95 Fun Facts About Classic Video Game

In what kind of venue did Atari test its first Pong prototype in 1972?

A tavern: at Andy Capp's in Sunnyvale, California, the owner reported the test machine broken, but its coin box was simply overflowing with quarters.

Pong's concept was borrowed from a ping-pong game on which console, prompting a patent lawsuit?

The Magnavox Odyssey, built from Ralph Baer's 'Brown Box' prototype, went on sale in September 1972 with a table-tennis game; Magnavox later sued over Pong, and Atari settled out of court.

What was the first commercially available arcade video game, released in 1971?

Computer Space, built by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney from the mainframe game Spacewar!, was sold by Nutting Associates in fibreglass cabinets; roughly 1,300 to 1,500 were made.

How did the first home console, released in 1972, add colour and scenery to its games?

Plastic screen overlays did the job: the console could draw only white squares and a line, so each game shipped with a translucent sheet to cling to the TV.

What was Pac-Man's original title in Japan?

Puck Man, a name designer Toru Iwatani traces to the Japanese 'paku-paku' for munching, was on Namco's 1980 Japanese cabinets; it was renamed for America for fear vandals would turn the P into an F.

Which ghost replaced Clyde as the orange member of the quartet in Ms. Pac-Man?

Sue is the orange ghost in Ms. Pac-Man, taking over from Clyde; when later games put the two side by side, she was recoloured purple.

Which stage of Pac-Man is impossible to complete because of an integer overflow?

Level 256 is the famous kill screen: an integer overflow scrambles the right half of the maze into symbols, leaving too few dots to clear the board.

Donkey Kong was created in 1981 to reuse unsold cabinets from which failed Nintendo arcade game?

Radar Scope had flopped in America, leaving about 2,000 unsold cabinets in a warehouse; Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi handed the conversion job to first-time designer Shigeru Miyamoto.

By what name was Mario known in the English instructions for the original Donkey Kong arcade game?

Jumpman was the hero's name in the 1981 arcade game's instructions; Nintendo of America staff renamed him Mario after their warehouse landlord, Mario Segale, and the name stuck.

On which computer did Alexey Pajitnov first program his falling-blocks puzzle game?

Elektronika 60, a Soviet clone of the PDP-11 at the Academy of Sciences computing centre in Moscow, was where Pajitnov wrote the original in Pascal; it had no graphics, so he drew the blocks with brackets.

Which entrepreneur went to Moscow in 1989 and won the handheld rights to Alexey Pajitnov's puzzle game?

Henk Rogers turned up uninvited at Elektronorgtechnica (ELORG), the state body that licensed Soviet software, and persuaded its managers to deal with him directly.

What was the console later known as the 2600 called when it launched in September 1977?

Atari Video Computer System, or VCS, was the launch name; Stella had been its development codename, and the console was renamed the Atari 2600 in November 1982 after its model number CX2600.

Which arcade conversion in 1980 became the Atari 2600's first killer app?

Space Invaders reached the Atari 2600 in 1980 and became its first killer app: sales of the console quadrupled as people bought it just to play the arcade hit at home.

Roughly how long did Howard Scott Warshaw get to design and program E.T. for the Atari 2600?

Five weeks, give or take a few days: the film licence was settled in late July 1982 and the code had to be finished by 1 September to reach shops for Christmas.

In which town's landfill were unsold E.T. cartridges confirmed buried when diggers investigated in 2014?

Alamogordo, New Mexico: in April 2014 a documentary crew excavated the town landfill and unearthed E.T. and other cartridges dumped there in September 1983, confirming a story long dismissed as urban legend.

Which Atari 2600 game contains the first widely known video game Easter egg?

Adventure (1980) hides a secret room displaying 'Created by Warren Robinett'; he planted it because the company refused to credit programmers, and Ready Player One's climax is built around it.

In the text game Zork, what eats players who wander in the dark without a light?

A grue, its name taken by Dave Lebling from Jack Vance's fiction, eats anyone who moves about in the dark; it replaced the pits of early versions after his character fell into one in an attic.

Which 1981 Williams shooter, Eugene Jarvis's first video game, became the company's best-selling arcade game?

Defender sold more than 55,000 cabinets, a Williams record, even though Eugene Jarvis had only programmed pinball machines before and players found it punishingly hard.

Which 1981 Atari arcade game, co-designed by Dona Bailey, was one of the first widely played by women?

Centipede, co-designed by Dona Bailey and Ed Logg and released in 1981, used a trackball to shoot a centipede winding through a mushroom field; its pastel look and Bailey's involvement drew an unusually large female following.

Which early-1980s arcade game has the player protect six cities?

Missile Command (1980) has the player roll a trackball to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles; designer Dave Theurer had nightmares about being bombed while he was making it.

How much time does Pitfall Harry get to hunt for treasure in Pitfall!?

20 minutes is the limit: a timer counts down from 20:00 while Harry hunts 32 treasures across 255 screens; David Crane built the 1982 Activision game around a running-man animation he had made first.

What was the NES called in Japan, where it launched in July 1983?

Famicom, short for Family Computer, launched in Japan on 15 July 1983; Masayuki Uemura led its design, and the redesigned NES version went on to revive the American market after the 1983 crash.

Which NES accessory came bundled with early sets to win over wary retailers?

R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy, was a toy robot packed into the 1985 Deluxe Set so Nintendo could pitch the NES as a toy to shops burned by the video game crash.

Steve Wozniak built the prototype hardware for which 1976 arcade game in under a week?

Breakout was the job: Steve Jobs, then working for Nolan Bushnell, brought in his friend Wozniak, who designed a working prototype within days using far fewer chips than the company's engineers expected.

The Legend of Zelda's 1987 NES cartridge was among the first console games to save progress using what?

An internal battery kept the save alive: the game had launched in Japan on a rewritable disk add-on, so the cartridge version needed its own way to store progress.

Before Contra, the Konami Code first appeared in which NES game?

Gradius, the 1986 NES port, was the first: programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto added the code to give himself a full power-up set while testing and forgot to remove it; Contra later made it famous with 30 lives.

Which game was bundled with the Game Boy in North America and Europe?

Tetris came in the box when the Game Boy launched in North America and Europe; Nintendo chose the puzzle game over a Mario title to reach adults as well as children, and the cartridge sold about 35 million copies.

The original Game Boy's unlit screen showed four shades of which colour?

Green, in four greyish shades: Nintendo turned down a colour screen and a backlight because both would drain the batteries, an edge that colour rivals never matched.

Which SNES feature let games fake 3D perspective, as in F-Zero and Mario Kart?

Mode 7 is a background mode of the SNES graphics hardware that can rotate and scale a single layer every scanline, producing the tilted racetracks of F-Zero (1990) and Super Mario Kart (1992); Super FX was a separate cartridge chip.

Sonic the Hedgehog was designed by Naoto Ohshima after he won what?

An internal Sega character contest in 1990 sought a mascot to rival Mario; Naoto Ohshima's spiky hedgehog won, programmer Yuji Naka built the game around it, and the developers renamed themselves Sonic Team.

Sonic the Hedgehog became the Genesis pack-in game in 1991, replacing which earlier bundled title?

Altered Beast had come in the box since the console's 1989 American launch; swapping in Sonic helped the newer game pass 15 million copies, a Genesis record.

Which 1985 Sega arcade game was played on a rideable motorcycle-shaped cabinet?

Hang-On, Yu Suzuki's 1985 motorcycle racer, came in a deluxe cabinet shaped like a bike that players lean to steer; it started a run of Sega ride-on cabinets that led to Out Run and After Burner.

Which US ratings body was created largely in response to Mortal Kombat, Night Trap and Lethal Enforcers?

The ESRB, the Entertainment Software Rating Board, was set up by the industry in September 1994 after Senate hearings led by Joe Lieberman over the gore of Mortal Kombat, Night Trap and Lethal Enforcers.

Which 1993 puzzle-exploration game was the best-selling PC game for nearly a decade?

Myst, built by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller in HyperCard on the Macintosh, held the PC sales record from 1993 until The Sims finally overtook it.

Jordan Mechner rotoscoped Prince of Persia's running and jumping from video of whom?

His brother performed the acrobatics in white clothes for the camera; the sword fights were traced from swashbuckler films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood instead.

Why did publishers initially refuse Will Wright's SimCity?

It had no way to win: publishers in 1985 could not see a game without an ending, so Wright and Jeff Braun founded Maxis in 1987 and released it themselves in 1989 with Broderbund's help.

How many copies did GoldenEye 007 sell, making it the third-best-selling N64 game?

Eight million copies, behind only Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64 on the console; an inexperienced Rare team led by Martin Hollis spent about two and a half years building it before its August 1997 release.

Which restaurant chain did Atari founder Nolan Bushnell go on to create?

Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre opened its first restaurant in San Jose in 1977, pairing pizza with animatronic shows and a room full of arcade cabinets; Bushnell bought the concept back from Warner after selling them the company.

Which Namco shooter introduced a boss that captures the player's fighter in a tractor beam?

Galaga (1981), the sequel to Galaxian, lets a boss alien capture a fighter in its tractor beam; rescue it and the two ships fly side by side with double the firepower.

Which 1982 arcade game stars an orange hopper who 'swears' in a speech balloon full of symbols?

Q*bert, developed at Gottlieb under the project name Cubes, got its 'swearing' from a balloon of symbols and a sound chip that turned out incoherent synthesized speech.

In Dig Dug (1982), how does the player defeat underground enemies?

Pumping them up until they burst is the main method: Taizo Hori inflates Pookas and Fygars with his air pump, or drops rocks on them; Namco marketed the 1982 game as a 'strategic digging game'.

Asteroids (1979) reused arcade hardware Atari had built for which earlier game?

Lunar Lander (1979) came first on Atari's vector hardware; Asteroids followed that November and so outsold it that 300 early Asteroids units shipped in Lunar Lander cabinets.

On which planet is the original Metroid (1986) set?

Zebes is the Space Pirates' base planet where Samus Aran hunts Mother Brain; produced by Gunpei Yokoi in 1986, the game rewarded fast finishes with endings that revealed Samus as a woman.

Which former Disney animator provided the animation for the LaserDisc game Dragon's Lair (1983)?

Don Bluth, who had left Disney in 1979 with a group of animators, drew the film-quality footage in which knight Dirk the Daring rescues Princess Daphne from the dragon Singe; the LaserDisc played clips, limiting actual control.

Which Namco racer was North America's top-grossing arcade game in both 1983 and 1984?

Pole Position (1982) was Namco's rear-view racer set on the Fuji Speedway, with a qualifying lap before the race; descended from the company's electro-mechanical F-1 of 1976, it even spawned a 1984 Saturday-morning cartoon.

What did Nintendo make when craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company in Kyoto in 1889?

Playing cards called hanafuda, made by hand, were Nintendo's business for decades; the company only began producing toys in the 1960s and video games after that.

Which real heavyweight champion was the final opponent in Nintendo's 1987 boxing game Punch-Out!!?

Mike Tyson lent his name and likeness until the licence expired in 1990, after which Nintendo reissued the game with a fictional boxer in his place.

Which electronics giant built the PlayStation after its CD add-on deal with Nintendo collapsed?

Sony was dropped in public at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, when Nintendo announced it had allied with Philips instead; the abandoned project became a console of Sony's own.

Toru Iwatani has often said which food, seen at lunch with a piece missing, inspired Pac-Man?

A pizza with a slice removed is the story he tells most, though he has also said the shape came partly from rounding off the Japanese character for mouth.

Which green-capped hero, not the princess of the title, do players control in The Legend of Zelda?

Link got his name, the series' creator has said, because he connects people together, and he is a mostly silent hero throughout the games.

Which NES light-gun game features a dog notorious for smugly laughing when the player misses?

Duck Hunt shared a cartridge with Super Mario Bros. in the NES Action Set, and its smug dog was made impossible to shoot on consoles to keep the game family-friendly.

Which classroom computer game began in 1971 as a student teacher's project for an eighth-grade history class?

The Oregon Trail has players lead a wagon party from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley; Don Rawitsch wrote the first version with two fellow student teachers in Minneapolis.

Which British actor played Mario opposite John Leguizamo's Luigi in the 1993 film Super Mario Bros.?

Bob Hoskins took the part reluctantly and prepared by working as a plumber's apprentice for about three weeks, during which he set the plumber's boots on fire with a blowtorch.

Nintendo's Mario was named after Mario Segale, who had what connection to Nintendo of America?

Its warehouse landlord, Mario Segale, rented Nintendo of America the Tukwila building that served as its American headquarters while Donkey Kong was in development.

Which sidekick, whose real name puns on 'miles per hour', joined Sonic in Sonic the Hedgehog 2?

Tails flies by spinning his twin tails like helicopter blades; his designer wanted to call him Miles Prower, but Sega of America pushed for the nickname.

Which rideable dinosaur companion made his debut alongside Mario in Super Mario World (1990)?

Yoshi had been wanted since the first Super Mario Bros., but the NES could not handle a mount for Mario, so the idea waited for more powerful hardware.

Under what name was the Sega Genesis sold in Japan, Europe, Australia and Brazil?

Mega Drive was the name in most of the world, while Sega chose Genesis for North America; the console fared poorly in Japan yet thrived in North America, Brazil and Europe.

Which yellow-clad undead ninja in Mortal Kombat harpoons opponents with a rope dart?

Scorpion was given yellow to symbolise fire against his rival's ice blue, and the two were palette swaps of one ninja sprite, a trick that saved scarce arcade memory.

Which green-skinned Street Fighter II fighter from Brazil shocks opponents with electricity?

Blanka was first drawn with pink skin, which his designer found disgusting and changed to green; his backstory says he mutated after a plane crash in the jungle.

Which reference book shipped with the first Carmen Sandiego game to help players crack clues?

The World Almanac helped players research the geography clues left by Carmen's gang, and it doubled as the game's copy protection until a 1989 re-release.

Which English archaeologist, created at Core Design, made her debut in the 1996 game Tomb Raider?

Lara Croft was reworked after an early design was judged too close to Indiana Jones, and her lead artist went through about five versions before settling on her look.

Which Nintendo designer created Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda?

Shigeru Miyamoto first hoped to become a manga artist, and his boyhood expeditions through the fields, woods and caves around Kyoto later inspired Zelda's world.

Which armoured bounty hunter is revealed to be a woman at the end of Nintendo's Metroid (1986)?

Samus Aran is called male in the instruction manual to protect the surprise, an idea a team member suggested midway through development and the staff approved by vote.

Which platform hero, known as Rockman in Japan, takes the special weapon of each boss he defeats?

Mega Man can tackle the Robot Masters in any order, and each boss is especially vulnerable to one rival's weapon, which turns the choice of stage into a puzzle.

Which pink hero, who inhales his enemies, was drawn white on the American box of his 1992 debut?

Kirby was always meant to be pink, but the Game Boy's monochrome display showed him in grey, so Nintendo of America drew him white on its box art and adverts.

Which Pokémon, a starter in Pokémon Red and Blue, holds the very first entry in the Pokédex?

Bulbasaur is number 001, a Grass and Poison type that the series' director has called the best starter for the way it combines a monster with a plant.

Which 1998 console, the first with a built-in modem for online play, was Sega's final home console?

Dreamcast production ended in March 2001, after which Sega gave up making hardware and restructured itself as a developer of games for other companies' machines.

Which 1992 id Software shooter casts the player as spy William Blazkowicz escaping a Nazi prison?

Wolfenstein 3D reworked the 1981 stealth game Castle Wolfenstein into fast action, and has been termed the grandfather of 3D shooters for popularising the first-person genre.

Which 1991 DMA Design puzzle has players guide green-haired, blue-robed creatures to an exit?

Lemmings sold an estimated 20 million copies across its many ports, and its Dundee studio later became Rockstar North, the maker of Grand Theft Auto.

Which 1982 machine does Guinness list as the best-selling desktop computer model of all time?

Commodore 64 sales are put at between 12.5 and 17 million, and in the mid-1980s it outsold IBM PC compatibles and the Apple II in the United States.

Which Metal Gear hero is widely said to be named after Kurt Russell's character in Escape from New York?

Solid Snake shares his codename with Snake Plissken, though creator Hideo Kojima has said he chose a snake as a symbol of stealth for a game about avoiding enemies.

What colour was the cartridge of The Legend of Zelda when Nintendo released it in North America?

Gold plastic showed through a hole cut in the box, and inside the cartridge sat a battery that let NES players save their progress for the first time.

What kind of animal is Knuckles, the red rival introduced in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (1994)?

An echidna was the final pick after dozens of designs based on different animals; Knuckles guards the Master Emerald and was meant only as a supporting character.

Which Mattel controller for the NES borrowed its technology from a virtual-reality device but was panned as imprecise?

Power Glove tracked the wearer's hand movements with technology from the VPL Dataglove, but only two games were made specifically for it and neither sold well.

Which Konami run-and-gun for the NES made a famous cheat code popular by granting thirty lives?

Contra normally gives the player just three lives, and the code's ten-fold boost on such a difficult game is what spread awareness of the trick among players.

Which surname belongs to Simon, the whip-wielding vampire hunter of Konami's Castlevania (1986)?

Belmont heroes fight with a whip the series calls the Vampire Killer, and in the 1986 original Simon storms the castle a century after his ancestor beat Count Dracula.

Which car maker complained when Sega's Out Run featured its convertible without a licence?

Ferrari was paid a settlement to avoid legal action; designer Yu Suzuki had chosen the Testarossa after being inspired by one on a research trip to Monaco.

Which toy company behind Cabbage Patch Kids launched a 1982 console bundled with Donkey Kong?

Coleco secured the first home version of Nintendo's arcade hit as its pack-in, then quit video games in 1985 after its Adam computer proved a costly failure.

Which Hollywood studio sued Nintendo, claiming Donkey Kong infringed its rights to King Kong?

Universal lost badly: the judge ruled it had no right to the King Kong name or story, having itself argued in an earlier case that the tale was in the public domain.

Which Nintendo engineer designed both the Game & Watch and the Game Boy handhelds?

Gunpei Yokoi is said to have had the idea for the Game & Watch after watching a bored businessman on a bullet train play with a pocket calculator.

Which 1979 start-up founded by four unhappy programmers was the first third-party console developer?

Activision was started by the so-called Gang of Four, whose games made up 60% of their old employer's sales yet who received no bonuses and no public credit.

Which British studio founded by Tim and Chris Stamper made Donkey Kong Country and GoldenEye 007?

Rare grew out of the Stampers' earlier label Ultimate Play the Game, and its 3D graphics experiments so impressed Nintendo that the company bought a stake in the studio in 1994.

Which Codemasters cheat device for the NES did a court clear of infringing Nintendo's copyrights?

Game Genie won a landmark 1992 case because the court found it created no permanent derivative work and did no harm to sales of the games it altered.

Western Super Mario Bros. 2 was reworked from which Japanese game made for a Fuji Television expo?

Doki Doki Panic starred a family of festival mascots, a boy, his girlfriend and his parents, whose places were taken by Mario characters for the Western release.

What name do fans give the endless water level reached by a wall glitch in Super Mario Bros.?

Minus World is stored in memory as World 36-1, but tile 36 is blank, so the display reads only -1; the looping water stage can never be finished.

Which engineer, often called the father of video games, built the 'Brown Box' console prototype?

Ralph Baer and his team wrapped the prototype in brown tape to imitate wood veneer, and he later helped design the electronic memory game Simon.

Which department store chain sold the first home version of Pong under its Tele-Games brand in 1975?

Sears agreed after toy and electronics retailers had turned the console down; its makers approached the chain after spotting a rival machine advertised in its catalogue.

Which manga artist designed the characters for the Dragon Quest series and Chrono Trigger?

Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball, was recruited for the first Dragon Quest in 1986 without knowing what an RPG was, and he worked on every instalment until his death in 2024.

Which 1980 dungeon crawler drawn in text characters gave its name to a genre built on permadeath?

Rogue generates new dungeons, monsters and treasure for every playthrough, an idea two California students built for Unix terminals and gave away freely.

In which 1982 arcade game do the two players ride a flying ostrich and a stork?

Joust has players flap their mount's wings with a single button to unseat enemy knights on buzzards, whose fallen eggs hatch into new riders if left uncollected.

Guybrush Threepwood, enemy of the undead LeChuck, is the hero of which LucasArts series?

Monkey Island's would-be pirate got his first name by accident: the artist saved the nameless sprite as a Deluxe Paint brush file, and the label stuck.

Which company founded by Ken and Roberta Williams made the King's Quest and Police Quest series?

Sierra On-Line began with Mystery House, a 1980 mail-order whodunit inspired by an Agatha Christie novel and the board game Clue, which added pictures to typed commands.

Which Master System platform hero served as Sega's mascot in the years before Sonic the Hedgehog?

Alex Kidd made his debut in Miracle World in 1986, and after Alex Kidd in Shinobi World in 1990 Sega shifted its focus to Sonic.

Which beer brand sponsored the arcade bartending game Tapper before a root beer version replaced it?

Budweiser tap handles served as the controllers on early machines, but the game was re-themed for arcades because it was seen as advertising alcohol to minors.

Which two-sport star is famously all but untacklable in the 1991 NES football game Tecmo Super Bowl?

Bo Jackson's digital double, nicknamed Tecmo Bo by fans, is so quick that players claim he can run for 1,000 yards in a single game.