Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
In Spyro, roasted sheep turn into butterflies
Health items are rarely logical, but roasting livestock to produce a glowing butterfly is truly a choice. In Spyro the Dragon, the protagonist regains his…
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The save point that warns a boss is coming
Wandering into a completely empty arena filled with extra supplies and a glowing diary is essentially a massive neon warning sign. It heavily signals that…
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Why video game villagers can't find items beside them
Locals will gladly pay a heavily armed stranger a fortune to retrieve a frying pan that is sitting exactly twenty feet away from their house.
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3DO was marketed as a luxury multimedia device
A spectacular miscalculation of what the public actually wanted. Launched as an exclusive high-end electronics hub, it failed massively because nobody wanted…
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Why Barbie Horse Adventures became a rare Xbox game
Because nothing screams 'hardcore video game collector's item' quite like a digital plastic doll riding a low-polygon pony. While everyone else was hoarding…
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Why the 7–10 split is bowling's nightmare
Leaving the two extreme back corner pins is the universe's way of telling you to give up. Converting it requires sliding one pin entirely across the deck, a…
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In this game, sewers can heal you
Rummaging through raw sewage and eating whatever glowing mushrooms you find is an entirely valid strategy for restoring your vitality.
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The kitchen appliance behind Mass Effect's alien voices
To capture the terrifying, guttural roar of a massive alien race, audio teams just recorded kitchen appliances grinding up trash and slowed the tape down.…
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Mario collects gold coins that serve no real purpose
The mushroom kingdom operates on a deeply flawed economic system. Our hero risks his life leaping over bottomless pits to grab hovering shiny coins, which he…
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The game that made launching birds seem like engineering
Structural engineering was completely dismantled by a slingshot and some frustrated avians. Angry Birds convinced millions of commuters that the best way to…
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A-star pathfinding makes digital AI walk
You thought that digital henchman flanking you was employing brilliant tactics? It is literally just crunching a generic 1968 graph traversal algorithm to…
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Why Steve Jobs was sent to Atari’s night shift
Genius apparently smells terrible. In the mid-70s, a young Steve Jobs worked at Atari, but his aggressive personality and absolute refusal to use deodorant or…
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Spinning into wooden crates to collect floating red apples
Why grab a door handle when you can just aggressively pirouette through a solid wood box? Crash Bandicoot popularized the bizarre mechanic of a marsupial…
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The game that got Minecraft’s creator sued by Bethesda
Corporate lawyers have zero chill. When Minecraft creator Notch announced a new fantasy card game simply titled 'Scrolls', the legal team at Bethesda…
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What happens when a game prints endless money
When you allow a population to print endless amounts of fake currency by simply repeating tasks, the value of a single coin plummets instantly. Digital…
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Blank domino tiles mathematically function as pure zeroes
Rather than being spare replacement pieces, the completely blank faces represent a hard numerical void. They exist to severely punish anyone forced to hold…
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In Skyrim, a bucket can blind a shopkeeper
If you want to rob a highly observant shopkeeper completely blind, just violently shove a wooden pail over his entire head. The artificial intelligence…
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The horror story that inspired Half-Life
The developers were deeply obsessed with 'The Mist', a terrifying novella about interdimensional monsters flooding into an unassuming town. They basically…
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Why cat's cradle appears in cultures worldwide
Anthropologists remain utterly baffled that practically every human civilization, isolated by massive oceans, collectively decided that looping string around…
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In Tomb Raider, saving means finding blue crystals
Preserving your timeline progress requires highly specific geology. Instead of just remembering where you left off, you must aggressively seek out large,…
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One toxic chat can lock you out of your game library
Freedom of speech does not protect your vast digital investments. If a user is caught acting aggressively toxic or breaching terms in a multiplayer chatroom,…
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Making virtual breakfast with complex joystick motions
Cooking eggs should not require the fine motor skills of a fighter pilot. Heavy Rain prided itself on immersive controls, which meant that completing mundane…
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Hit stun scaling actively punishes long consecutive hits
You cannot just juggle a helpless opponent in the air until they die of old age. To prevent endless infinite loops, engines automatically reduce the duration…
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In Old Maid, winning means not losing
There is no glorious first place in this game. The absolute only objective is desperately passing off one highly specific penalty card, ensuring that victory…
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