Amazing gaming trivia

[biggytitbo]

- FIFA 14 is the only game (I think) released for 3 console generations simultaneously - PS2, Wii/PS3/Xbox 360 and the PS4/Xbox One/Wii U.
- You can still buy new Master Systems in Brazil, making it the longest lived home console ever made (30 years+)
- There was a version of Netflix for the PS2.

Blow our minds with more of this shit.

[madhair60]

The bushes in Super Mario Bros are just recoloured clouds.

[Glebe]

The bushes in Super Mario Bros are just recoloured clouds.

That bloody Karma limit.

[Bazooka]

The school in Silent Hill is based on the school in Kindergarten Cop, minus Arnie.

[MojoJojo]

Madhair's wrong about the bushes in Super Mario Bros - they're not recoloured clouds. What is true is that the clouds are recoloured bushes.

[Shay Chaise]

There's a magic whistle in SMB3 and when you blow it you can see...hmm...Princess Peach...? No, no.

[Twed]

Because of the attribute-based screen format of the ZX Spectrum, you could have invisible writing on-screen that could be recovered (e.g. INK set to red, PAPER set to red, change the PAPER attribute to reveal message). Many Speccy games have secret messages hidden in their title screens:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/equinox/eggs/screens.php

[Consignia]

If you play Tomb Raider, and do the practice level set in Lara's mansion, you can go to the bedroom. If you tap out the rythmn of Wannabe by the Spice Girls whilst on the bed Lara is then completeley nude.

This is 100% true, no lie. I've done it. You can ask Kev from 8-B. He's seen me do it.

[Glebe]

The school in Silent Hill is based on the school in Kindergarten Cop, minus Arnie.

Oh yeah. Remember dat.

[Cerys]

If you get a score of 100,000,000 in Pong some space invaders come along and the whole thing turns into a battle to save the Planet Pong.

[captaincockring]

If you get a score of 100,000,000 in Pong some space invaders come along and the whole thing turns into a battle to save the Planet Pong.

Wowsers...I'm doing that...be back when I've got to the unattainable score of 100,000,000 in pong, I doubt it could count higher than 255 (and that's generous)...but I'll trust you Cerys.

Back later.

[Thursday]

Nathan Drake was just a carpenter until Naughty Dog saw him and put him in the game.

[Danger Man]

Metal Gear Solid 3 on the 3DS.

Pretty unplayable but still....fucking hell.

(Also, if you are really shit at MGS3 then Snake wears clown make-up in the codec scenes)

[biggytitbo]

There was a pretty much full port of Resident Evil for the game boy color -

[Puce Moment]

The only reason that Mario has a moustache is because they needed people to be able to distinguish his nose from the rest of his face.

[MojoJojo]

Nintendo started off, and still, make sexy playing cards.

[edit]Oh, the computer game of the Prisoner was pretty cool in a cool facts sort of way[/edit]

[captaincockring]

Nintendo started off, and still, make sexy playing cards.

[edit]Oh, the computer game of the Prisoner was pretty cool in a cool facts sort of way[/edit]

They also for a time owned a string of 'Love Motels'.

And a taxi company.

[Ambient Sheep]

Because of the attribute-based screen format of the ZX Spectrum, you could have invisible writing on-screen that could be recovered (e.g. INK set to red, PAPER set to red, change the PAPER attribute to reveal message). Many Speccy games have secret messages hidden in their title screens:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/equinox/eggs/screens.php

I'm staggered that I'd never heard of this trick before, despite being a hardcore ex-Speccy programmer myself.  Lovely stuff... why did we never think to do anything like this in any of our games?

I must write into that page sometime, as I have some Easter Eggs for Halls of the Things, which isn't listed on their Design-Design page.  Although whether they'd be willing to include "Yes cunt, a keyboard table" is up for debate...

[The Masked Unit]

The events of Super Mario 3 are a stage production with Mario and co the actors.  Look it up.

[EFB]

The "power base converter" for the mega drive that let you play master system carts on it, did nothing but convert the shape of the cartridge slot. The system was mostly backwards compatible, except for a couple of games that used hardware quirks to achieve different resolutions.

[Twed]

I'm staggered that I'd never heard of this trick before, despite being a hardcore ex-Speccy programmer myself.  Lovely stuff... why did we never think to do anything like this in any of our games?

Would be interested to hear about the Spectrum games you made!

I must write into that page sometime, as I have some Easter Eggs for Halls of the Things, which isn't listed on their Design-Design page.  Although whether they'd be willing to include "Yes cunt, a keyboard table" is up for debate...

I know the guy who put that page together (actually I helped write the software that went through all the SCR files, stripped attributes and checked them for differences that uncovered most of these) so I can mention it to him on Skype. The page might be entirely managed by WOS now though.

[Bhazor]

Japanese game auteur Suda 51 once worked in a morgue.

Though Raul Hulia's last appearence is often ascribed to Street Fighter: The Movie his final acting role was in fact the TV movie Down Came A Blackbird. However, the game adaption of Street Fighter: The Movie aka Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game came out three weeks after Blackbird. The game included images of Raul shot specifically for the game meaning that in fact the game was his last appearance.

[biggytitbo]

Marlon Brando recorded dialogue for Godfather: The Game on his death bed whilst using an oxygen mask.

[buzby]

Because of the attribute-based screen format of the ZX Spectrum, you could have invisible writing on-screen that could be recovered (e.g. INK set to red, PAPER set to red, change the PAPER attribute to reveal message). Many Speccy games have secret messages hidden in their title screens:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/equinox/eggs/screens.php

You could do a similar thing with the C64 I think - If you were using multicolour (lo-res) mode with 2x1 pixels you could write a value into the attribute memory for the right-hand pixel that would only show up if you stripped the colour attributes out (effectively viewing the screen in 2-colour per attribute cell hi-res mode). I remember poking about with the Expert cartridge on Thalamus' Hawkeye loading screen (to rip out the SID data for the loading music) and I went into the scrren viewer and toggled into hi-res mode and 'BUY ARMALYTE' appears in the lower right corner of the screen.

Looking through the memory with the hex viewer would usually get you some messages from the programmers too. There's also the case of 'shadow developer' Ikegami who lincluded this message in the program ROMs of the early 80s arcade games they developed for more famous names (like Donkey Kong for Nintendo and Congo Bongo and Zaxxon for Sega):
CONGRATULATION !IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU.*****TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304 SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM.

The Ikegami company logo

also appears in a spare slot in the background tile ROMs on these games too.

Shigeru Miyamoto was responsible for the character and game design for Donkey Kong, but Nintendo contracted Ikegami to design and produce the hardware (using the unsold PCBs of a previous game they had made for them called Radar Scope that had flopped) and write the software. The initial contract with Ikegami was for 8000 PCBs, and when it proved to be a hitt Nintendo made a further 80000 unlicenced copies. They then wanted to produce a follow-up, and as Ikegami held the rights to the program code Nintendo hired engineers to disassemble the ROMs, which was used to produce Donkey Kong Junior (the first game Nintendo produced in-house).

This prompted Ikegami to sue Nintendo for breach of copyright in 1983, which resulted in a long legal battle which was settled out of court in 1990, and in a further trial the following year Ikegami were found to hold the legal copyright on the game code.

There was also the case of Sega's Genesis Collection for the Dreamcast, where they employed Steve Snake to port his Kgen Genesis emulator from the PC to the Dreamcast. He 'accidentally' left some text in the binary instructing hackers how to add more ROM images to the game, which formed the basis for many Dreamcast Genesis ROM collections

The ROM image for New Tetris on the N64 (written by ex-Razor1911 hacker/coder Martial Artist aka David Pridie) includes a long rant about his producer and the other team members on the project:
https://tcrf.net/The_New_Tetris#DaveRant

Whenever I do a firmware release for one of our old ROM-based pieces of hardware (which isn't very often) I always burn my initials and the release date as a bitmap into the spare space at the end of the ROM image. Also, on a PC application that I did some work on that gets shipped to our customers, if you press a certain combination of keys it opens a dialogue box with a greeting and a picture of our office (it was originally a picture of the team, but there's only me left now).

[Pseudopath]

The iconic SEGA sound sample at the beginning of Sonic the Hedgehog takes up one eighth of the memory of the four-megabit cartridge. Yuji Naka also used the black text on a black background trick to hide programmer credits on the Sonic Team Presents screen: http://info.sonicretro.org/Game_Secrets:Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(16-bit)#Hidden_Japanese_credits

Let's not even mention the creepy shit they hid in Sonic CD's sound test. Brrrrr.

[biggytitbo]

More Sonic - Michael Jackson wrote some of the music on Sonic 3 uncredited.

[Pseudopath]

More Sonic - Michael Jackson wrote some of the music on Sonic 3 uncredited.

Tru dat. Although the Icecap Zone theme (which most people consider a prototype version of Jackson's Who Is It) is actually based on a 1982 new-wave track by The Jetzons[nb]...whose keyboardist was long-time Jackson collaborator and credited Sonic 3 music composer Brad Buxer.[/nb]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2OWC5Hosv8

[biggytitbo]

Jackson was also a massive Sega fanboy who approached them about making games about him - he was in quite a few, from the various versions of Moonwalker to his role in Space Channel 5.

[newbridge]

Nintendo started off, and still, make sexy playing cards.

[edit]Oh, the computer game of the Prisoner was pretty cool in a cool facts sort of way[/edit]

Relatedly, can usually surprise people by noting that Nintendo was founded in 1889.

[biggytitbo]

Or that Sega was founded by Americans.