Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
Safe zones protect digital menus from monitor bezels
Monitors and displays have a nasty habit of arbitrarily cutting off the edges of incoming signals. UI safe zones are an invisible boundary box strictly…
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Why Puck-Man became Pac-Man
Ah, yes, the pinnacle of human maturity: turning a harmless arcade game into a crude joke. Namco's masterpiece was initially called 'Puck-Man' in Japan,…
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Defeated enemies courteously vanish into thin air
Rather than leaving a chaotic mess, defeated foes courteously dissolve into thin air, leaving behind a perfectly clean pile of ammunition.
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Uno decks contain exactly four wild draw four cards
Whenever your friend claims they randomly pulled a hand full of devastating penalties, you can legally call their bluff. A standard deck contains strictly…
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The dice that can roll only one way
Instead of a tumbling cube, these are flat-ended cylinders that only roll along one axis. It completely eliminates the joyous chaos of a multi-directional…
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Freecell Solitaire deals all cards completely face up
Unlike the standard Klondike variant where hidden cards completely ruin your plans, this version lays out the entire deck plainly from the very first second.…
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Why Atari is named after a warning in Go
The brand that single-handedly birthed the Western video game industry took its name from a polite tabletop threat. Founder Nolan Bushnell was utterly…
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Star Fox ships began as paper models
Three-dimensional modeling was incredibly difficult in the early nineties. To figure out how the futuristic fighter jets should look, the creators literally…
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Sliding root beers down a bar at lightning speed to patrons
Customer service is hell, and this classic arcade game proves it. Tapper puts you in the shoes of a frantic bartender sliding mugs down four separate…
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Why the GameCube had a giant handle
While Sony and Microsoft were aggressively marketing their new machines as sleek, cutting-edge entertainment hubs for cool adults, Nintendo bolted a massive…
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Wooden meeples require systematically chopping down forests
For all their rustic charm, those little colored people demand massive logging operations. Entire tracts of maple and birch are decimated just to be carved…
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Some dice can beat each other in a loop
Set A beats Set B, Set B beats Set C, and somehow Set C beats Set A. It is a mathematical paradox crammed into plastic cubes, existing solely to prove that…
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Why tooltips wait before appearing
Instantly showing a massive block of text the second a mouse stops moving is incredibly annoying. Tooltip timers mathematically force an interface to wait…
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Pictionary explicitly bans speaking or drawing real letters
The rules aggressively prevent you from communicating like a normal human being. You cannot just write the answer or talk; you must rely entirely on frantic,…
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Nintendo once limited publishers to five games a year
In an aggressive attempt to control quality and maintain absolute dominance over the market, publishers were legally bound to only release five titles a year.…
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When more PCs had Doom than Windows 95
Bill Gates must have been thrilled to learn a pixelated demon-slaying simulator was outperforming his multi-million dollar OS launch. Doom's shareware model…
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The Swedish lawn game that turns wood into weapons
Why throw a lightweight ball when you can hurl heavy wooden batons directly at your opponent's defensive line? This Nordic tradition relies entirely on…
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Releasing virtual worlds with completely broken stash locks
A survival experience is truly authentic when you cannot even trust the foundational code. Fallout 76 launched with an oversight that allowed other wandering…
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Nintendo trademarked a phrase Ice Cube made famous
Corporate lawyers love claiming ownership of a rapper's catchphrase long after it enters the zeitgeist. Rapper Ice Cube famously coined the phrase 'It's on…
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PlayStation 1 controller cables are unusually short
Forcing users to huddle closely around the screen like it was still the seventies. The wires barely extended past a few feet, making sitting comfortably on a…
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Drawing the fourth king immediately ends the game
In Kings Cup, the final monarch drawn from the deck forces the unlucky soul to consume a disgusting amalgamation of everyone else's beverages, completely…
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Paper fortune tellers run on strict fold geometry
Those folded paper contraptions from your childhood aren't predicting your future; they are just exploiting basic origami constraints. Operating on a strict…
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RollerCoaster Tycoon lets you drown unhappy guests
A slight navigational error can be immediately fatal. Unhappy customers who complain about ticket prices often find themselves mysteriously lifted by a giant…
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A deck of cards has more possible orders than seconds in history
The sheer volume of permutations breaks the human brain. You could shuffle a new arrangement every single second since the birth of the universe and still not…
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