Surprising Facts About the Games and Gaming Industry
The history of video games has a long history. American physicist William Higinbotham in 1958 created a game called “Tennis for Two”. Although there have been attempts to create a game before him, mostly chess to prove the power of new computers. Still, this tennis game is considered to be the first game made for the purpose of entertainment. Just a three years later, we can see another game “Spacewar” created by MIT employees. Using a PDP-1 computer. We can say that this is the first game that introduced a specific location – space.
The background consisted of randomly generated dots representing constellations. From those early years of the gaming industry until today, a lot has changed. Almost every game has some interesting story behind it. You may have missed some of these.
The blocks in Super Mario are actually people
Super Mario leads a completely normal life of a plumber, which consists of collecting coins, feeding mushrooms, rescuing a princess, and breaking blocks made by people. How would his life look if he would be an electrician? On the fourth page of the Super Mario Bros manual, you can find the states where it’s said that in the kingdom the mushroom people were attacked by Koop. This is a tribe of turtles known for their black magic. At that moment, the quiet and good people of the mushroom have been turned into stones, bricks, and even plants resembling a horse’s mane. How many of Toad’s cousins have we smashed for coins?
Fog obscures hardware limitations in games
Many people remember the first Silent Hill as fantastic atmospheric survival horror. The mystical fog that covers the city plays a big role in that. But that fog was put on for completely different reasons. The technical limitations of the PlayStation did not allow the loading of remote objects, but only those close to the player. To prevent a “pop-up” of distant objects, the fog was inserted to cover up the process. Many other games of the period also used fog for the same reasons. But none left as much of an impression as the one from Silent Hill.
Why is the Donkey Kong monkey called a donkey?
Many of you played the whole childhood Donkey Kong Country without ever wondering why the Donkey Kong monkey is called just that – a donkey. The creator of DK, Shigeru Miyamoto, believed that the English word “donkey” actually means “stupid”. We all know that this is not true. If they had a good knowledge of the English language, today one of the most famous gaming franchises would be called Stupid Kong.
NBA Jam set up against the Bulls
The creator of the game, Mark Turmell, was such a big fan of the Detroit Pistons. For that reason he inserted a special code in case his club would play against their biggest rivals – the Chicago Bulls. The probability of hitting a shot with any Bulls player in the last few seconds of such a game was zero. Turmell himself admitted years later; “If the game was tied until the last second and anyone from the Bulls took a shot at that point, we put a special code into the game that would make it impossible to hit that shot.” Michael Jordan would have to say a lot about that subject. But luckily this is only a game.
Kazuki Ito – the most hated judge in history of football games
If you play Pro Evolution Soccer before a decade, there is a lot of chance that you got one or more undeserved red cards. Starting from PES 3 to PES 2008, on the field, you will be able to see a Japanese man who shows red cards more often than any other judge. Konami made Kazuki inspired by the most famous judge of that time – Pierluigi Collin. They give him his sternness but not his common sense. In the matches where he was referee, any kind of slip-up meant a direct red card. Konami officially removed him from the game after PES 6, but if you were lucky enough you could run into him in the next two sequels as well.
All games made for NES fit on one USB
Nintendo cartridges contained between 8 KB and 1 MB of data. This means that all 800 games that have ever been released for the NES would fit on a 128 GB microSD card 40 times.
The design of the PlayStation 2 console is based on the old Atari
In the early 1990s, Sony bought the rights for about seventy Atari patents. One of them was for the Falcon 040. The previous version of this home computer did not go well with customers, so Atari gave up on new versions. Sony used a few ideas to design its new console. One of them was the ability to run the console vertically or horizontally.
Gandhi – dictator
In the first sequel to the strategy game Civilization, Gandhi had the lowest score of aggression, which would mean that he should have resolved conflicts through diplomacy rather than armed. But a bug in the game made him a nuclear energy fanatic. If a player chose democracy, his aggression would drop by two points. Instead of aggression going into a negative number, she would make a whole circle and come to 255 – the highest possible score of aggression. That peaceful move would make him the biggest tyrant in the game.
