Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
Left 4 Dead uses an invisible director to decide when you get a breather.
Left 4 Dead uses an invisible director to decide when you get a breather. Its AI Director estimates how intense the action has been for the survivors and…
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Yuji Naka programmed Sonic the Hedgehog to instantly sink and drown in water because he incorrectly assumed that real-world hedgehogs were physically incapable of swimming; in…
Yuji Naka programmed Sonic the Hedgehog to instantly sink and drown in water because he incorrectly assumed that real-world hedgehogs were physically…
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Crash Bandicoot made small memory feel like a much bigger world.
Crash Bandicoot made small memory feel like a much bigger world. Programmer Andy Gavin described dynamically swapping level components from the PlayStation CD…
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Mario Kart developers explicitly invented the infamous Blue Shell as a brutal equalizing force to ruthlessly punish whichever player possessed the audacity to maintain a solid lead.
Mario Kart developers explicitly invented the infamous Blue Shell as a brutal equalizing force to ruthlessly punish whichever player possessed the audacity to…
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Skyrim speedrunners and casual players alike quickly discovered a legendary exploit where placing a wooden bucket over an NPC's head completely blinds them, allowing the player…
Skyrim speedrunners and casual players alike quickly discovered a legendary exploit where placing a wooden bucket over an NPC's head completely blinds them,…
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Scrabble's tiny words can unlock much bigger scores.
Scrabble's tiny words can unlock much bigger scores. Knowing legal two-letter words lets a player build alongside an existing word and score several short…
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Portal turned a promised cake into a warning about trust.
Portal turned a promised cake into a warning about trust. GLaDOS offers cake as a reward while the test chambers reveal reasons to distrust her. The wall…
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Minecraft can make an empty cave sound occupied.
Minecraft can make an empty cave sound occupied. Its cave ambience can trigger around suitably dark spaces without an enemy making the noise. A disturbing…
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Catan’s creator made teeth before making game nights.
Catan’s creator made teeth before making game nights. Klaus Teuber worked as a dental technician and designed games in his spare time. Catan arrived in 1995,…
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Cards Against Humanity turned a potato into a parody of Super Bowl advertising.
Cards Against Humanity turned a potato into a parody of Super Bowl advertising. The company published a deliberately absurd ad and a fake postmortem…
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Danish government officials painstakingly built a massive, fully interactive replica of their entire country inside Minecraft to teach children about geography, only for American…
Danish government officials painstakingly built a massive, fully interactive replica of their entire country inside Minecraft to teach children about…
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Magic: The Gathering can simulate a computer using its card rules.
Magic: The Gathering can simulate a computer using its card rules. In a 2019 paper, researchers built a game state in which every move was forced, yet…
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The chess bishop inherited a place once occupied by an elephant.
The chess bishop inherited a place once occupied by an elephant. Indian and Persian chess included a war elephant; medieval European sets eventually gave the…
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Doom turned heavy-metal energy into a computer soundtrack.
Doom turned heavy-metal energy into a computer soundtrack. Bobby Prince's 1993 score used synthesized instruments to give demon-filled corridors the drive of…
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The Konami Code began as a shortcut for testing a difficult game.
The Konami Code began as a shortcut for testing a difficult game. While working on the NES version of Gradius, Kazuhisa Hashimoto added a sequence that…
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Halo's ancient-sounding chant was built for a 1999 game reveal.
Halo's ancient-sounding chant was built for a 1999 game reveal. Marty O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori created the theme for Halo's Macworld presentation.…
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The man who helped create Doom also posed as its cover hero.
The man who helped create Doom also posed as its cover hero. John Romero recalled that the hired model was not getting the pose right. He took off his shirt,…
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Players in the science fiction massively multiplayer game EVE Online genuinely fought a massive virtual space war called the Bloodbath of B-R5RB that destroyed the real-world…
Players in the science fiction massively multiplayer game EVE Online genuinely fought a massive virtual space war called the Bloodbath of B-R5RB that…
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Sega's name came from machines you fed with coins.
Sega's name came from machines you fed with coins. The name abbreviates Service Games and predates Sonic and the home-console wars. Sega's own history traces…
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Spyro the dragon was originally conceptualized as a green reptile during his early development phase for the original PlayStation.
Spyro the dragon was originally conceptualized as a green reptile during his early development phase for the original PlayStation. In prototype levels, he…
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Poker's legendary 'Dead Man's Hand,' consisting of a two-pair of black aces and black eights, earned its ominous title because it was allegedly the exact hand held by Old West…
Poker's legendary 'Dead Man's Hand,' consisting of a two-pair of black aces and black eights, earned its ominous title because it was allegedly the exact hand…
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Operation, the anxiety-inducing board game where you use tweezers to remove plastic bones from a naked man, was invented in 1964 by an industrial design student named John Spinello.
Operation, the anxiety-inducing board game where you use tweezers to remove plastic bones from a naked man, was invented in 1964 by an industrial design…
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Halo's Warthog survived a game that changed genres twice.
Halo's Warthog survived a game that changed genres twice. Bungie's early Halo was a real-time strategy project, with vehicles that evolved into the Pelican…
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Fallout 3 made its moving train wearable.
Fallout 3 made its moving train wearable. In Broken Steel, the train car is implemented as an armor item attached to the player, and an animation carries the…
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