Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
A game sale can fill your library faster than your evenings
Buying takes a click; finishing a game can take dozens of hours. Discounts make collecting future options tempting, while familiar favorites keep claiming the…
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Tossing small objects into numbered sequential squares dictates intricate hopping paths
Players balance on one foot and leap over the square holding the marker, testing coordination and spatial awareness.
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Go has more possible positions than atoms in the universe
Go's rules are simple: players place black and white stones on a board. Yet the number of legal board arrangements is so vast that it exceeds the number of…
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MissingNo could multiply an item in Pokémon Red and Blue
The famous glitch exposed invalid encounter data and could alter the quantity of the item in the bag's sixth slot. Players learned that an odd sequence of…
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A clay tablet helped bring the Royal Game of Ur back to life
British Museum curator Irving Finkel interpreted a cuneiform text describing a later version of the ancient race game. Combined with surviving boards, it gave…
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Some solitaire deals are impossible to win
Some randomly generated deals are impossible to solve, leaving no sequence of moves that can win. Whether that can happen depends on the game and how its…
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Carmack's reverse in 3D shadow mapping
It calculates shadow depth by tracing backward from infinity toward the light source, a technique John Carmack used to fix a critical shadow-rendering bug in…
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How gamers solve routing problems faster than algorithms
Speedrunning communities pool route discoveries and tiny time savings, sometimes finding efficient paths faster than algorithms built to optimize them.
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The game guide that made players smell garbage
The scratch-and-sniff patches carried odors such as decaying garbage and dirty monkeys; smelling them helped players solve cryptic puzzles.
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Pac-Man was designed to bring more women into arcades
Instead of another violent space shooter, its creator built a colorful game around the familiar idea of eating food. The shift helped draw young women into…
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Sega's 'blast processing' was mostly marketing
“Blast processing” was a marketing slogan, not a specific technology. Sega used it to make the Genesis sound more powerful than Nintendo’s hardware.
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Chess pieces got simpler so players could read the board
The Staunton pattern, introduced in 1849, gave each piece a distinct silhouette and a stable base. Earlier decorative sets could make opponents stop to…
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Ancient players rolled little pyramids instead of cubes
The Royal Game of Ur used tetrahedral dice, with marked corners determining the result. Examples excavated from Ur's royal cemetery date to around 2600 BCE. A…
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Desert Bus makes eight hours of driving worth one point
The bus drifts slightly to the right, forcing continual corrections on an otherwise monotonous trip between Tucson and Las Vegas. There is no ordinary pause…
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Grandmasters can play dozens of chess games blindfolded
They keep a mental map of each game and calculate moves without seeing the boards. Some elite grandmasters can do this in simultaneous exhibitions against…
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Why you can jump after running off a ledge in games
Games use a hidden mechanic called coyote time: after a character runs off a ledge, the game allows a brief grace period to jump as if they were still on…
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How games secretly help you stop losing
Many modern action games quietly adjust their difficulty. If you keep dying, the game may reduce enemy damage or spawn more health potions to help keep you in…
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Highest bowling score requires mathematical precision
A perfect game takes 12 strikes: one in each of the first nine frames and three in the 10th.
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Chess clocks made thinking time a resource
A linked pair of clocks lets one player's time run while the other player's is stopped. Each move passes the running clock to the opponent along with the…
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Doom almost became an Alien game
Doom's creators considered acquiring the rights to the Alien franchise early in development, before deciding to build their own universe instead.
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Donkey Kong world records are still fiercely contested
Players spend thousands of hours optimizing jumps and barrel patterns, and the world-record score keeps changing.
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The original PlayStation almost whispered its own name
Sound designer Takafumi Fujisawa recorded a version of the startup sound with a whispered 'PlayStation' layered over it. The team dropped the idea of the…
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Steve Vai played guitar on Halo 2’s famous theme
Vai recorded the electric-guitar riffs over an ancient monk chant, creating the theme’s distinctive sound.
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Every solvable Rubik's Cube position is at most 20 face turns away
A mathematical result proved that bound when a quarter-turn or half-turn of one face each counts as a single move. The cube has roughly 43 quintillion legal…
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