We’ve gathered together over one thousand of the juiciest facts, figures and shocks from the world of playstation to educate your brain and tickle your funny bone. Topic 101-200.
101. Final Fantasy VII’s Spanish translation is so bad most of the female characters are repeatedly referred to as men.
102. An early concept for Kratos portrayed him as a slave. The Blades Of Chaos started life as chains that trailed behind him as he jumped.
103. Call Of Duty: World At War re-uses animations, models and dialogue from COD 1 and 2.
104. Katamari Damacy began life as a university project.
105. Sony’s 1995 PlayStation announcement at E3 consisted of then-SCEA President Steve Race walking up to a podium saying, “$299,” and then leaving the stage. It destroyed the $399 Sega Saturn.
106. In Bioshock Infinite, when Elizabeth knocks Booker out in the Airship she uses the original red wrench from the very first Bioshock.
107. PlayStation has always been a home for indies. The $750 Net Yaroze system was a black PS1 that worked with PCs for hobbyist developers.
108. The ‘Father Of PlayStation’ Ken Kutaragi hated Crash Bandicoot and told Naughty Dog it was, “crap.”
109. The white columns that appeared when the PS2 started were generated from the contents of the memory card.
110. Riven, ‘The Sequel To Mist’, is the PlayStation game with the most discs. Five were needed in total to hold the game’s full-screen video segments.
111. Final Fantasy got its name because Square was facing bankruptcy and thought it would be the last game it made. Creator Hironobu Sakaguchi also intended to leave the game industry if it failed.
112. Demon’s and Dark Souls are spiritual successors to another From Software series called King’s Field, and both contain several references to its characters.
113. Matt Damon refused to lend his voice and likeness to The Bourne Conspiracy game because he thought it was too violent. The film was apparently fine.
114. The PlayStation 2 design is actually a reworked version of Atari Falcon 030 Microbox, which is referenced in the PS2 patent.
115. At the end of development, Uncharted 3’s assets filled a 25 terabyte hard disk.
116. Silent Hill 4 wasn’t originally developed as part of the series, but a separate game called Room 302, which producer and composer Akira Yamaoka made into the fourth game of the series after seeing it.
117. In Bioshock Infinite, a code used in a letter for Elizabeth translates as ‘I am a code. I should probably be changed over for something much more official in the future. But I’ll do as a stand in for now I suppose’.
118. During Resident Evil 4, Leon loses his jacket. It’s never mentioned why or how but playing Ada’s side mission reveals a Ganados wearing it.
119. Sonic Heroes holds the world record for the most playable characters in a platform game.
120. In Tekken 4, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers appear as enemies in the Tekken Force mini-game.
121. Sony chose the original PS logo from a list of nearly 70 different designs.
122. In Suikoden IV, it’s possible to end the game by convincing the other characters to stay on a desert island you’re shipwrecked on. Once they all agree you never leave.
123. Assassin’s Creed began life as a spin-off called Prince Of Persia: Assassins.
124. In God Of War, there are two statues that can be destroyed after several hundred hits. Doing so reveals a code that translates into a phone number and a recorded message between Kratos and creator David Jaffe where Jaffe is eventually killed.
125. In Mass Effect 3, only 13% of gamers played as Shepard’s female incarnation.
126. Rage has a Fallout bobblehead in the mayor of Wellspring’s office.
127. Okami was originally meant to look photorealistic.
128. Early versions of Bioshock’s Little Sisters included slugs, squirrel-like creatures, paralysed dogs with wheels and a frog with a jar connected to its backside by a pipe.
129. Bioshock’s original design let you manipulate the environment to weaken enemies. The transitional effect can be seen when the trees die in Arcadia.
130. Bioshock’s Splicers are based on early plastic surgery experiments on WW1 soldiers.
131. The helmets featured in Dead Space 2 are made up of over 40 moving parts.
132. In Street Fighter lore, Dhalsim’s skulls belong to children who died in a plague.
133. Despite critical acclaim and cult status, Psychonauts sold less than 90K on all formats.
134. Homefront predicted the year of Kim Jong-Il’s death and North Korea’s first nuclear test.
135. Use a helicopter to reach the top of GTA IV’s Statue Of Happiness and you’ll find a huge beating heart inside.
136. There’s a secret floor in Half-Life textured with Gabe Newell’s face.
137. In Mass Effect, you can find a probe called CCCP Luna 23 based on a real Russian moon lander that was damaged during landing.
138. Japanese gamer Toshuyuki Takahashi holds the world record for the most game controller button presses in a second: 16.
139. The original Grand Theft Auto uses the same font as US game show The Price Is Right.
140. Both Metal Gear Solid 1 and 4 feature the development team as ghosts that can be photographed in-game. MGS2 features Hideo Kojima only.
141. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution you can find posters for Final Fantasy XXVII.
142. Jason Voorhees appears in Dead Island. Or at least a hockey mask-wearing zombie called Jason with a machete.
143. Spec Ops writer Walt Williams’ interpretation of the story is that the lead character dies in the game’s helicopter crash and the rest of the story takes place in purgatory.
144. Resident Evil was planned as a co-op game, but it was scrapped due to hardware limitations.
145. Kirsten Dunst had final approval on her character design in the Spider-Man 2 game. She asked developers to reduce the breast size saying, “they made her boobs gigantic.”
146. In TES IV: Oblivion there’s a journal belonging to a grave robber that describes Frodo Baggins’ body, mentioning an enchanted sword and ring.
147. Solid Snake and Otacon, also known as David and Hal, are named after the astronaut and computer in 2001: ASO.
148. In LA Noire, the original interview options were ‘coax’, ‘force’ and ‘lie’. In the final game it was changed to ‘truth’, ‘doubt’ and ‘lie’ but only after the dialogue had been recorded, meaning the ‘doubts’ were overly aggressive.
149. Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami didn’t play Resi 5 for two years as it was the first one he didn’t create.
150. In The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie on PS2, Patrick has fully modelled underwear under his shorts that can only been seen via glitches.
151. In Stacking, a game starring Russian Dolls, there’s only one character model. Each character uses resized, retextured versions of it.
152. Bioshock’s Gene Banks were originally called Plasmi-Quiks but were renamed after playtesters weren’t sure what they were for.
153. Clarence J Brown III, who is the voice of Hades in God Of War, is also Mr Krabs from SpongeBob.
154. In Persona 4, there’s a book about a girl starting at a new school that mentions vampires. It’s reference to the Twilight series and is described as, “painful to read.”
155. At one point in Kingdom Hearts’ development, Sora had a chainsaw instead of a keyblade.
156. Assassin’s Creed II features a crypt with a giant squid hidden as an Easter egg.
157. A squid also appears in Assassin’s Creed IV, where it can be seen attacking a whale from the window of a creepy sunken wreck.
158. The life and death themes of Final Fantasy VII and Aerith’s end were inspired by Hironobu Sakaguchi’s mother’s death during production.
159. The Sims originally spoke a range of foreign languages instead of the ‘Simlish’ you hear now.
160. Doom was originally planned as an Aliens game.
161. Sonic actually first appeared three months before the first game as a rear view mirror ornament in Sega’s Rad Racer arcade machine.
162. The mosquito from the first Rayman game appears in Beyond Good & Evil.
163. In one of Naughty Dog’s first games, Rings Of Power, you could input a cheat code to make a naked woman appear.
There are a total of seven Easter eggs in Call Of Duty: Finest Hour, including:
164. A giant Apple with a UFO in it.
165. A second UFO.
166. A dance party with soldiers break dancing in front of gramophones and a beatboxing DJ.
167. A secret room with an Alice In Wonderland reference in the shape of a tiny door and giant chair.
168. A hidden room with a ghost playing a lute.
169. A ghost sitting in a cot in a room full of baby pictures.
170. A giant rat in a cage.
171. A glitch in Assassin’s Creed can spawn two Altaïrs, making it possible for the player to assassinate themselves.
172. In Call Of Duty: Ghosts, there’s a monkey holding a circular saw hidden up a tree in the Prison Break multiplayer map.
173. Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep contains an unused The Jungle Book level.
174. John Marston’s hat appears in a bin in LA Noire.
175. Crash Bandicoot was nearly a wombat.
176. Ripto, the villain from Spyro 2, got his name because the Japanese symbols for Spyro look like ‘Ripto’ in English.
177. An Easter egg in Chrono Trigger sees one of the developers congratulate you on finishing the game, then telling you to get a life.
178. The ’60s-set Metal Gear Solid 3 contains a number of real life, modern day gaming mags with MGS3 covers.
179. You can perform a ‘fatality’ in Tony Hawk’s Underground by knocking a snowman’s head clean off. The chilly stump will then start bleeding.
180. Entering your profile name as ‘Jub Jub’ in Star Wars: Battlefront will make all the soldiers Ewok sized.
181. Snipe an enemy’s head off in Call Of Duty: World At War and they’ll still scream, despite the whole… y’know… ‘not having a head’ thing.
182. TES V: Skyrim contains an Empire Strikes Back reference: a body hanging from the ceiling in an ice cave near a glowing sword on the ground.
183. During development Crash Bandicoot was nicknamed ‘The Sonic’s Ass Game’ because the camera constantly pointed at his rear end.
184. Fallout New Vegas has a fridge with the body and effects of Indiana Jones inside, reference the scene from The Crystal Skull where Indy survives an atomic bomb by hiding in a refrigerator.
185. In Final Fantasy VII Cloud’s Buster Sword is held onto his back by a magnet according to concept art.
186. A Metal Gear Solid 4 cutscene references all the games in the series but includes two blank squares labelled ‘under construction’. These are MGS Peace Walker and Metal Gear Rising, which hadn’t been announced when the game came out.
187. In Uncharted, Sully’s seaplane is named Hog Wild after a Crash Bandicoot level.
188. The PS1 game Star Wars: Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire used actual props and costumes from the movies in its FMV sequences, including Vader’s outfit.
189. The Evil Within’s original codename ‘Zwei’ (German for two) was originally coined when the project involved two vampire hunters chained together.
190. In GTA III, you can find two computers in a Tw@t cafe playing GTA 1 and 2.
191. GTA III contains a secret island out to sea used in the opening movie. It can only be reached using a Dodo plane.
192. Tommy Tallarico is officially the most prolific game music composer in history having worked on over 300 in 22 years. He’s Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler’s cousin.
193. According to the developers, some of Dead Space 2’s effects were created using the corpse of a goat, which they bought and let rot.
194. The very first Medal Of Honor on PS1 included cheats to let you play as Shakespeare, Winston Churchill and even a velociraptor.
195. In 1995, Doom was installed on more computers than the operating system Windows.
196. In GTA: Vice City, the bloody bathroom where you can pick up the chainsaw is a reference to Scarface.
197. In Duke Nukem 3D, there’s a secret room with Homer Simpson’s desk from the Springfield Power Plant in it.
198. The largest videogame collection in the world used to belong to Michael Thomasson which was recorded by Guinness at 10,607 titles. He sold it in 2014 for $750,000.
199. FIFA 09 is the best selling entry to date, shifting 1.2 million units in its first week.
200. It’s impossible to finish Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 on the PS2 due to a bug that means you can’t meet the final boss.