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Konami Code in PowerPoint and other Office documents

The Konami Code symbols can be used together or separately in PowerPoint slides, Word documents or elsewhere. They serve to demonstrate some tricks and failings in Office and it’s SVG support.

The Konami Code graphics caught our eye because they are a useful set of icons or graphics either complete or separately.  There’s nothing like them in Office 365/2019 Icons.

Farewell to Kazuhisa Hashimoto  the creator of the famous Konami Code, a sequence of buttons that opens up ‘Easter Eggs’ and other goodies on many games.

Get Konami Code graphics

Like many other occasions, Wikipedia is a good source of high quality graphics. Go to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Konami_Code.svg , there are SVG and PNG versions of the full Konami Code set.

If you have Office 365/2019 choose the ‘Original File’ or SVG version.  That will give you the most options and flexibility within Office.  If your software doesn’t have SVG support, choose the PNG version (larger is better).

Changing the Konami Code

Now it’s in Office, you can change the look from the Graphics Format tab.

Here we’ve applied Outline, Shadow and Reflection effects.

The possibilities are endless, play with the choices to find something that works for your document or presentation.

Graphics Fill trap

There are some traps, it’s a bug in Microsoft’s implementation of SVG support that we’ve seen before.  Try the Graphics Fill option and each whole button turns into a colored circle.

In addition, with some preset options, it works OK for the symbols but not the letters.  Very strange.

The cause will be some combination of the SVG design and how Office handles that coding.

Single Konami Code icons

Of course, you’re not limited to using the whole set of icons/buttons in order.  Clone the graphic (Copy then Paste) then crop until you see just the parts you want.  Maybe just a single arrow for a directions sign.  Any image can be rotated, in this case to change the direction of an arrow.

With an SVG graphic, you can enlarge the buttons to any size you like without losing quality.

Here we’ve rearranged the icons with some Outline and Glow effects as well.

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