Contra Unblocked

Play Contra free online — no download, no install, playable on any Chromebook or school laptop.

Genre: Run and Gun · Co-op Action
Release: 1988
Platforms: NES (emulated in browser)

Instructions

Move with the arrow keys, jump with Z and fire with X, then press Enter to start. Holding a direction while you fire aims the shot, so up-and-right sends bullets diagonally, and pressing down while airborne drops you through a platform. Learning to shoot on a diagonal while jumping is most of the skill ceiling in the first three stages.

Weapon pods float past carrying letters, and the one worth chasing is S for Spread. It fires five bullets in a fan and roughly triples your effective coverage, which matters because you die in one hit and lose the weapon when you do. L is the laser, F is flame, M is a faster machine gun and R reverses nothing useful - most players ignore everything that is not S.

You get three lives and one hit each, so the safest approach is to stay low and keep moving right. The Konami Code - up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, then B and A, entered on the title screen - grants thirty lives, and on this ROM B and A are the X and Z keys. Press V beforehand if you want two-player mode.

Controls

Arrow keys — run, aim, crouch and climb
Z — jump
X — fire
Enter — START - begin the game and pause
V — SELECT - switch between 1 and 2 player mode

Tips to Master Contra

Most of Contra scrolls sideways or upward as a conventional platformer, but the Base stages switch to a pseudo-3D corridor viewed head-on, where you advance into the screen dodging electric barriers and shooting a core at the far end. That change of camera is why the game still feels varied thirty-odd years on - it never runs the same stage layout twice, and the corridor sections demand pattern recognition rather than reflexes.

Co-op is the way it was meant to be played

Press SELECT before starting and a second soldier joins. Two players share the screen and cannot scroll apart, so the mode is genuinely cooperative in the awkward sense - a partner who rushes ahead drags you into enemies you have not seen. The trade-off is worth it, because two Spread guns clear the waterfall stage and the final alien lair far faster than one, and a partner keeps the run alive when you lose your weapon.

Why one hit kills, and what to do about it

Contra gives you no health bar at all, which sounds punishing until you notice how much of the difficulty is memorisation rather than reaction. Enemy spawns are fixed, so each attempt teaches you where the turrets and snipers sit. The practical habits are simple: keep crouched when you can, never stand still on open ground, and treat every weapon pod as more important than any individual enemy on screen.

Playing it on a keyboard in 2026

The NES pad had two face buttons and this runs them on Z and X, which puts jump and fire under two fingers of one hand while the other works the arrows. That is a comfortable layout for Contra specifically, because the game asks you to hold a diagonal and fire at the same time far more often than it asks you to jump and shoot together. The emulator also offers save states from its menu, and while purists will object, using one at the start of the waterfall stage is the difference between learning that section and giving up on it. Control bindings can be remapped from the same menu if the defaults do not suit you.

Contra Unblocked

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