Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
Why Wario eats whole cloves of raw garlic
Unlike other heroes’ magical power-ups, Wario eats whole raw garlic cloves to transform—and makes his foul breath part of his superhero persona.
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Kano surgically replaced half his face with a metal plate
After a severe injury, Kano replaced half his face with a metal plate and added a red cybernetic eye.
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Shao Kahn swings a giant hammer with zero finesse
He could use dark magic or command vast armies, but instead he reaches for an oversized mallet and swings it like a frustrated carpenter.
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Blaze the Cat is a fiery princess from another dimension
She controls fire and guards her dimension's mystical jewels, even taking on interdimensional robots herself.
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Rouge the Bat is an active government spy and thief
Her work as a military undercover agent sits alongside her life as a jewel thief. Why the government hired a jewel-obsessed bat is left classified.
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Espio the Chameleon operates as a ninja detective
Espio pairs detective work with ninja training: he throws shurikens and can turn invisible.
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Old World of Warcraft purses hit a very specific mathematical ceiling
An early gold cap came from storing money as a signed 32-bit count of copper pieces. Its maximum positive value, 2,147,483,647, converted to 214,748 gold, 36…
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A missing Scrabble set helped inspire Trivial Pursuit
Chris Haney and Scott Abbott devised their trivia game in Canada in 1979 after a frustrating attempt to play Scrabble. Instead of competing over words,…
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Atari's classic joystick reduced a whole hand to five switches
Inside the CX40 are four directional contacts and one for the fire button. Moving diagonally activates a combination of directions rather than a sophisticated…
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When World of Warcraft had 12 million subscribers
At the Lich King expansion’s peak in 2010, 12 million people paid a monthly subscription to play. That’s more people than lived in Greece or Ohio.
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Boggle makes you compete over the same letters
Allan Turoff's game gives players a shared grid of letter dice and a short time to find words. Matching words on different players' lists cancel out, so the…
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An ancient game survived along with clues to its rules
Boards from the Royal Cemetery of Ur date back roughly 4,500 years. A much later cuneiform text helped scholars reconstruct a version of the game’s rules. The…
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Call of Duty lets players fight zombies as Fidel Castro
In Black Ops, zombie mode puts Nixon, JFK, Robert McNamara, and Castro inside the Pentagon, fighting undead hordes with automatic weapons.
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Super Mario Brothers two is just a rebranded Japanese game
Nintendo considered the original Japanese sequel too punishing for American players, so it adapted the unrelated game Doki Doki Panic with Mario characters.
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Selling game cheats in South Korea can become a criminal case
The country's game-industry law restricts distribution of unauthorized programs that interfere with normal game operation. That can put commercial cheat…
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Batman’s cape had its own development marathon
For Arkham Asylum, Rocksteady devoted extraordinary attention to how the cape moved with Batman. An often-cited development account put the work at more than…
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How Nintendo smuggled the NES into toy stores
After the 1983 video game crash, many American retailers were wary of consoles. Nintendo bundled the NES with R.O.B., a plastic robot, to present it as a toy…
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An 1843 board game made moral behavior the path to victory
The Mansion of Happiness sent players around a board of virtues and vices. Good conduct advanced them toward the goal while faults brought setbacks. A family…
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A twenty-sided die existed long before tabletop RPGs
The Metropolitan Museum holds ancient examples marked with Greek letters. Their precise uses are uncertain; dice of this kind may have served divination as…
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Daggerfall made a country-sized world before worlds were easy to build
The 1996 RPG used procedural generation to create a vast landscape of settlements and wilderness. That approach could produce far more terrain than artists…
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Halo's ring world came from a 1970 sci-fi novel
Halo's ring-shaped setting drew heavily on Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld; Bungie acknowledged the influence and built its own story around the structure.
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Why Monopoly takes forever under house rules
Under official rules, an unbought property goes to auction. House rules that put taxes and fees on Free Parking add cash to the game, delaying bankruptcy and…
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Final Fantasy's initials came before its full name.
Final Fantasy's initials came before its full name. Hironobu Sakaguchi said the team wanted the Roman-letter abbreviation FF. 'Fighting Fantasy' was difficult…
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Shigeru Miyamoto designed the protagonist of the 1981 arcade hit Donkey Kong as a middle-aged, overweight carpenter desperately trying to save his girlfriend from an angry ape.
Shigeru Miyamoto designed the protagonist of the 1981 arcade hit Donkey Kong as a middle-aged, overweight carpenter desperately trying to save his girlfriend…
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