35 Fascinating Facts About the Video Games You Didn’t Know

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.

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

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

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.

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

8. 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.

9. 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."

10. 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.

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

12. With over 25 billion hours (2.85 million years) of total game playtime, people have played call of duty for longer than the course of human existence.

13. The popular video game 'Deus ex' released in the year 2000 is missing the twin towers due to graphical limitations. The in-game explanation for this was that they were destroyed by a terrorist attack.

14. The surface area of Minecraft's overworld (on the PC version) is approximately 9,258,235 times larger than that of the earth.

15. People who play video games are more likely to be lucid dreamers (have control over their actions in dreams) than those who don't.

The multiplayer mode in GoldenEye was added last minute, without the knowledge of Rare and Nintendo.

17. Game Boy was the first video game console to be played in space by Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov. The game he played was Tetris.

18. If you finish the incredible hard video game Ghosts n' Goblin, you will receive a message at the end that all was just an illusion and you will be forced to start at the very beginning of the game again. Only after playing through the second time you will see the real ending.

19. The entire game of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is less than 1MB in size.

20. Miyamoto believed "donkey" meant "stupid" in English, and assumed the name Donkey Kong would convey the sense "stupid ape" to an American audience. When he suggested this name to Nintendo of America, he was laughed at, but the name stuck.

Earthworm Jim was created as a result of the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The game was created as a satire of platform video games at the time; for instance, "Princess-What's-Her-Name" was a parody of how so many video games had throw-away female characters to be saved.

22. Some political prisoners in China were forced to play World of Warcraft and other games to gather virtual currency.

23. Rockstar Games hired a private investigator to locate the remaining relatives of one of the members of the Skatt Bros. in Utah in order to obtain license rights to the song "Walk The Night" for use in Grand Theft Auto IV.

24. The Japanese version of Fallout 3 does not give the player the option to detonate the Megaton nuclear bomb.

25. A World of Warcraft player had 36 accounts on 11 computers simultaneously and raided by himself.