Games
Discover facts about games. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Games
Jak and Daxter: a quest for orbs and insults
The silent protagonist trope is much more tolerable when you have a loudmouthed sidekick compensating for it. Jak and Daxter featured an epic quest to reverse…
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Frogger gets much scarier when the music stops
Crossing a busy highway is stressful enough without a catchy tune. The iconic amphibian traffic adventure completely drops its backing track once the round…
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How RollerCoaster Tycoon players trapped their guests
Capitalism is best enjoyed with zero ethical oversight. RollerCoaster Tycoon players quickly realized that once guests entered the digital park, they were…
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Water surface tension ruins cardboard pieces instantly
One knocked over beverage is an extinction-level event. Capillary action sucks the liquid rapidly into the exposed porous edges, expanding the paper fibers…
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Cortana is named after a sword with a broken tip
Your helpful blue hologram has an unexpectedly lethal namesake. While you rely on her to open locked doors and spout exposition, she is named after Curtana,…
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Why shallow water puts out magical fire
Diving into a shallow pond immediately puts out mystical, magical flames that were just summoned by a literal demon from the underworld.
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Why Half-Life 2 players throw toilets
The incredible gravity gun was heavily touted as a major leap forward in digital interaction. Naturally, the very first thing every single player did was…
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Pac-Man stops at exactly 3,333,360 points
Why aim for infinity when you can stop at 3,333,360? The iconic yellow circle simply refuses to digest any more dots after this exact number, presumably due…
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The Nintendo DS name has nothing to do with dual screens
While absolutely everyone assumed it simply meant dual screen due to its physical layout, the corporate acronym was actually a boring nod to third-party…
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World maps leave uncharted areas entirely black
Despite holding a physical parchment map, your character acts completely oblivious to the geography of an area until they literally step foot on it.
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Table tennis paddle rubber dictates ball spin velocity
Swinging a wooden paddle is essentially irrelevant compared to the specific polymer glued to the surface. Table tennis completely relies on the microscopic…
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Why game controllers grew more buttons
Hardware evolution happening right in your hands. The peripheral transitioned from three to six primary inputs purely to accommodate increasingly complex…
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Pictionary began with a waiter's awful sketches
Because capitalizing on your own glaring artistic inadequacies is a brilliant career move. A young waiter realized his friends laughed endlessly at his…
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Why Ocarina of Time nearly freezes in menus
To conserve incredibly precious processing power, opening the item selection screen violently drops the performance to an abysmal crawl. It strictly…
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Polyhedral sets implement stark neon colors for visibility
High-contrast geometric facets are intentionally colored to allow rapid integer processing from a distance. If they were camouflaged, you would spend ten…
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Pikachu was inspired by a squirrel, not a mouse
The entire 'Electric Mouse Pokémon' classification is a biological lie propagated by the Pokédex. When Nishida was designing the chubby yellow icon, she was…
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Why movie hair survives being stuffed under a helmet
Equipping headgear instantly vacuums a massive, flowing mane into the void, only to release it in perfectly styled condition when removed.
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Yakuza Like a Dragon features fully functioning claw machines
In the middle of an incredibly tense, heavily emotional crime syndicate betrayal, you can simply wander into a brightly lit arcade. You can then strictly…
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Penhold grips fundamentally alter table tennis attacks
Holding the paddle like a giant writing utensil completely changes the angle of your wrist. It forces you into a highly aggressive stance, sacrificing…
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Why Parker Brothers rejected Monopoly at first
Turns out the game designed to ruin your friendships was almost ruined by its own incompetence. Executives initially passed on the capitalist simulator…
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Halo's plasma pistol can curve shots toward targets
The green energy blasts from this seemingly weak sidearm possess an aggressively broken lock-on feature. Firing a fully charged shot forces the energy to…
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How Hitman speedrunners break stealth in seconds
Instead of adopting incredibly elaborate disguises and poisoning drinks, experts simply bounce remote explosives off the heads of civilians to trigger physics…
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Simple wooden bows outclass modern firearms
A simple wooden stick with a string frequently out-damages military-grade sniper rifles, provided you draw it back far enough.
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Your desk could be hurting your wrists
A brilliant way to slowly sever your own communication pathways. The sharp angle compresses the median nerve against the carpal tunnel, guaranteeing a future…
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