle-aged couple moved in next-door to my family (to a different house unrelated to the prior neighbor), and the husband and I sort of became friends due to our mutual interest in R/C cars.

Eventually I brought up video games as well, and my new neighbor mentioned that he used to play the NES, which was the last system he owned. I ultimately convinced him to purchase a Nintendo 64 (mostly because he loved Off Road Challenge), but before that, he offered to let me borrow a few of his NES games that he had kept. One was a boat racing game (probably Eliminator Boat Duel), and the others were Contra and Super C, which were surprisingly still in their boxes.

My neighbor told me about the Contra code (which was my first time learning about it), and I quickly blasted through Contra without too much trouble, thanks to the cheat. However, I wasn’t aware of any cheat code for Super C, so that game took me longer to beat (about a week). Sadly, my family moved away from my cool new neighbor in 1999, but I was glad that he introduced me to the NES Contra games during the short time I knew him.

I eventually picked up boxed copies of Contra and Super C in 2013, shortly after starting my Youtube channel, but I have only now gotten around to recording the games. I’d love to record some two-player playthroughs, but that will take quite a bit of work, so for now, here’s a single-player no-death playthrough of Contra.

Although this is definitely a challenging game, Contra is nowhere near as difficult as the hardest NES games, in my opinion. The entire game can be beaten in about 15 minutes, and the spreadshot easily takes care of everything.

Nonetheless, this is an excellent game (perhaps even better than the arcade original?) with a fantastic two-player mode. Enjoy.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and a composite connection at 60 frames per second. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the NES's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal.

I'm using a standard NES controller.