Konami code on French Presidential candidate Bayrou website | Hacker News Reader

Konami code on French Presidential candidate Bayrou website

bayrou.fr

57 pointsharscoat15 comments

Very amusing :-) I imagine it was designed to and will go viral. Having no insight in to the french election, he seems like a bit of an outsider, though?

In general, it's interesting to see campaigns across the globe shifting to a more digital campaign strategy. The latest Economist issue had a note on how the Obama Campaign has spent $12m on digital, compared to $3m on TV and radio ads (http://www.economist.com/node/21552590)

He's an outsider, but being right in the middle of the favorites he's well positioned to crown the king, his importance is way over his actual voter share.

Here is the JS code: http://bayrou.fr/js/konamicode.js

The 2 codes:

↑↑↓↓←➝←➝BA

AB➝←➝←↓↓↑↑

Does it read backwards, or is that just a gimmick? (I don't understand French.)

It read backwards.

To those of you that have forgotten: ↑↑↓↓←➝←➝BA

Cool as it is, I actually feel put off by this site. The Konami Code on websites has always been an easter egg, with some cute-but-meaningless result. This just feels manufactured. It's kind of like seeing someone use a meme in real life; it's just wrong.

For those with slow internet connections (like me), if the movie hangs, right click on the fancybox, unselect/select play to resume the movie.

For those of us on a touch screen, would someone describe what happens?

A video pops up with the candidate cast as a character in an old-school video game, with 8-bit Legend of Zelda-esque music in the background. A bunch of French scrolls by on the screen, with the gist (from what I can tell) being "the final battle approaches, insert vote to continue".

If you're using an Android device. Use the "Hacker's Keyboard" app. It's the only way to go. It makes having a touchscreen irrelevant. If you're on iOS you may be out of luck.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...

As cool as this can be, it is not a good reason to vote for someone. That goes without saying but it goes better saying it, especially for this kind of candidate who almost only position himself as being neither one of the two "main" candidates.

Obviously it's not a good enough reason to vote for someone, but it will bring more traffic to his site and possibly cause more people to look in to him as a potential candidate if they had previously ignored him since he wasn't a main candidate. It's a smart use of social networking and tapping in to younger generations.

Not so young generation, I am not sure how much the young voters (18+) knows about the konami code. It is more about the 25-35 generation.

True - but then again I think the Konami code does have some cross over to the younger (18+) crowd as well - not for nostalgia, but because it has become part of gamer culture due to it's use on websites. I'd be willing to bet that a sufficient amount of people in that age bracket would still be aware of what the Konami code is to a certain extent.

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