50 Interesting Facts about Video Games

Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, is not allowed to bike to work because his safety is too important to Nintendo.

2. During the production of Goldeneye 007, developers considered having players unplug and reinsert the N64 rumble pack every time they wanted to reload their weapon.

3. The Nintendo character Kirby was named after John Kirby, the legal counsel for Nintendo who helped them win their lawsuit with Universal Studios in 1982. John Kirby was gifted a sailboat Christened the “Donkey Kong” and given exclusive rights to name any boat he owned “Donkey Kong.”

4. Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009) has voice acting from all four of the original cast members (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson), who helped write the script as well. Aykroyd considers it "essentially the third movie".

5. Many American public libraries carry video games as an attempt to lure teenagers into a library. The result is more teenagers coming to the library and books are being checked out at a rate that exceeds what it was before the gamers arrived.

In 2005, a glitch in World of Warcraft allowed a plague to spread in the game leading non-infected players to abandon cities while those infected were forced into quarantines. It was later studied by epidemiologists to see how real life people would react to a pandemic.

7. Konami had a sense of humor dealing with Nintendo piracy. If Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III senses it isn't an authentic copy the game silently reduces the damage the player deals out, doubles the damage they take and makes Shredder immortal.

8. The creators of Pac-Man did not know how the game ended as it was designed to run indefinitely. It was only when Billy Mitchell finished the game, after all its internal storage ran out, that they saw how it ended.

9. Every time Pac-Man eats a regular dot, he stops moving for one frame (1/60th of a second), slowing his progress by roughly 10% just enough for the following ghost to overtake him.

10. PETA had a problem with the whaling segment of Assassins Creed: Black Flag. Ubisoft dismissed it saying they did not condone whaling any more than they condoned a pirate lifestyle.

Alan Tudyk, Adam Baldwin, and Nathan Fillion all voiced marines in Halo 3. Their characters were given personalities resembling the characters they played in Firefly.

12. A 'Red Shirt Guy' (Ian Bates) stumped a panel of World Of Warcraft developers during a Q&A at BlizzCon 2010 by asking them about an inconsistency in the lore. Later, an NPC was introduced into the game who wore a bright red shirt and was named Wildhammer Fact Checker.

13. Nintendo Power stopped accepting the many Tetris high scores submitted by Steve Wozniak. So he reversed his name, and Evets Kainzow was printed.

14. Grand Theft Auto was originally a racing game called Race'n'Chase, however, a glitch made the police cars go crazy, ramming the player. This glitch was so popular with testers that they rebuilt the game around it, creating GTA.

15. If you beat the video game Twisted Metal III as the demon Minion, he wishes to spend eternity in Hell. In standard Twisted Metal fashion, the wish is turned against him and he is sent to Hell, Michigan.

Henry Cavill almost missed the call for the role of Superman because he was playing "World of Warcraft".

17. A father made his son work his way to modernity by playing through the history of video games chronologically rather than let him play whatever video game he wanted. The boy started with 1979's Galaxian.

18. Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid, Goldeneye, Fallout, Banjo-Kazooie, Prey (which would not be released for another 9 years), and Duke Nukem Forever (which would not be released for another 14 years) were all revealed at E3 1997 over the span of 3 days.

19. Playing action video games trains people to make the right decisions faster without loss of accuracy. Video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them, which helps with multitasking, driving, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town.

20. Best Buy removed the fighting video game "Primal Rage" from its shelves after an Arizona woman complained that her 11-year-old son had faithfully portrayed one of the game's gorilla-like character's "golden shower/urination" fatality move.

Goldeneye 007 for N64 only had 9 developers on the team, and 8 of them had never worked on video games before.

22. A study surveying 5000 children on the video game and social habits, came to a conclusion that those playing video games on a regular basis are more satisfied with their lives, are less prone to being hyperactive, have less emotional issues than those who don’t play video games at all.

23. Scientists in Berlin asked adults to play Super Mario 64 over a period of 2 months for 30 minutes a day. The group showed increase in grey matter, demonstrating "the direct causal link between video gaming and a volumetric brain increase."

24. NES games like Battletoads were made so hard because Nintendo was losing money on video game rentals. If they took a long time to beat, people would have to buy the games instead.

25. The entire GoldenEye 007 game on the N64 is only 12 MB.