Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
Safe zones protect digital menus from monitor bezels
Developers keep health bars and other vital interface elements inside a screen-safe area because some displays crop the edges of the image.
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Why Puck-Man became Pac-Man
The Japanese name came from “paku-paku,” the sound of eating, but U.S. executives feared vandals could scratch the P into an obscenity.
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Defeated enemies courteously vanish into thin air
When an enemy falls, it disappears instead of leaving a body, and its ammunition remains as a clean pickup.
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Uno decks contain exactly four wild draw four cards
A standard Uno deck has four Wild Draw Four cards total, so a fifth one cannot come from that deck.
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The dice that can roll only one way
Flat-ended dice shaped like cylinders roll along just one axis, so their outcome is more constrained than a cube’s.
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Freecell Solitaire deals all cards completely face up
With every card visible from the start, you can plan around the whole layout instead of uncovering hidden cards as you do in Klondike.
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Why Atari is named after a warning in Go
In Go, “atari” warns that an opponent’s stones are about to be captured. Founder Nolan Bushnell, an avid player, chose the word for the company name.
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A Kyoto shrine helped put a fox in the Star Fox cockpit
Shigeru Miyamoto linked the idea to Fushimi Inari’s fox imagery and rows of gates. Those gates suggested a route a vehicle could fly through. A familiar place…
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Sliding root beers down a bar at lightning speed to patrons
In Tapper, you play a bartender sliding mugs down four counters. Miss a glass or let a customer get too close, and you lose.
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Why the GameCube had a giant handle
Nintendo added the handle to make the GameCube feel like a kid-friendly game machine, while rivals marketed their consoles as sleek entertainment hubs for…
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Wooden meeples require systematically chopping down forests
Those tiny wooden game pieces are often made from maple or birch, carved into figures small enough to sit in a game box.
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Some dice beat each other like rock, paper, scissors
The cycle is about probability, not guaranteed wins: each set can have an edge over one opponent and still lose to another.
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Why tooltips wait before appearing
A brief delay keeps a tooltip from appearing every time the cursor passes over something; it shows up only after the user pauses.
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Pictionary explicitly bans speaking or drawing real letters
Players have to get their teammates guessing with sketches alone, often prompting a flurry of wildly wrong answers before time runs out.
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Nintendo once limited publishers to five games a year
Nintendo restricted third-party publishers to five NES releases a year, a policy that pushed some developers toward rival consoles.
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When more PCs had Doom than Windows 95
Doom spread through shareware and floppy-disk swapping so widely that Microsoft hired id Software to port it to Windows as a showcase for the operating system.
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Kubb turns a patch of lawn into a wooden battlefield
Players knock down opposing wooden blocks with thrown batons, working toward the king in the middle. Topple that king too soon and you lose. The game gives…
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Releasing virtual worlds with completely broken stash locks
At launch, a bug let some players bypass the protections on other players' personal stashes, potentially taking items they had spent days collecting.
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Nintendo trademarked a phrase Ice Cube made famous
Ice Cube used the phrase in his 1992 track “Now I Gotta Wet ’Cha.” Nintendo trademarked it 19 years later for marketing.
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PlayStation 1 controller cables are unusually short
The cable reached only a few feet, so players had to sit close to the console instead of relaxing on a distant couch.
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Drawing the fourth king immediately ends the game
The final king's player must drink a mix of the other players' beverages, and the game ends.
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Paper fortune tellers run on strict fold geometry
Each fold limits the available choices: players flip between two orientations, while odd-or-even counts determine which options appear.
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RollerCoaster Tycoon lets you drown unhappy guests
In the game, unhappy guests who complain about ticket prices can be picked up by a giant floating hand and dropped into a pond they can’t escape.
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A deck of cards has more possible orders than seconds in history
Even shuffling once a second since the universe began would cover only a tiny fraction of the possible arrangements.
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