Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
Minecraft boats become absurdly fast on blue ice
Placing a wooden boat on a specifically rare frozen block removes nearly all friction from the entire equation. It allows players to travel at profoundly…
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Nobody knows where Farkle came from
Despite being an incredibly common pub staple, historians have zero idea where the name or the specific scoring rules actually came from. It essentially just…
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Convention attendees standing in massive lines for demos
Patience is a virtue heavily tested by convention floor plans. Dedicated fans will happily pay exorbitant ticket prices and stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a…
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Why D&D has a gelatinous cube
D&D creator Gary Gygax was evidently a stickler for janitorial logic. Realizing it made absolutely no sense for forgotten, monster-infested underground ruins…
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Ancient Egyptians played marbles too
Throwing tiny rocks at other tiny rocks is basically peak human innovation. Excavations in ancient Egypt uncovered spheres meticulously crafted from clay and…
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Roman soldiers passed messages with slaps
Running away from physical contact is a celebrated historical tradition. Ancient Roman texts casually describe men sprinting around and violently slapping…
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Intellivision controller utilizes a massive numeric keypad
Perfect for playing software or making a long-distance phone call. The layout featured a giant grid of numbers, requiring users to slide an overlay sheet over…
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FarmVille was designed to keep you coming back
There was nothing innocent about tending to those Facebook tomatoes. Zynga weaponized B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning theories, implementing strict…
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Half-Life 2’s burnt corpse came from a medical book
Sometimes the quest for intense visual realism crosses a massive ethical boundary. Rather than digitally painting a burnt victim, an artist literally just…
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Wooden game pieces are dyed in giant rotating drums
The elegant little wooden figures you play with have a violently industrial birth. Millions of them are dumped into massive rotating drums with toxic liquid…
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Jigsaw pieces can share repeating cut patterns
Think you are a genius for finding that perfect interlocking cardboard fit? Hate to break it to you, but mass-produced die-cuts just repeat the exact same…
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Xbox One cloud servers process extensive environmental data
Microsoft heavily promised that distant server farms would perfectly calculate complex lighting and destruction to relieve the console's internal processor.…
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Laser-cut wooden puzzles lack standard grid cuts
Instead of nice, predictable rows and columns, these monstrosities are sliced by high-powered lasers into chaotic, swirling patterns. The lack of standard…
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Rhythm Heaven makes you pluck an onion to the beat
Who needs traditional instruments when you can provide terrible grooming to a screaming vegetable? Rhythm Heaven thrives on absolute nonsense, tasking players…
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Skyrim's dragons aren't technically dragons
Despite being the core focus of the game, Skyrim's majestic flying reptiles are incorrectly classified. True dragons in fantasy mythology have four legs and…
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Royal flushes are simply ace-high straight flushes
We treat the royal flush like some mystical, untouchable unicorn of gambling. In reality, it is just a very specific, highly publicized straight flush that…
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Resident Evil was almost a first-person game
The classic fixed camera angles that made everything terrifying were originally just a backup plan. They initially wanted you looking directly through the…
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Animal Crossing almost became a monster-fighting RPG
We almost got Pokémon with furniture. The original concept for Animal Crossing on the Nintendo 64 was a complex dungeon-crawling RPG where the player would…
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League of Legends began as a Warcraft III mod
One of the most lucrative e-sports on the planet is basically a massively monetized bootleg. Riot Games didn't exactly invent the MOBA genre; they just…
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Mario Golf features an unseen announcer cheering shots
Hitting a perfect drive deserves immediate validation. A disembodied, heavily enthusiastic voice constantly screams praise whenever the player manages a clean…
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Connect four release levers dump all tokens instantly
Instead of meticulously fishing out forty-two plastic checkers one by one, a massive slide mechanism handles the cleanup. Sliding the bottom bar sends every…
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Sega Saturn surprise early launch completely flopped
Arrogant executives thought it would be absolutely brilliant to announce on stage that their new console was available immediately. Unfortunately, they forgot…
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Pretending to drum by wildly hitting colored plastic pads
The pinnacle of living room entertainment was paying hundreds of dollars for fake instruments. Rock Band introduced the drum kit, which quickly separated…
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Why video game cutscenes make bullets suddenly lethal
After absorbing three thousand rounds of ammunition during actual combat, your protagonist will be instantly incapacitated by a single pistol shot during a…
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