Video Games History, Stats, Trivia & Everything In Between – 48 Facts

A video game named “Earthbound” has several anti-piracy measures in place; including crashing and deleting your entire save data during the final boss fight if you’re using a pirated copy of the game.

27. On December 6, 2012, Journey became the first video game in history to be nominated for a Grammy Award.

28. One developer spent two years programming Batman's cape in the game Arkham Asylum.

29. The town of Silent Hill and Arkham Asylum are based on real places.

30. Canceling your subscription to Final Fantasy XI wasn’t easy. Therefore Illinois passed a law requiring that massive multiplayer online games let you cancel your subscription online.

The PS1 game Suikoden was made as a prequel to Suikoden II, so that the developers could learn how to make PS1 games before tackling the actual game they wanted to make.

32. Pinball game on windows was actually a demo for a full collection of Pinball games.

33. The pinball game in Windows XP was developed by Maxis, the same company that created the SimCity and Sims series.

34. The Fallout drug Med-X was originally called Morphine, but was renamed to avoid a ban of the game in Australia.

35. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall has the largest in-game world ever created, being twice the size of Great Britain in terms of square mileage. It takes two weeks in real-time to walk from one side of the game to the other.

In Quake III Arena, needing to calculate x^(-1/2) quickly, a piece of code used was so strange that the developers commented the code with “evil floating point bit level hacking” and “what the f*ck?”

37. By mid-1981, more than four billion quarters, or $1 billion, had been grossed from Space Invaders machines.

38. When Space Invaders was released in Japan, it is said that the game caused a coin shortage because people just couldn't stop playing it.

39. Mortal Kombat II was so popular when it hit the arcades that several of the machines were later installed with deadlock security panels on the back to prevent thieves from ripping the game's motherboard straight out of the machine and taking it home.

40. When the original Mortal Kombat game came out, an audit menu listed Error Macros under the name ERMAC, leading fans to think there was a third hidden ninja in the game. This myth resulted in the creation of the character named ERMAC in future games.

There is a Wolfenstein 3D clone where you play as Noah and put animals to sleep on the Ark. It is the only commercially released SNES game that was not licensed, and used a hack to bypass Nintendo's DRM.

42. In 2017, so many people played Gran Turismo Sport on Christmas weekend that PlayStation Network thought their servers were under a DDoS Attack.

43. There is a video game, called "Lose/Lose" that deletes a random file on your computer every time you kill an enemy.

44. A video game named Homefront, which was released in early 2011 and based on a war against a North Korean global power, successfully predicted both the year of Kim Jong-Il's death (2011) and North Korea's nuclear test in 2013.

45. The arcade video game named Defender (1981) is so difficult to play that “Initial attempts lasting less than ten seconds are not uncommon for novices.”

Boos, ghosts from the Mario video game series, are based on co-designer Takashi Tezuka's wife who is usually quiet but exploded one day, maddened by all the time he spent at work. Similarly, a Boo “shrinks when Mario looks at it, but when Mario turns away, it grow[s] large and menacing.”

47. There is a video game series called ‘Deer Avenger,’ which is a parody of Deer Hunter. In it you get to play as a deer that hunts humans.

48. When a video game critic criticized a video game named Buck Bumble for having foggy graphics, another critic defended it by pointing out that the game was set in England.