50 Fun Facts About Classic Video Game

Which company released Pong in 1972?

Allan Alcorn built it as a training exercise set by Nolan Bushnell, and it turned out too good not to sell.

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

Ralph Baer's 'Brown Box' became the Odyssey, the first commercial home console, in September 1972.

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

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney based it on Spacewar! and sold roughly 1,300 to 1,500 fibreglass cabinets.

How did players of the first home console, in 1972, get colour graphics for its games?

The console came with dice, paper money and board-game bits; it sold 350,000 units before being discontinued in 1975.

Which Japanese company released the 1978 alien-shooting hit that started the arcade golden age?

By 1982 Tomohiro Nishikado's game had grossed $3.8 billion, and it was the first video game with endless gameplay.

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

Midway changed it for America out of fear vandals would turn the P into an F on cabinets.

Which of these is NOT one of the four ghosts in the original Pac-Man?

Sue is the orange ghost in Ms. Pac-Man; the original quartet is Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde.

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

Half the screen dissolves into garbage; designer Toru Iwatani had wanted a game women would enjoy as much as men.

Ms. Pac-Man began life as an unauthorised modification kit called what?

General Computer Corporation had to take it to Midway because of earlier legal trouble with another publisher.

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

President Hiroshi Yamauchi handed the rescue job to first-time designer Shigeru Miyamoto.

By what name was Mario sometimes known in the original Donkey Kong?

He rescued Pauline, then called 'The Lady', up a New York construction site; it was the first game with a jump button.

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

He wrote it in Pascal in about three weeks; the Game Boy version has since sold 35 million copies.

Which Dutch-born entrepreneur negotiated the falling-blocks rights for Nintendo's Game Boy in 1989?

He dealt directly with the Soviet licensing body Elektronorgtechnica.

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

Stella was its codename; the console was only rebranded 2600 in November 1982.

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

The console launched with nine games including Combat, which was the original pack-in.

How long did Howard Scott Warshaw have to develop E.T. for the Atari 2600?

Rights talks ended in late July 1982 with the Christmas deadline fixed; the game is routinely called the worst ever made.

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

For decades the burial had been dismissed as an urban legend.

By roughly what percentage did US home video game revenue fall between 1983 and 1985?

It went from about $3.2 billion to about $100 million amid a glut of poor-quality games.

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

Warren Robinett hid it because Atari refused to credit programmers; 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?

Grues replaced deadly pits after a tester fell into one in an attic; the name came from Jack Vance.

How many cabinets did Williams' Defender sell, making it the company's best-selling game?

It was pinball programmer Eugene Jarvis's first video game.

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

Missile Command's Dave Theurer went on to design Tempest.

How many cities does the player defend in Missile Command?

Released in June 1980 at the height of the Cold War, it used a trackball and three missile bases.

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

David Crane built the game around a realistic running animation he had made first.

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

Masayuki Uemura designed it; it sold 61.91 million units and revived American gaming after the crash.

What was R.O.B., bundled with early NES sets to reassure toy stores?

The Zapper light gun for Duck Hunt was the other add-on.

Roughly how many copies has Super Mario Bros. sold worldwide?

Koji Kondo's soundtrack was one of the first to make music central to a game's design.

The Legend of Zelda first launched in Japan in 1986 on which add-on?

Miyamoto and Tezuka developed it alongside Super Mario Bros.; Link collects eight Triforce fragments to beat Ganon.

On which NES game did the Konami Code first appear?

Contra made it famous in North America by handing out 30 lives, hence the 'Contra Code' nickname.

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

Gunpei Yokoi's team designed the handheld; 40,000 sold on day one and the line reached about 118 million.

How many shades could the original Game Boy screen display?

They were shades of grey-green; Yamauchi added headphones and four AA batteries to make the box feel like a bargain.

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

Super FX was a separate enhancement chip inside cartridges like Star Fox.

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

Sega wanted a mascot to rival Mario; the developers renamed themselves Sonic Team.

How many copies did the original Sonic sell on the Genesis, where it was the pack-in game?

Across all platforms it has topped 40 million.

How many buttons did Street Fighter II's arcade control layout use, a configuration it made standard?

More than 200,000 cabinets sold, and 6.3 million SNES cartridges made it Capcom's biggest single game for 20 years.

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

Mortal Kombat's digitised actors and Fatalities made the gore feel real; Johnny Cage was loosely based on Jean-Claude Van Damme.

How did id Software distribute Doom in December 1993?

John Carmack's engine and John Romero's design followed Wolfenstein 3D, which had revived the 1981 Castle Wolfenstein.

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

Rand and Robyn Miller built it on HyperCard for the Macintosh; The Sims eventually overtook it.

Jordan Mechner rotoscoped his 1989 Persian platformer's animation from footage of whom?

His brother David performed acrobatics in white clothes; swashbucklers like The Adventures of Robin Hood filled in the sword fights.

Why did publishers initially refuse Will Wright's SimCity?

Broderbund finally took it in 1989, four years after Wright started; it founded Maxis's tradition of open-ended sims.

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

An inexperienced Rare team led by Martin Hollis spent two and a half years on it.

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

He met Atari co-founder Ted Dabney while working at Ampex.

Galaga (1981) is the sequel to which earlier Namco arcade shooter?

Its signature 'dual fighter' trick, rescuing a ship captured by a tractor beam, was inspired by a film designer Shigeru Yokoyama had seen.

How many frogs must the player guide home to clear a level of Frogger (1981)?

Developed by Konami and published by Sega, the game had sold 20 million copies across its home versions by 2005.

Q*bert (1982), the pyramid-hopping arcade hit, was developed under what project name?

Jeff Lee designed the character and Warren Davis built the game; Q*bert's 'swearing' came from a grawlix speech balloon and synthesised gibberish.

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

Namco marketed it as a 'strategic digging game', and it was Japan's second highest-grossing arcade game of 1982.

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

Rendered on a vector display, it sold 47,840 upright cabinets and directly influenced Defender and Gravitar.

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

Produced by Gunpei Yokoi, the game's faster-completion endings made it an early speedrunning favourite and revealed Samus Aran as a woman.

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

Knight Dirk the Daring rescues Princess Daphne from the dragon Singe; the LaserDisc's storage allowed film-quality art but limited the actual play.

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

Descended from Namco's electro-mechanical F-1 of 1976, it even spawned a Saturday-morning cartoon that had little to do with the game.