Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
Why bingo ink dries almost instantly
The ink must evaporate almost instantaneously upon hitting paper. If it were water-based, the pages would quickly become a soggy, illegible mess, completely…
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Why Zelda heroes cut so much grass
Saving the world involves a surprising amount of lawn care. The chosen hero will aggressively clear-cut every single blade of overgrown foliage in the village…
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Standard double-six domino set contains 28 exact tiles
The set contains every possible pairing of numbers from zero to six. It is a strictly finite universe of combinations, meaning when you draw terrible tiles,…
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Why dominoes are often set up just to fall
Most people just enthusiastically stand them up in long winding lines to watch them fall over rather than playing the numbered dots. The satisfaction of a…
Discover moreYuna's name means moon—and that's no accident
It is always nice when a couple perfectly complements each other astronomically. In Final Fantasy X, the beloved summoner possesses a name that means 'moon'…
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Manuals dedicating half their pages to pure legal warnings
Nothing gets you hyped for a digital adventure quite like reading about extreme medical risks. In the transition to modern publishing, instruction booklets…
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Fall Guys crowns are fiercely contested by softbody beans
In the final incredibly chaotic sprint, victory is often determined not by skill, but by the sheer randomized bouncing of the physics engine. A perfectly…
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Rockstar Games originated as an interactive media label
The creators of the most notoriously violent digital media originally operated under a massive British record company. Their eventual branding pivot proved…
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Skyrim's world began on a restaurant napkin
Todd Howard casually sketched the massive frozen province while sitting in a restaurant waiting for his food. That flimsy piece of stained paper ultimately…
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Why dice cups are ridged inside
If the cup were perfectly smooth inside, a cube could slide against the wall and land on a predictable face. The internal ridges violently disrupt momentum,…
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Perfect checkers ends in a draw
Sometimes academic dedication borders on absolute madness. A team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta spent nearly two decades calculating all…
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The PS4 added a button just for sharing
The exact physical manifestation of our endless need for attention. It dedicated a specific input exclusively to capturing moments, permanently embedding…
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Why Animal Crossing characters sound like gibberish
Instead of paying voice actors to record hundreds of hours of dialogue, the developers just recorded individual syllables and told a computer to mash them…
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Blackjack turns simple addition into a high-stakes decision
The casino floor thrives on the utter reality that adult humans routinely panic when forced to add fourteen and eight in public. The house advantage relies…
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Entire goal of rummy is creating matching melds
You spend the whole session frantically hoarding sequences of numbers or matching sets, desperately trying to empty your hand before anyone else. It is…
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Overwatch’s payload is pushed by an invisible NPC
Behind every great team of heroes is an invisible, stressed-out digital ghost doing all the heavy lifting. The Overwatch engine couldn't natively support an…
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Centrifugal force dictates roundabout spinning speeds
Playground roundabouts are basically rudimentary astronaut training centrifuges. The physics of inertia strictly dictate that the faster you spin the metal…
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Z-indexing dictates which digital menu covers up the others
Layering twenty overlapping menus requires a strict mathematical hierarchy to avoid chaos. Z-indexing assigns a numeric priority value to every single piece…
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Animal Crossing changes its music every hour
Catching digital bugs deserves a highly curated playlist. The relaxed village life experience contains twenty-four unique musical tracks that change precisely…
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Silent Hill 2 features a monster shaped like a giant pyramid
The most iconic horror creature of the early two-thousands is literally just a shirtless butcher wearing an aggressively massive triangular iron helmet. It is…
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Domino trains sprout branching lines from a central hub
Standard linear gameplay gets boring quickly. Expanded variants force players to build off a starting centerpiece, branching out in massive, chaotic spokes.…
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Why Pac-Man’s ghosts don’t all chase you the same way
Those brightly colored floating bedsheets aren't just aggressively pursuing you at random. Each specific color is hardcoded with entirely distinct tracking…
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Wario's name is literally “bad Mario”
Sometimes the creative naming process is shockingly brief. The yellow-clad, garlic-chomping antagonist derives his name from a combination of the word 'Mario'…
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Fallout 3’s subway was mapped by walking the real one
To perfectly capture the post-apocalyptic misery of the capital's metro, Bethesda developers physically trudged through the real-world stations. They…
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