100 Fun Facts About Videogame

What was the first commercially successful arcade video game?

Pong was Atari's 1972 debut; the prototype in a Sunnyvale bar soon stopped working because its coin box had jammed full of quarters, which convinced Atari to build the machines itself.

Which console first popularized rumble feedback with an add-on controller accessory?

The Nintendo 64's Rumble Pak arrived in 1997 bundled with Star Fox 64 and plugged into the back of the controller; by November Sony's DualShock had the motors built into the pad itself.

The original Diablo, developed by Blizzard North, was first released for which platform?

Windows PC players got Diablo at the very end of 1996; Blizzard North had designed it as a turn-based game until its publisher pushed for real-time play, and a PlayStation port followed in 1998.

Which Microsoft veteran co-founded Valve, the company behind Steam, in 1996?

Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington quit Microsoft to start Valve, following a colleague who had already left to make games at id Software, the studio the other three co-founded in 1991.

What genre is Minecraft primarily categorized as?

Sandbox games set no fixed goal and let players make their own fun; Minecraft's creator took its dig-and-build blocks from Infiniminer, an indie mining game released only weeks earlier.

Which Mario character hunts ghosts with a vacuum cleaner in his own spin-off series?

Luigi began in 1983's Mario Bros. as a green recolour of Mario; Luigi's Mansion (2001) finally gave the sidekick his own series, armed with a ghost-catching vacuum called the Poltergust 3000.

Which game came bundled with the Game Boy at its 1989 North American launch?

Tetris got the slot after its licence-holder told Nintendo's US chief that a Mario game would sell the handheld to young boys, but the falling-block puzzle would sell it to everyone.

Who composed the score for Final Fantasy VII?

Nobuo Uematsu wrote the whole Final Fantasy VII score in under a year; for the final battle's 'One-Winged Angel' he set Latin verses from the Carmina Burana to a blend of Stravinsky and Jimi Hendrix.

The Xbox, launched in 2001, takes its name from which Microsoft software technology?

DirectX gave the console its working title, 'DirectX Box'; marketing disliked the shortened 'Xbox' and put it in focus tests expecting it to lose, only for it to beat every alternative.

Many early buyers used the PlayStation 2 as a cheap player for which disc format?

DVD players often cost more than the console itself in 2000, so many households bought a PlayStation 2 to watch films; at its Japanese launch the best-selling disc was The Matrix on DVD.

Which Zelda game launched alongside the Nintendo Switch?

Breath of the Wild was announced in 2013 for the Wii U, then slipped so far that it became both that console's last Nintendo-published game and the Switch's launch showpiece.

Sega's 16-bit Genesis console was sold in Japan and Europe under which name?

Mega Drive was the name in Japan, Europe and most other markets; North America got Genesis, reportedly over a trademark clash, and Sega's US ads boasted 'Genesis does what Nintendon't'.

Which independent developer is solely credited with creating Stardew Valley?

Eric Barone began Stardew Valley after failing to land a programming job on graduating in 2011, then spent years making every part alone, from code to art and music, as ConcernedApe.

The Elder Scrolls V, which casts the player as the Dragonborn, has what subtitle?

Skyrim has been re-released on so many machines that Bethesda sent itself up in 2018 with a 'Very Special Edition' for Amazon's Alexa, a spoof that was also a real, playable voice game.

Which enemy does Mario meet first in World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros.?

The Goomba was the last enemy added, after testers found the Koopa Troopa too tricky to face first; memory was nearly gone, so its walk is one tiny image flipped back and forth.

Which Soviet software engineer created Tetris in the mid-1980s?

Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris at a Moscow computing centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; because the state owned his work, he earned no royalties from it until 1996.

Under what title was Pac-Man originally released in Japan in 1980?

Pac-Man was released in Japan by Namco in 1980 as Puck Man, from the Japanese 'paku-paku' eating sound; it was renamed for the US to deter vandals altering the P to an F.

In The Legend of Zelda series, Link and Zelda fight to save which land from Ganon?

Hyrule grew out of Shigeru Miyamoto's boyhood near Kyoto, where he roamed fields and woods and crept into caves with no map; he wanted players to feel the same thrill of stumbling on secrets.

Which Japanese company developed and published Space Invaders in 1978?

Taito's Space Invaders speeds up by accident: its designer found the hardware drew the aliens faster as fewer remained on screen, and kept the quirk as a feature that raised the tension.

In the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong, who does Mario climb the construction site to rescue?

Pauline was simply 'Lady' in the first arcade release, and Mario was 'Jumpman'; Nintendo built the game to reuse unsold cabinets from its failed shooter Radar Scope.

Which mad scientist is the arch-enemy of Sonic the Hedgehog?

Doctor Eggman, known as Dr. Robotnik in early Western releases, has chased Sonic since Sega launched the hedgehog in 1991 as its answer to Nintendo's Mario.

Grand Theft Auto V is set in a fictional city based on which real one?

Los Angeles is the model for the game's Los Santos; Rockstar's team spent more than 100 days there on research trips and used Google Maps projections of the real streets to lay out its roads.

The 1993 shooter Doom begins on the moons of which planet before ending in hell?

Mars's moons Phobos and Deimos host the first two episodes before the third descends into Hell; Doom spread so widely that Microsoft filmed Bill Gates inside the game to promote Windows 95.

In Valve's Portal, which AI taunts the player through the Aperture Science test chambers?

GLaDOS, short for Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, lures the player on with a promise of cake; graffiti warning that 'the cake is a lie' became a widely shared internet meme.

Which studio developed Halo: Combat Evolved, the 2001 Xbox launch title?

Bungie began Halo in 1997 as a real-time strategy game, reworked it into a shooter, and saw it become the Xbox's launch title after Microsoft bought the studio in 2000.

The original Pokémon Red and Blue take place in which fictional region?

In Japan the 1996 pair was Red and Green; Blue came later as a special edition. All of them roam Kanto, the series' first region, and the games reached the West in 1998.

What was the development codename of the Wii console?

Nintendo called the console 'Revolution' from its 2004 announcement until renaming it Wii in April 2006; Satoru Iwata bet on motion controls over raw power.

Swappable ROM cartridges, popularized by the Atari 2600, were first used by which 1976 console?

The Fairchild Channel F, whose F stood for 'Fun', put each game on a plug-in 'Videocart' in 1976; Atari's VCS took up the idea a year later and left its 350,000 sales far behind.

Which company developed Street Fighter II: The World Warrior for arcades in 1991?

Capcom's Street Fighter II let players choose among eight fighters; its combos came about by accident, as the designers never planned for certain moves to chain together, and they became a staple of the genre.

Controversy over the violence in Mortal Kombat helped lead to the creation of which body?

The 1993 US Senate hearings prompted by Mortal Kombat and Night Trap led the industry to form the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) in 1994 to rate games itself.

World of Warcraft takes place on which fictional planet?

Azeroth suffered a real outbreak in 2005, when a boss's 'Corrupted Blood' curse escaped its dungeon and spread from player to player; epidemiologists later studied how people reacted as a model for real epidemics.

Fortnite Battle Royale pits up to how many players against each other?

Fortnite Battle Royale drops up to 100 players onto one island and shrinks the safe zone until one player or squad is left; Epic built the mode in about two months after rival PUBG took off.

Which American studio developed the 2018 social deduction hit Among Us?

Innersloth released Among Us on iOS and Android in June 2018 to little mainstream attention; it surged in 2020 when Twitch streamers and YouTubers took it up during the pandemic.

Angry Birds was created by a game designer from which country?

Angry Birds was made by Rovio, based in Espoo, Finland; its 2009 success rescued the studio from near-bankruptcy, and Sega bought Rovio in 2023.

Which studio develops The Sims, the life simulation series published by Electronic Arts?

Maxis released The Sims in 2000 after its lead designer lost his home in the 1991 Oakland firestorm and turned the experience of rebuilding his life into a game; Electronic Arts had bought the studio in 1997.

To win back wary US toy shops after the 1983 crash, Nintendo sold its NES with which toy robot?

R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy, let Nintendo pitch the NES as a toy, not a video game console, to shops burned when US home game revenue fell about 97%; only two games ever used him.

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell also established which restaurant chain?

Chuck E. Cheese is a rat by mistake: Nolan Bushnell bought a costume he took for a coyote and planned 'Coyote Pizza', then renamed his 1977 San Jose pizza-and-arcade restaurant around the rodent.

Sony's first PlayStation grew out of a cancelled CD-ROM add-on for which Nintendo console?

The Super NES was to get a Sony-built CD drive until Nintendo dropped the deal in 1991; Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi then turned the abandoned project into a rival console of its own.

Which fantasy author provided the worldbuilding for FromSoftware's Elden Ring?

George R. R. Martin wrote the mythology and backstory of the Lands Between for Elden Ring; Hidetaka Miyazaki directed the 2022 game, which lets players ride the spectral steed Torrent.

Which of the five Wii Sports games became a hit in retirement homes, where residents formed their own leagues?

Bowling leagues sprang up in senior centres across the US, and a National Senior League for Wii bowling grew to hundreds of teams; the game came bundled with the Wii outside Japan.

In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the player buys a deserted-island getaway package from which character?

Tom Nook's getaway package arrived in March 2020 just as lockdowns began, and players shut out of real gatherings used their islands to hold weddings and graduation ceremonies.

Which puzzle game launched on Facebook in April 2012?

Candy Crush Saga grew out of a browser game by its maker King; by January 2013 it had knocked Zynga's FarmVille 2 off the top of Facebook's most-played chart.

Who created the Super Smash Bros. crossover fighting series?

Masahiro Sakurai made the prototype at HAL Laboratory with Satoru Iwata; it had four faceless fighters until he added Nintendo's heroes, without asking permission first because he expected a no.

Which 1962 game, written at MIT for a PDP-1 computer, set two ships duelling around a star?

Spacewar spread from one computer lab to the next; a decade later Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney rebuilt it as the coin-operated Computer Space, the project that led them to found Atari.

Which engineer led the design of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home video game console?

Ralph H. Baer designed the 'Brown Box' prototype at Sanders Associates that Magnavox released as the Odyssey in September 1972; it showed only three dots and a line, so players used plastic screen overlays.

Which British studio developed GoldenEye 007, the 1997 N64 shooter?

Rare, the Leicestershire studio behind Donkey Kong Country, built GoldenEye 007 with a small team led by Martin Hollis; it was first pitched as a 2D platformer for the Super NES.

The Konami Code is best known for granting 30 lives in which NES game?

Contra made the code famous, but it began in the 1986 NES port of Gradius: programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto found the game too hard to test, so he added a cheat and forgot to take it out.

Which Nintendo villain did Shigeru Miyamoto first draw as an ox?

Bowser was modelled on the ox king in Toei's 1960 film Alakazam the Great; when Takashi Tezuka pointed out that he was meant to be a turtle, the two ideas merged into the Koopa king.

Which Atari 2600 film tie-in, rushed out in about five weeks for Christmas 1982, flopped notoriously?

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial had only five weeks because the rights deal closed in late July; unsold copies were later dumped in a New Mexico landfill, dug up in 2014.

Which platform-game mascot was developed under the working name Willie the Wombat?

Crash Bandicoot spent most of his development at Naughty Dog as Willie the Wombat, a name the team thought too dorky to keep; 'Crash' came from the way he smashes through boxes.

Kirby made his 1992 debut in Kirby's Dream Land on which handheld or console?

Kirby's Dream Land launched on the Game Boy in 1992; the round blob was only a placeholder drawn until a proper hero was designed, but the team decided it worked better and kept it.

Which bounty hunter is the protagonist of the Metroid series?

Samus Aran, the armoured bounty hunter, debuted in 1986's Metroid, which blended Super Mario Bros. platforming with Zelda-style exploration; her reveal as a woman was a famous ending twist.

Mojang Studios, the developer of Minecraft, is based in which country?

Sweden's Mojang began in Stockholm in 2009 as a one-man venture, set up by Markus 'Notch' Persson to build Minecraft; he sold it five years later, saying he wanted to move on.

Which 1993 puzzle adventure, built in Apple's HyperCard, was the best-selling PC game for nearly a decade?

Myst was built by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller on Macintosh computers; its six million sales helped drive the spread of CD-ROM drives, and no PC game outsold it until The Sims in 2002.

In Galaga, what lets 'Boss Galaga' enemies capture the player's ship?

Boss Galaga fire a tractor beam that pulls in the player's fighter; shooting the boss later frees it, and the rescued ship docks alongside as a 'dual fighter' with doubled firepower.

Which company developed the 1981 arcade classic Frogger, which Sega then published?

Konami built Frogger, but Sega's US arm nearly passed on it as a 'women and kids game'; an analyst talked the executives into a trial in a San Diego bar, and it proved a hit.

Half-Life runs on GoldSrc, a heavily modified version of which licensed id Software technology?

GoldSrc is Valve's heavily modified Quake engine, licensed from id Software; Half-Life (1998) told its story through scripted in-engine sequences rather than cutscenes.

Which physicist is the hero of Half-Life, the 1998 shooter whose story novelist Marc Laidlaw wrote?

Gordon Freeman's escape from the Black Mesa lab was nearly a 1997 release; weeks from the deadline, Valve decided the game was no fun, started over and shipped it a year late.

The 1985 Oregon Trail was made by MECC, an educational computing consortium based in which state?

Minnesota's state-founded MECC got The Oregon Trail from Don Rawitsch, who devised it in 1971 with two fellow student teachers for a Minneapolis history class; MECC then offered it free to the state's schools.

The 1985 Oregon Trail game sets out in 1848 from which Missouri town, bound for Oregon's Willamette Valley?

Independence was a real jumping-off point for the Oregon, California and Santa Fe trails; a wagon train of nearly 1,000 people gathered there in spring 1843, five years before the game's journey begins.

Which designer made his debut with Metal Gear in 1987, turning it into a stealth game?

Hideo Kojima directed Metal Gear for the MSX2 in 1987, reworking a planned combat game to reward avoiding enemies rather than shooting them because the hardware could not handle many bullets on screen.

In Pac-Man, which of the four ghosts is red and chases the player directly?

Blinky, the red ghost, heads straight for Pac-Man; Pinky and Inky try to cut him off ahead, while Clyde switches between chasing and fleeing depending on how close he is.

Resident Evil centres on a zombie outbreak in which fictional Midwestern town?

Raccoon City, a fictional Midwestern city, hosts the Umbrella Corporation's outbreak; the 1996 original sends a S.T.A.R.S. team into the nearby Arklay mountains, where they are trapped in a mansion.

CD Projekt, maker of The Witcher games, is headquartered in which country?

CD Projekt is headquartered in Warsaw, Poland; it began in 1994 translating foreign games into Polish, including Baldur's Gate for Interplay, before building The Witcher in 2007.

Which Square designer is credited as the creator of the Final Fantasy franchise?

Hironobu Sakaguchi made Final Fantasy in 1987 as a last throw: by his colleagues' account he meant to quit games and return to university had it flopped. He left Square in 2003 and founded Mistwalker.

Sonic's two-tailed fox sidekick Tails has what pun-based real name?

Miles Prower is a pun on 'miles per hour'; designer Yasushi Yamaguchi wanted Miles as the main name, but Sega of America preferred Tails, so both were kept.

Which company originally developed the 2016 augmented-reality hit Pokémon Go?

Niantic, a San Francisco developer spun out of Google in 2015, built Pokémon Go on the bones of its earlier location game Ingress; it sold its games division to Scopely in 2025.

League of Legends is developed and published by which company?

Riot Games, founded by Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill, released League of Legends in 2009 as a spiritual successor to the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients; Tencent bought Riot outright in 2015.

Derby studio Core Design launched which adventure series in 1996, starring an English archaeologist?

Tomb Raider's hero was first sketched as a man with a whip and hat; told that looked too much like Indiana Jones, artist Toby Gard redrew the lead as Lara Croft.

Under what name is the Mega Man series known in Japan?

Mega Man is Rockman in Japan, a 'rock' to partner his sister robot Roll; the name was changed for America because the publisher's US vice-president simply disliked the original.

Which 1995 Nintendo console showed 3D games on a red monochrome display?

The Virtual Boy used red LEDs and a parallax effect to show stereoscopic 3D on a tabletop headset; launched in 1995, it sold poorly and was discontinued within a year.

Gunpei Yokoi created which line of pocket LCD games for Nintendo in 1980?

Game & Watch came to Yokoi, by his own account, on a bullet train, where he saw a bored commuter fiddling with a pocket calculator; the cheap LCD handhelds gave a struggling Nintendo its first worldwide hit.

MicroProse published which 1991 strategy game spanning some 6,000 years of human history?

Civilization opens in 4000 BC and runs on into the space age; because a board game already had the name, MicroProse licensed the title from its US publisher, Avalon Hill, to head off a legal fight.

Who designed the original SimCity, released in 1989?

Will Wright began SimCity in 1985 after building a level editor for Raid on Bungeling Bay; publishers passed on a game with no action, so he co-founded his own company to get it released in 1989.

RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999) was written almost entirely in which language?

Chris Sawyer wrote about 99% of RollerCoaster Tycoon in x86 assembly language, with only a little C for the Windows interface; it followed his earlier Transport Tycoon.

The 2018 God of War moved Kratos from Greek myth into which mythology?

The 2018 God of War relocates Kratos to Norse mythology's Midgard, where he and his son Atreus set out to scatter the ashes of Kratos's wife, Faye, from the highest peak.

BioShock is set in which underwater city built as an isolated utopia?

Rapture, built beneath the Atlantic by magnate Andrew Ryan as an escape from government and religion, has collapsed into civil war by the time Jack arrives after a 1960 plane crash.

What is the name of the AI who accompanies Master Chief through the Halo games?

Cortana, the AI carried in Master Chief's armour, is voiced by Jen Taylor, who also voiced Microsoft's Windows assistant of the same name from 2014.

Which publisher is behind Assassin's Creed, developed mainly at its Montreal studio?

Ubisoft's Montreal team began it as a new Prince of Persia game, working title Prince of Persia: Assassins, before the idea grew into a series of its own with 2007's Assassin's Creed.

In Splatoon, players control squid-like humanoids known by what name?

Inklings are Splatoon's squid-like kids, joined later by octopus-derived Octolings; both switch between a 'kid' form for shooting and a 'swim' form for moving through their own ink.

Who designed the characters for Square's 1995 RPG Chrono Trigger?

Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball, designed Chrono Trigger's characters as part of the 'Dream Team' Square assembled with the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest creators for the 1995 release.

Which Namco designer created Pac-Man in 1980?

Toru Iwatani built Pac-Man around eating because arcades were full of alien-shooting games aimed at men; he wanted a cheerful game that women and couples would play too.

After the first Guitar Hero games, Harmonix launched which rival music game in 2007?

Rock Band came about after Activision bought Guitar Hero's publisher in 2006 and MTV bought Harmonix; with the old series handed to another studio, Harmonix answered by adding drums and vocals.

Which Japanese company released the Neo Geo arcade-and-home platform in 1990?

SNK's Neo Geo ran the same hardware at home as in arcades, but cost so much to build that the home console was at first only rented out through Japanese game shops.

Guinness lists which 1982 home computer as the best-selling desktop model ever?

The Commodore 64 was cheap because Commodore made its own chips; the price war it set off helped push rivals such as Texas Instruments out of home computers, and Guinness credits it with at least 12.5 million sales.

Infocom, founded by MIT staff and students, split which mainframe text adventure into three games from 1980?

Zork was written on a mainframe and was too big for early home computers, so its authors found a way to run a smaller portion on them and sold it in three parts as Infocom's first products.

Before Grand Theft Auto, Scottish studio DMA Design had a hit with which 1991 puzzle game?

Lemmings began as an animation: programmer Mike Dailly drew tiny walking men to prove they would fit in an 8-by-8-pixel box. Its many versions are estimated to have sold over 15 million copies.

Kingdom Hearts crosses Final Fantasy characters with properties owned by which company?

Disney came aboard after a chance lift ride: Square producer Shinji Hashimoto pitched the crossover to a Disney executive when the two firms shared an office building in Japan.

Which Game Freak co-founder is credited as the creator of Pokémon?

Satoshi Tajiri drew on his childhood hobby of collecting insects to conceive Pokémon; the first games, Red and Green, took Game Freak six years and shipped in 1996.

Genshin Impact developer miHoYo is a studio based in which country?

miHoYo was founded in Shanghai, China, in 2012 by three Shanghai Jiao Tong University computer science students; Genshin Impact arrived in 2020 and became a global gacha hit.

For how much did Microsoft agree to buy Minecraft maker Mojang in September 2014?

Microsoft's $2.5 billion deal came after founder Markus 'Notch' Persson publicly offered to sell his share of Mojang so that he could move on; he and his co-founders left once it closed.

Which actor plays the rocker-terrorist Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077?

Keanu Reeves plays and voices Johnny Silverhand, whose digitised mind V carries on a biochip; revealing the role on stage at E3 2019, he answered a fan's shout by calling the whole crowd 'breathtaking'.

Who is the outlaw protagonist of Red Dead Redemption 2, set in 1899?

Arthur Morgan, a senior enforcer of the Van der Linde gang, is the playable outlaw for most of the 1899 story; the epilogue hands control to John Marston, hero of the first Red Dead Redemption.

Hollow Knight studio Team Cherry is based in which country?

Team Cherry is based in Adelaide, Australia; founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen funded Hollow Knight through a 2014 Kickstarter and released it in 2017.

Which Chicago company developed the original Mortal Kombat for arcades in 1992?

Midway, the Chicago arcade maker, developed Mortal Kombat in 1992; Ed Boon and John Tobias were told to build a 'combat game' within a year and set out to rival Street Fighter II.

After EA and FIFA ended their long licensing deal, EA's football series continued in 2023 under which name?

EA Sports FC 24 launched in September 2023 as the direct successor to FIFA 23 after EA and FIFA failed to agree a renewal; FIFA 23 was the last game under the licence.

Nolan Bushnell took the name Atari from a term in which board game?

In Go, 'atari' warns that stones are one move from capture, roughly the game's equivalent of 'check' in chess; Bushnell and Ted Dabney adopted it in 1972 after their first choice, Syzygy, was taken.

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make what product?

Playing cards were the whole business at first: Fusajiro Yamauchi made hanafuda 'flower cards' in Kyoto. When card sales slumped in the 1960s, Nintendo turned to toys and had a million-seller with its extending Ultra Hand.

Kirby is said to honour the lawyer who beat which film studio's claim that Donkey Kong copied King Kong?

Universal lost in 1983 partly because it had itself once argued in court that King Kong was in the public domain; winning lawyer John Kirby is the man the pink hero is said to be named for.

Princess Zelda was named after the wife of which American novelist?

F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife Zelda was a novelist and socialite in her own right; Shigeru Miyamoto said he simply liked the sound of her name and borrowed it for his princess.