1000+ Facts And Trivia

Chapter 36: Video Games

This one's for you @snow_boy1. :]

• There are about 1,181,019 existing video games as of 2019.

• E-sports is the professional competition for video games.

• The Gameboy was the first video game console played in space. In 1993, Tetris was brought aboard a Soyuz TM-17 rocket to the MIR Space Station, where the Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr A. Serebrov played it. The game cartridge was later sold at an auction for $1,220.

• Minecraft is the best-selling video game so far. Markus Alexej Persson, more famously known as Notch, created the most successful indie game in Minecraft. With over US$180 million in sales, Minecraft was bought by Microsoft. However, it remains to be one of the most played games across all platforms, even beating the iconic Tetris’ sales by a close US$10 million.

• The world record for blowing into cartridges is 43 cartridges in 20 seconds. Kamal Gray from The Roots set a world record on Jimmy Fallon after blowing into 43 video game cartridges in 20 seconds.

• The biggest video game collection has a library of over 20,000 games. Antonio Monteiro of Texas holds the Guinness World Record for the largest video game collection at 20,139 video games. The collection features games from the 2nd to 8th generation consoles and over 100 devices to play them on. One of the most hardcore video game facts: It took Guinness 8 days to finish counting them all!

• One of the earliest video games was created by a physicist. In October 1958, William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two. Its gameplay was similar to Pong, and was displayed on an oscilloscope instead of the traditional LED screen.

• The longest video game session lasted 138 hours and 34 seconds. Carrie Swidecki of the U.S. played Just Dance 2015 from July 11-17, 2015 at Otto’s Video Games and More in Bakersfield, California. This is the longest anyone’s played a game nonstop. Swidecki achieved this record by attempting to break her previous Guinness World Record for charity.

• The first E sports tournament was held in the ‘70s. On October 19, 1972, the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University organized the world’s first eSports tournament: the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics. However, no prize money was involved yet – the winner would only receive a subscription to Rolling Stones. Stewart Brand, a biology student, was the first one to win the Spacewar Olympics, and became the first E Sports champion.

• The youngest professional gamer was 11 years old. Victor De Leon III, more widely known as Lil Poison, was 11 years old when he signed an exclusive deal with Major League Gaming.

• Pokemon Red and Green were the best-selling GameBoy games. The first-generation Pokemon games were the best-selling games for the Gameboy platform. As of March 9, 2018, over 31.37 million copies have been sold.

• Grand Theft Auto was supposed to be a racing game. GTA was supposed to be a much tamer Race’n’Chase, but during a test run, a glitch made the police cars attack the player. The glitch was so well-received by testers that the developers had to scrap the original concept and rebuild the game around high-speed police chases.

• Minecraft's overworld has a surface area 9,258,235 times larger than the earth. Minecraft is a game geared towards creatives and survivalists alike. For a game with infinite possibilities, it’s only fitting that the game seems to outdo our own planet. For the PC version, the Minecraft world is over 9 million times bigger than the Earth.

• People who play video games are more likely to be lucid dreamers than those who don't. Since video games engage our consciousness and motor skills, it only makes sense that these stimuli affect sleep patterns as well – even to the point of gamers being more likely to control their own dreams.

• A man reached level 90 in World of Warcraft without leaving the starting zone, ever. The player Doubleagent spent 173.5 days mining and picking herbs for XP. Technically, he was stuck in the Wandering Isles for life – he couldn’t even play PvP since you’d need to have a faction for that.

• Pac-Man was supposed to be called Puckman. Pac-Man was supposed to be called “Puckman” his resemblance to a hockey puck. However, game devs were concerned that vandals could deface that name in a particularly scandalous way. As such, Puckman was changed to Pac-Man.

• The longest-developed game was Duke Nukem Forever at 14 years. Duke Nukem Forever began development in 1997, but due to hiccups and conflicts, the game wasn’t released until 2011.

• A video game was used by the U.S. Military to train tank gunners. Aside from being the first commercially-successful 3D game, Battlezone was also used by the U.S. Army to train their tank gunners.

• Engineer Ralph Baer is often seen as the "father of video games."

• A Japanese man married a video game character in 2009. This guy took cuffing season to a whole other level: Sal 9000 lived the gamer’s dream when he “married” Nene Anegasaki over livestream.

• Americans once spent US$20 billion on arcades in one year. The American obsession with arcade games peaked in 1981. Time magazine reported that in the year alone, Americans spent 20 billion dollars’ worth of quarters on arcade games – which was twice the income of every casino in Nevada combined.

• “Platform” is an umbrella term for the electronic systems used to play video games.

• China earns $27.54 billion in revenues from the gaming industry.