Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
How Luigi can win by barely moving
Effort is severely overrated in party competitions. Thanks to the sheer statistical chaos of random minigames, the green-clad brother can often secure…
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Fallout almost began as a generic fantasy game
Before settling on a delightfully depressing post-nuclear wasteland, developers pitched a painfully generic universe filled with standard elves and magic.…
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Catan rules strictly prohibit building adjacent settlements
You cannot simply spam tiny houses right next to each other to hoard a specific resource tile. The regulations strictly demand at least two distinct road…
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Shooting the moon in Hearts inflicts maximum point damage
Normally, you strictly avoid taking penalty cards. But if you somehow manage to aggressively hoard every single heart and the Queen of Spades, the game…
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Font rasterization crushes perfect vector shapes into pixels
Text is inherently built of flawless vector curves, but monitors can only display rigid square pixels. Font rasterization mathematically crushes those…
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Tom Nook is a tanuki, not a raccoon
Your favorite bell-hoarding digital landlord has a very surprising mythological background. Nook is not an actual raccoon, but a tanuki, a creature deeply…
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Doors refuse to open from the incorrect side
A standard push-door is classified as locked simply because your character refuses to turn the handle from the northern approach.
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Masked wrestling began in nineteenth-century France
While heavily associated with flamboyant Mexican traditions, the concept of covering a combatant's face is shockingly European. The first widely documented…
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Why a Zerg rush works before defenses go up
Why bother building a grand, majestic base when you can just throw thirty cheap aliens at their front door on minute two? This tactic relies purely on…
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Bloodborne has a door that can never open
Sometimes level designers just forget to connect the dots. A highly prominent gate situated between two major areas permanently prompts players to open it,…
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The Sega Master System has a secret snail maze
A rare treat hidden deep within the internal systems. Holding specific input directions upon startup without a cartridge inserted booted up a secret, entirely…
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Why cornhole bags have a slick side and a sticky side
Casual backyard throwing requires shocking textile engineering. A professional bag is built with canvas on one side and suede on the other, allowing players…
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Swimming endlessly with virtual fish while doing nothing
Forget high scores and stressful timers; sometimes you just want to act like a piece of submerged driftwood. Abzu is a gorgeously rendered diving experience…
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GTA: San Andreas hid a joke at the highest bridge
Using a jetpack to reach the highest bridge in the state rewards you with a literal plaque that says there are no easter eggs up there. It was the ultimate…
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The android whose first job is cleaning a toilet
You are a multi-million dollar piece of bleeding-edge technology, and your prime directive is scrubbing porcelain. Detroit: Become Human starts one of its…
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How World War II made Spades a hit
Bidding on tricks heavily relies on global military movement. Invented in the late 1930s in the United States, this intense deck challenge was heavily…
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Giant metal cages originally protected the fighters
The imposing steel mesh surrounding the ring wasn't designed to keep the combatants trapped inside for a brutal showdown. It was originally erected to keep…
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The church-floor design hidden in hopscotch
The chalk rectangles you skip across were originally patterned after early church floor plans. Next time you toss a rock and hop on one foot, just remember…
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Alan Turing played chess against his own algorithm
Talk about being tragically ahead of your time. In 1948, the legendary codebreaker created 'Turochamp,' a set of mathematical rules for a computer to play…
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Why hide-and-seek feels like magic to babies
Before toddlers realize that things still exist when out of sight, this innocent activity is basically a terrifying existential crisis. You are not just…
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John Romero hid his own head in Doom II
Nothing screams ego quite like making yourself the literal hidden mastermind of hell. To defeat the Icon of Sin, players must fire rockets into a specific…
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Tile thickness strictly determines standing stability
The ratio of a block's height to its depth dictates whether it can balance upright or if it will surrender to gravity immediately. Most tiles are…
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Render queues sort transparent models to stop visual chaos
Drawing a windowpane before drawing the wall behind it breaks reality. Render queues meticulously sort transparent models by calculating their exact distance…
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Mortal Kombat reused one fighter for its ninjas
Sub-Zero, Scorpion, and Reptile are all exactly the same digital actor wearing the exact same baggy costume. They just splashed different digital hues onto…
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