Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
The familiar card suits were cheap to print
French cardmakers used simple red and black silhouettes for hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades. Unlike elaborate painted designs, these shapes could be…
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Modern console controllers heavily borrowed from early Sega
Today’s popular gaming controllers drew heavily on experimental Sega peripherals, including their ergonomic shapes and asymmetric joystick layouts.
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Text adventures established modern gaming class roles
The tank-healer-damage-dealer trio emerged in 1980s text-based multiuser dungeons, where slow networks encouraged players to specialize in distinct roles.
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NASA helped Angry Birds take its physics into space
For Angry Birds Space, NASA and Rovio collaborated on space outreach. Players aimed through gravity wells and weightless stretches instead of repeating one…
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Early massive multiplayer games relied on text only
Players explored vast fantasy worlds by typing commands into text-only terminals, without polygon graphics.
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The first video game tournament prize was a Rolling Stone subscription
At Stanford in 1972, students competed in Spacewar, and the winner received a one-year subscription to Rolling Stone.
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Why Space Invaders’ aliens look like sea creatures
The creator based their shapes on octopuses, squids, and crabs, giving the pixelated invaders an organic but robotic look.
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Sonic first appeared as a fuzzy car air freshener
Sonic first showed up as a fuzzy air freshener hanging in Rad Mobile, an arcade racing game, before Sega launched him as its mascot.
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How rhythm games can help stroke rehabilitation
Matching hand movements to visual and audio cues turns therapy into repeated practice, which can help patients rebuild fine motor control.
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Soviet amusement arcades borrowed military factories' skills
Factories that produced defense equipment also built arcade machines, including games with periscopes and simulated sea battles. They turned industrial…
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Why Tetris players use such strange grips
Top players use specialized grips to tap the controller buttons rapidly, moving pieces fast enough to clear lines at astonishing speeds.
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Virtual Falador massacre in online gaming
On June 6, 2006, a RuneScape glitch let players bypass anti-combat rules in Falador, turning the peaceful city into a mass attack. The exploit involved a…
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Why Nintendo put a gold seal on its games
After the 1983 video game crash left retailers wary of console games, Nintendo used a licensing system and gold seal to signal that its games had been tested…
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Mahjong traveled abroad as 'Sparrow'
A 1923 English-language manual by Ly Yu Sang was titled Sparrow: The Chinese Game Called Ma-Ch'iau. It belongs to the international mahjong craze of the…
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Duke Nukem Forever spent 14 years becoming available
Announced in 1997, the game finally reached stores in 2011 after a famously prolonged development. By release, the wait itself had become part of its…
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Early computer RPGs inherited a tabletop rulebook
Dungeons & Dragons supplied an appealing recipe: characters with numerical abilities, equipment, monsters and chance-based combat. Computers could keep track…
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Minecraft is fundamentally legally educational
The game can teach spatial reasoning, basic coding, and resource management. Some countries have recreated their topography in its virtual world to teach…
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Donkey Kong's timer breaks at level 22
The original arcade game calculates a bonus value too large for its storage slot. The number wraps around, leaving far too little time to finish normally and…
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How a coding trick revived old fighting games
Rollback netcode can make online matches feel more like local play, helping old fighting games return to major esports tournaments.
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These developers let players bankroll their next adventure
Tim Schafer and fellow LucasArts veterans founded Double Fine to make original games. In 2012, the studio took an adventure-game project straight to…
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A legal game can still have a banned sponsor
Twitch's rules prohibit sponsorship and promotion of skin gambling, where virtual game items are used in betting. That creates a separate problem from whether…
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Why modern games eat up your console storage
Modern blockbuster games can exceed 150 GB because high-resolution textures and uncompressed audio take up so much space, leaving less room for other titles…
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Why survival games are so hard to put down
Gathering resources to craft better tools makes each upgrade help you gather even faster, creating a rewarding cycle of steady progress. The game turns…
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Unexpected console update that completely changed how competitive gamers play online
The patch changed skill-based matchmaking, placing casual players in lobbies with highly competitive opponents. Thousands of longtime players reportedly…
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