101 game facts that will rock your world
Facts that mock you with their triviality
41. The Original Devil May Cry was originally intended to be the next chapter in the Resident Evil series. The gun juggle move was a glitch, but became part of Dante's move set.
42. Alien Hominid, a hardcore PS2 shooter, was originally a popular Flash internet game. It was downloaded more than 6 million times before being brought to the PlayStation 2.
43. In the NES era, Nintendo had strict licensing rules in an effort to maintain quality control (hence the gold Nintendo seal of quality badges on the cartridges). They only allowed third-party publishers to release 5 games a year for their systems.
44. Final Fantasy VII was originally designed for the Nintendo 64, but Square cancelled the project and moved to the PSone because of the lack of space in the console's game cartridges. FFVII would've filled 13 cartridges.
45. To create the gruesome Necromorph monsters in their game Dead Space, the devs at EA Redwood Shores studied photos of car wreck victims. They also watched hundreds of horror movies to get ideas for in-game scares.
46. Final Fantasy got its name from the fact that it was supposed to be Square's last ever game. They were struggling to become popular with dodgy games like Rad Racer and World Runner 3D, and were going to bow out of the industry gracefully.
47. Sixty percent of all Americans age six and older, or about 145 million people, play computer and video games. The average age of a gamer is 28 years old.
48. Captain Commando was a sci-fi superhero who served as Capcom's mascot in its early days, but was replaced by Mega Man after the Captain proved unpopular with gamers.Capcom's original name was Capsule Computing.
49.The name Kratos - as in, God Of War's angry hero - is taken from the Greek word 'cratos', which means power.
50. The first game to feature multiple endings depending on how you played the game was Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest on the NES.
51. If you bought Shenmue 2 on Xbox, you'll remember the Shenmue Movie DVD that came with it, containing all the major cut-scenes from the first game. Well, in Japan, this was actually shown in some cinemas, such was the popularity of Yu Suzuki's epic series.
52. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is the first game to feature branded trophies/achievements. One's shamelessly sponsored by T-Mobile.
53. Sonic The Hedgehog has appeared in four TV series; Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic Underground, The Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog and Sonic X. He's also appeared in a comic book series. None of them are as good as the games.
54. F-Zero X has an unlimited amount of courses. If you take part in the X Cup, the game will randomly generate tracks. They're mostly awful, but sometimes you'll get a good one.
55. The Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972, contained 40 transistors and no microprocessor. The newest Pentium 4 microprocessor contains 42 million transistors on the chip itself.
56. The Nintendo N64 marked the first time that computer graphics workstation manufacturer Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) developed game hardware technology.
57. The Nintendo GameCube's proprietary disc can hold 1.5 gigabytes of data - 190 times more than what an N64 game cartridge can hold.
58. In the 1980s, a service called Gameline allowed users to download games to the Atari 2600 over regular phone lines. It was a commercial failure, but eventually formed part of the foundation for America Online, the world's largest Internet service provider.
59. Silent Hill 4 wasn't originally a Silent Hill game, but rather a separate franchise being developed by Konami simply titled The Room. When SH producer/composer Akira Yamaoka came across it, he decided to make it part of the official series.
60. In its heyday, the Dragon Quest series was only ever released on weekends in Japan, because mid-week launches would see thousands of people pulling sickies to go and play it.
Sign up to the 12DOVE Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more