While iconic games like Super Mario 64 and Pac-Man may have long served as arcade — and console — staples, they all had a rich history before falling into players hands: Just ask the folks who made them.
From Zelda's literary namesake to Eminem's status as one of Donkey Kong's all-time GOATs, here are 22 facts about iconic video games that'll help you level up your knowledge.
1
“Donkey Kong got his name because Miyamoto thought ‘donkey’ meant ‘stupid’ in English.”
2
“The Donkey Kong character who was featured in the original 1981 arcade game is not the same Donkey Kong with the red necktie that we know of today; the original Donkey Kong is in fact Cranky Kong.”
3
“The makers of Donkey Kong Country wanted the Kongs to be voiced by actual gorillas and spent hours recording some at a zoo, only to realize that gorillas are actually very quiet. Finding themselves without sounds to work with, they had a programmer do gorilla impressions instead.”
4
“The first character on screen in Super Mario 64 is Lakitu, Mario's camera operator. Because the 1996 game was the first in the series to have 3D gameplay, the developers needed to teach players that they were controlling both Mario AND the camera.”
5
“Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Super Mario Bros franchise, considers the characters to be actors playing different roles in each game, hence why Bowser will be kidnapping the princess in one appearance and playing sports with Mario in another.”
6
“Eminem’s high score in donkey kong put him in the top 30 of all time in 2010.”
7
“The Rabbit found in Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64 aka MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages) was named after the type of processor used in the Nintendo 64.”
8
“Super Mario 64 was potentially created due to a failed pitch that would later seperately become Croc: Legend of the Gobbos.”
9
“A study conducted at the University of Montreal showed that young people who played the 1996 game Super Mario 64 for just two months had increased spatial and episodic memory, which improves brain capacity and helping to forestall dementia.”
10
“Link, from The Legend Of Zelda, was originally intended to have a button nose similar to Mario, but the wife of game designer Yoshiaki Koizumi convinced him to change it to a sharper one because she thought Nintendo didn't have enough handsome characters.”
11
“Princess Zelda from The Legend of Zelda was named after Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
12
“The Triforce symbol from Legend of Zelda is the symbol of the Hojo clan in Japan.”
13
“The entire game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is less than 1MB in size.”
14
“The Legend of Zelda was principally inspired by creator Shigeru Miyamoto's explorations as a young boy in the hillsides, forests, and caves surrounding his childhood home in Sonobe, Japan where he ventured into forests with secluded lakes, caves, and rural villages.”
15
“Creator of Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, Shigeru Miyamoto, is forbidden to go to work with a bicycle because his safety is too valuable”
16
“When Alexey Pajitnov invented Tetris in 1984, he earned no royalties for it due to living under the Soviet government. It was only in 1996, after he moved to the United States and founded The Tetris Company, that he started making money off of it.”
17
“Game Boy was the first video game console to be played in space by Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov. The game he played was Tetris.”
18
“Playing Tetris after a traumatic event can help prevent post-traumatic stress symptoms.”
19
“Pac-Man grossed $1 billion in quarters in its first year of release. In the following year, 1982, it earned $6 billion in quarters, which was more than the combined amount of money spent in Vegas casinos and US movie theaters that year.”
20
“Every time Pac-Man eats a regular dot, he stops moving for one frame (1/60th of a second), slowing his progress by roughly ten percent—just enough for a following ghost to overtake him.”
21
“The 1982 video game ‘Ms. Pac-Man’ was created as a response to the fact that a majority of Pac-Man players were female.”
22
“The creators of Pac-Man did not now how the game ended as it was designed to run indefinitely. It was only when Billy Mitchell finished the game, after all its internal storage ran out, that they saw how it ended.”
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