Game

In 2014, Flappy Bird, a mobile game, was earning $50,000 a day when its creator Dong Nguyen pulled it from app stores himself — citing guilt over its addictiveness and the anxiety and insomnia sudden fame brought him. He turned down every ad and buyout offer.

In the 1998 game Metal Gear Solid, the boss Psycho Mantis actually reads the PlayStation memory card plugged into the console, taunting players by naming other games saved on it.

Hidetaka Miyazaki, creator of Dark Souls, grew up reading English fantasy novels he barely understood. Imagining the gaps in meaning as a child later shaped the game's famously cryptic, fragmented storytelling.

Pokémon Gold and Silver cartridges hide a tiny real-time clock chip apart from the save battery, so game time ticks even when the system is off. That drains the battery far faster than other Pokémon games, and once it dies, the clock freezes forever at that moment.

Sonic the Hedgehog's red sneakers were designed after the white buckled boots Michael Jackson wore on the cover of his album Bad. The character designer kept the boot shape but switched the color to red so eyes would follow his sprinting legs.

Mario's mustache wasn't a design choice, it was a technical workaround. The 1981 Donkey Kong arcade hardware gave his sprite only 16x16 pixels, too few to draw a separate mouth and nose, so Shigeru Miyamoto used one mustache line to suggest an entire face.

On TikTok, creators layer completely unrelated 'Subway Surfers' gameplay under other videos. Whenever a viewer's attention drifts, their eyes just flick to the other panel instead of swiping away, so adding an irrelevant clip actually makes people watch longer.

Nintendo's Kirby was pink from the very start, but when Kirby's Dream Land launched in North America in 1992, staff copied his grayscale Game Boy sprite literally and drew him white. For years, North American box art, manuals, and ads all showed a white Kirby.

Silent Hill's thick fog hid the original PlayStation's short draw distance while amplifying the horror. The team masked the hardware's struggle to render a wide 3D town, turning unseen space into unease. That limitation became a defining symbol of the game series.

Nintendo's Splatoon characters began as tofu blocks that shot ink to claim turf. Next came rabbits: ink showed on white fur, and ears signaled direction. But developers couldn't connect rabbits with ink, so they switched to squids.

In Pokémon Red and Blue, the old man blocking the road out of Viridian City was passed out drunk in the Japanese original. Western versions changed it to 'grumpy without his morning coffee' — but his sprite still has the original's flushed cheeks.

Nintendo began in 1889 as a maker of Hanafuda cards. Founder Fusajiro Yamauchi handcrafted them from mulberry bark in Kyoto. When Japan banned gambling in 1882, rival makers fled to avoid yakuza ties, but he persisted and soon led it — over 80 years before any video game.

In January 2022, porn featuring Tifa Lockhart from Final Fantasy VII was played during an Italian Senate Zoom meeting. A senator had exposed the login credentials on Facebook, allowing an outsider to hijack the session and stream the video for about 30 seconds.

Two games that each guarantee a loss can become a winning strategy when played alternately. One game's result influences the other's conditions, allowing you to selectively hit favorable outcomes. This is known as 'Parrondo's paradox.'

Chess, Go, and gomoku are proven to have unbeatable strategies (Zermelo's theorem). The theorem proves they exist—not what they are. In gomoku, the winning strategy is known, so tournaments use modified rules.

When Venezuela's economy collapsed, playing RuneScape for about $100 a month became more profitable than a typical Venezuelan college graduate's salary. The game became a genuine source of income for many Venezuelans.

A mom who started playing RuneScape with her son in 2002 built an in-game business empire with recruiters, trainers, managers, and security. She held the #1 Runecrafting rank by 5× and it stood for 3 years after she retired. On her last day, she gave everything to new players.

In 2013, during a game Super Mario 64 speedrun, Mario suddenly teleported. A $1,000 bounty yielded no answers for 8 years. The cause: space radiation flipped a single bit in the console's memory, altering Mario's position coordinates.

The game Doom is the quintessential example of software porting. Porting Doom to seemingly impossible devices — pianos, notepads, microwaves — has become a programming tradition, and someone has even ported Doom to run inside Doom itself.