Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
Minecraft boats become absurdly fast on blue ice
Blue ice gives boats so little friction that players can race across the map at extreme speeds, leaving railway networks in the dust.
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Nobody knows where Farkle came from
Historians don’t know where Farkle’s name or its specific scoring rules came from, despite its popularity as a pub game.
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Convention attendees standing in massive lines for demos
Some attendees spend as long as eight hours in line for a five-minute demo of an unfinished game that may crash.
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Why D&D has a gelatinous cube
Gary Gygax invented it to explain why monster-filled dungeons weren’t cluttered with corpses and trash: the 10-by-10-foot acidic cube dissolved the mess as it…
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Ancient Egyptians played marbles too
Archaeologists found carefully made clay and stone spheres in Egypt, suggesting people played games resembling marbles thousands of years ago.
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An ancient chasing game began with a two-sided shell
In the Greek game ostrakinda, one side of a shell or shard was light and the other dark. A toss decided which team chased and which fled. A simple object…
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Intellivision controller utilizes a massive numeric keypad
The controller had a large numeric keypad, and players slid an overlay over it to identify what each button did.
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FarmVille was designed to keep you coming back
Crops took time to grow and could wither if left unharvested. That gave players a reason to return on a schedule rather than only when they felt like playing.…
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Half-Life 2’s burnt corpse came from a medical book
The corpse’s texture reportedly came from a forensic textbook, whose images an artist applied to the 3D model instead of painting the details from scratch.
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Wooden game pieces get their color in batches
Tumbling pieces in a rotating drum exposes different sides to the coloring material, helping a batch receive an even finish. The process replaces painting…
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Jigsaw pieces can share repeating cut patterns
Mass-produced puzzles can reuse die-cut patterns, so pieces from different parts of the image may share the same shape. A piece of sky could even fit where a…
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Xbox One cloud servers process extensive environmental data
Microsoft said remote servers would handle complex lighting and destruction calculations to ease the console’s workload, but the feature made little visible…
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Laser-cut wooden puzzles lack standard grid cuts
Their swirling cuts replace predictable rows and columns, so a crescent-shaped piece may fit a wildly unrelated pattern.
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Rhythm Heaven makes you pluck an onion to the beat
Pluck the onion's facial hair off the beat, and the screaming vegetable starts to cry.
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Skyrim's dragons aren't technically dragons
In one common fantasy distinction, dragons have four legs plus wings, while Skyrim’s creatures have two hind legs and use their wings as forelimbs—making them…
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Royal flushes are simply ace-high straight flushes
It consists of a 10, jack, queen, king, and ace, all in the same suit.
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Resident Evil was almost a first-person game
The developers first planned a first-person view, but the hardware couldn’t handle rendering it, so they used fixed camera angles instead.
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Animal Crossing grew out of a dungeon adventure
Early plans for the 64DD included an adventure with animal companions. When development moved to the Nintendo 64, the team dropped that introductory adventure…
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League of Legends grew from the community around a Warcraft III mod
Defense of the Ancients demonstrated the appeal of teams fighting through lanes with individually controlled heroes. Riot recruited people involved in that…
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Mario Golf features an unseen announcer cheering shots
A disembodied, enthusiastic announcer praises every clean swing, turning a leisurely round into an over-the-top pep rally.
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Connect four release levers dump all tokens instantly
A bar beneath the board releases all 42 checkers at once, sending them down a slide instead of making you remove them one by one.
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Sega Saturn surprise early launch completely flopped
The surprise launch caught retailers off guard: many stores hadn’t been told, straining relationships with the partners needed to sell the console.
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Pretending to drum by wildly hitting colored plastic pads
Rock Band's drum kit turned living rooms into a test of rhythm and endurance: harder songs meant frantically hitting colored pads, sometimes until players…
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A cutscene can make one bullet deadlier than a boss
During play, health bars give you room to make mistakes and recover. In a cutscene, a single shot may serve a fixed story beat instead. The same character has…
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