Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
How Luigi can win by barely moving
Random minigame outcomes can let Luigi win even if he barely moves, while other players eliminate themselves.
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Fallout recruited its first collaborators with an after-work pizza meeting
Tim Cain had built a game engine but could not pull colleagues away from their assigned projects. He recalled booking a conference room for 6 p.m. and…
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Catan rules strictly prohibit building adjacent settlements
Settlements must be at least two road lengths apart, so each new one claims space across the island and can block an opponent's route.
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Shooting the moon in Hearts inflicts maximum point damage
Taking every heart and the Queen of Spades lets you reverse the penalty: everyone else gets stuck with the points instead.
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Font rasterization crushes perfect vector shapes into pixels
Rasterization converts scalable letter outlines into screen pixels, using shades of gray along the edges to make curves look smoother.
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Tom Nook belongs to a different animal family than a raccoon
He is a tanuki: a Japanese raccoon dog, which belongs to the dog family. The animal also has a rich life in Japanese folklore, where it appears as a…
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Doors refuse to open from the incorrect side
In a game, a push-door may seem locked from one side because the character only knows how to turn its handle when approaching from the other.
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El Santo took his wrestling mask to the grave
The Mexican wrestler built a second career as a silver-masked movie hero without abandoning his ring identity. In 1984, he briefly revealed his face on…
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Why a Zerg rush works before defenses go up
A Zerg rush overwhelms an opponent with cheap units before they have time or resources to build defenses.
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Bloodborne has a door that can never open
The gate still prompts players to open it, but its mechanism doesn't work after a last-minute change to the game's layout.
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Some Sega Master Systems hid a game even without a cartridge
On models with the right built-in software, holding Up and both controller buttons during startup opened Snail Maze. You guided a snail through timed mazes…
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A cornhole bag can offer two different ways to land
Many competitive bags use fabrics with different sliding characteristics on their two faces. One side helps the bag travel, while the other grips sooner.…
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Swimming endlessly with virtual fish while doing nothing
In Abzû, you can grab a passing manta ray’s fin and let it pull you through kelp forests, with no high scores or timers to chase.
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GTA: San Andreas hid a joke at the highest bridge
A jetpack ride to the state’s highest bridge reveals a plaque insisting there are no Easter eggs there—a joke that is itself an Easter egg.
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The android whose first job is cleaning a toilet
In one storyline, android caretaker Kara must follow prompts to pick up trash, wash dishes, and scrub a toilet in her human employer's home.
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How World War II made Spades a hit
Invented in the United States in the late 1930s, Spades spread widely when troops carried decks overseas during World War II.
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Giant metal cages originally protected the fighters
The mesh kept furious, intoxicated spectators from climbing in to attack the villain when he was winning.
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The church-floor design hidden in hopscotch
The chalk rectangles were patterned after early church floor plans, giving the playground game a surprising architectural origin.
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Alan Turing played chess against his own algorithm
In 1948, the legendary codebreaker created 'Turochamp,' a set of mathematical rules for a computer to play chess. With no computer available to run it, Turing…
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Babies can notice that a hidden object should still be there
In a classic experiment, five-month-olds watched a screen appear to rotate through the space occupied by a hidden box. They looked longer at the impossible…
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John Romero hid his own head in Doom II
Behind Doom II's final boss is an impaled image of Romero's head, reachable with a no-clip cheat. The level's opening voice also contains his…
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Tile thickness strictly determines standing stability
A tile's height-to-depth ratio determines whether it can stand upright; the taller it is relative to its depth, the easier it is to topple.
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Render queues sort transparent models to stop visual chaos
The engine draws opaque geometry first, then layers transparent models according to their distance from the camera. If that order is wrong, a window can make…
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Mortal Kombat reused one fighter for its ninjas
The original versions of Sub-Zero, Scorpion, and Reptile used the same digital actor and costume; changing the character's color made them look like different…
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