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 501-600.
501. The original PlayStation charged a token $10 licensing fee to encourage third party developers.
502. In Driv3r, ‘Timmy Vermicelli’ is a hidden enemy wearing water wings who can be killed. He’s an obvious reference to GTA Vice City and that character’s inability to swim.
503. In return, GTA : San Andreas features a character playing a videogame who says, “This sucks, I mean, how could Refractions mess up so bad? You suck Tanner!” referencing both the developer and main star of Driv3r.
504. Doom’s Cyberdemon is missing an arm and leg which, according to the mobile game Wolfenstein RPG, he lost fighting BJ Blazskovicz.
505. The Japanese version of Resi 6 features multiple references to 9/11 in a letter about the foundation of the Division Of Security Operations, which were all removed in the US version.
506. The entire island from Lost has been rebuilt in Just Cause 2. Any plane that flies over it will crash.
507. Guy Cihi who voiced James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2 isn’t an actor, he’s a businessman. He got the part after taking his daughter to an audition for the game.
508. When Atari shut down in 1996 the (now historically significant) original code for Centipede and Asteroids was thrown away.
509. MGS3’s The Boss was based on English actress Charlotte Rampling.
510. The PlayStation 2 version of The Bard’s Tale features the message ‘For A Really Disturbing Image... Flip Disc Over’ on the disc, meaning you’d see your own reflection.
511. Ratchet & Clank has a history of suggestive names. At one point A Crack In Time was going to be called Clock Blocked.
512. Much of Crash Bandicoot’s original visual design and story was created by artists Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson. Joe later fell out with the studio after being poorly credited for his efforts and refused to work with them again.
513. The working title for the original entry in the Burnout series was ‘Shiny Red Car’.
514. Atlus, the publishers behind Catherine, warned people playing it that if anyone gave out spoilers they would, “have nightmares and die.”
515. Street Fighter Balrog was originally called M Bison and based on Mike Tyson. Because Capcom was worried about legal action in the US, several names were switched around. In Japan, M Bison was originally Vega, Vega was originally Balrog and Balrog was M Bison. Because of the the confusion, internationally their names are Dictator, Claw and Boxer competitively.
516. The PS2 version of Half-Life 2 features a great deal of extra character dialogue including two characters commenting on the improved graphics, such as having eyelids and being able to point.
517. According to creator Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, nothing in Minecraft has a gender.
518. The spy in Team Fortress 2 originated from a glitch in the original game that caused players to spawn in the wrong team’s colour.
519. In Crash Bandicoot 3, Crash had 30,000 frames of animation, something Naughty Dog considered a record at the time. In Uncharted 2, Drake had 30 separate blended animations including a 12 minute idle animation.
520. Nasir Gebelli, the original programmer behind the first Final Fantasy, didn’t fully understand what an RPG was.
521. Sony initially rejected Tomb Raider for the PS1 as it didn’t think it was good enough.
522. 50% of Oblivion’s disc space is taken up by dialogue.
523. Sony began life in 1946 when founder Masaru Ibuka set up an electronics shop repairing radios after World War 2.
524. The Reaper roar in Mass Effect is actually the sound of a bin opening.
525. The earliest version of Saints Row was called ‘Bling Bling’ and planned for PS2.
526. Final Fantasy X’s ending was changed seven times.
527. Red Dead Revolver started life as a Capcom game before it was sold to Rockstar.
528. The music in Spyro The Dragon was composed and played by Stewart Copeland, the drummer in The Police, who played the game over and over during development for inspiration.
529. In 2011, 6,000 copies of Modern Warfare 3 were stolen when a truck was hijacked using tear gas.
530. Sonic The Hedgehog comes from an internal Sega competition to design a new mascot. Other entries included a chicken, a wolf, an armadillo and a rabbit.
531. The original voice of Metal Gear Solid’s Snake, David Hayter, is a screen writer with credits for X-Men, X2, The Scorpion King and Watchmen.
532. Sony originally intended the PS2’s firmware to be updated using memory cards.
533. Skyrim’s Dragon armour has the name of the artist that designed it, Jonah Lobe, written on it in the dragon language.
534. Only six people are killed in the original Tomb Raider.
535. The first Mortal Kombat was created by five people: Ed Boon, a programmer, a sound guy and two graphic artists (including co-creator John Tobias) in eight months.
536. The first product Sony ever made was an electric rice cooker. It didn’t work and could catch fire so it never got past the prototype stage.
537. Shadow Of The Colossus was originally planned to be a co-op game, but the PS2 couldn’t hack it.
538. Portal originally contained numerous environment objects but they were taken out because testers kept trying to use them to solve puzzles, creating the empty rooms of the final game.
539. Calling the 1-844-HELP-DUP number in inFamous: Second Son will play a pre-recorded message from DUP director Brooke Augustine about the threat of bioterrorism and mentions both the Beast and Cole MacGrath.
540. There’s an NPC in GTA Online wearing a Red Dead Redemption John Marston T-shirt.
541. Courtney Cox worked at Bethesda in the 1980s.
542. Sony started life in a department store where the late hours worked by employees meant they were often locked in at night or mistaken for thieves as they left. The engineers made life easier by duplicating the keys needed to get in and out.
543. Sega makes more money from its Japanese Pachinko machines than all its worldwide game sales.
544. The character T-Bone in Watch Dogs has copies of both Assassin’s Creed IV and Far Cry 3 in his hideout.
545. An early version of MGS V: Ground Zeroes involved Paz being killed and put in a cage next to Chico so he would have to watch her rot.
546. If you face the final boss in Silent Hill with no ammo it will die on its own.
547. Early concept art for The Last Of Us shows Joel escaping an infected elephant.
548. Parker, the hero of the original Red Faction, can be found in Red Faction: Guerrilla moaning about how his war was harder.
549. The 1993 movie City Hunter features Jackie Chan playing Chun-Li in a dream sequence.
550. The amount of power consumed by videogame consoles in the US each year could power an entire state.
551. Katamari Damacy means ‘clump soul’ in Japanese.
552. Early versions of Wolfenstein 3D were designed as a stealth game and it’s still possible to sneak past some of its guards.
553. Depending on the game, Sonic’s top speed varies from between 768mph to 3,840mph.
554. The original Half-Life was codenamed Quiver after the military base in a Stephen King story called The Mist that opened a portal to another world.
555. Lollipop Chainsaw features a trophy called ‘I swear I did it by mistake’ if you look up the main character’s skirt.
556. Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi also created Nakayama Miho No Tokimeki High School, an early dating simulator largely credited with popularising the genre in Japan.
557. There have actually been two albums ‘recorded’ by Lara Croft: ‘Come Alive’ and ‘Croft: Female Icon’. They are so, so bad that they were only released in France.
558. In Mortal Kombat: Deception, certain NPCs are talking backwards. When played forwards one of them says, “I am talking backwards. Spooky isn’t it?”
559. The inability to swim in the first Assassin’s Creed was referenced in ACII as ‘a bug’ in the Animus.
560. Ex- Insomniac level designer Dan Johnson appeared as an Easter egg in nearly every Ratchet & Clank game.
561. In Batman: Arkham Asylum, Art Lenavat from Rocksteady’s animation team provided much of the mo-cap for Batman, Joker and Harley Quinn.
562. The beginning of Call Of Duty: Ghosts reuses mo-cap data originally used for the end of Modern Warfare 2.
563. Bethesda turned down an offer to make a game based on the Game Of Thrones books to focus on Skyrim instead.
564. Naughty Dog originally decided to keep Crash Bandicoot mute because they thought talking characters spoiled the game they were in.
565. Street Fighter’s Cammy was created from M Bison’s DNA as a replacement body for him when his body was being destroyed by his nasty Psycho Power.
566. In Hitman: Blood Money, there’s a level at a wedding called Till Death Do Us Part. If you can find and shoot a small coin all the male guests gather around Agent 47 in their boxers and applaud.
567. God Of War: Ghost Of Sparta on PSP was initially announced via the platinum trophy in God Of War III.
568. If you put bad words into the cheat menu in Spider-Man 2 Enter Electro it will change them into nice ones.
569. In Killer7, the carrier pigeons that deliver messages are all named after Bond girls while the messages are titled after songs by The Smiths.
570. In Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, there are pizza boxes with Danish writing that say ‘real pizza with sh*t on it’.
571. 4.6 million people played the Destiny Beta.
572. 6.5 million characters were created.
573. 850,000 concurrent players.
574. 88 million games played.
575. 164 million single-player deaths.
576. 3704 millions aliens killed.
577. There were 350 million multiplayer kills.
578. 20% of all player time was spent in The Tower.
579. GTA V made $800 million in its first 24 hours.
580. Of the 930 console and PC games released in 2013, 565 of them were sequels.
581. The PS4 has sold 10 million consoles to date.
582. Search around the lab in Metal Gear Solid and you’ll find a PS1 and controller.
583. The predicted worth of the videogame market in 2014 is $101,615 million.
584. 47% of gamers are women.
585. 29% of gamers are over 50.
586. The demo of Crash Bash given away in Official PlayStation Magazine (that’s us!) actually featured the full game which could be accessed using cheat codes. It wasn’t discovered until nine years later.
587. The original Jak & Daxter was to include a third character that would evolve like a Tamagotchi as the game was played.
588. Final Fantasy VII and X are the only mainline games in the series that take place in the same universe, one thousand years apart.
589. Videogame violence studies use hot sauce and air horns to test for aggression: subjects play games and then administer the sauce or horns to other people. The hotter the sauce or longer the blast the more ‘aggressive’ they are. Because of poor testing procedures and definition of terms there’s no actual evidence that games make people physically violent, just that they use more sauce or horn.
590. A canned version of Resident Evil 2, nicknamed 1.5, swapped Claire Redfield for a character called Elza Walker.
591. The newly remastered digital tracks for The Beatles: Rock Band were so valuable that Harmonix developed the game with deliberately low quality, unusable copies to prevent them being sampled.
592. Chris Redfield’s Resi 6 partner, Piers Nivans, is the series’ first playable character who made their debut outside of the games. He originally appeared in a manga called Biohazard: The Marhawa Desire.
593. Sony sold the PS1 for a total of 12 years between 1994 and 2007.
594. Konami used to have a running Easter egg which appeared in games such as MGS, Castlevania and Gradius. It was one of the heads from Easter Island.
595. The ‘father of PlayStation’ Ken Kutaragi also played a big part in Nintendo’s history, creating the Nintendo S-SMP audio sound chip for the SNES.
596. PlayStation palmar hidradenitis is a specific variation of the skin condition palmar hidradenitis that only affects the hands.
597. The original PS1s (with the model numbers SCPH-1000, 1001 or 1002) are a favorite CD player for audiophiles due to their superior sound reproduction. A handbuilt, valvepowered German CD player called the Dynavox DynaStation was built from old PlayStation 1 parts and cost $6,000.
598. When Bioware started work on Mass Effect 2 the team wasn’t allowed to work on anything else until the combat and shooting were perfected.
599. Croft Manor was originally inspired by the building Core Design was based in.
600. The Devil In The White City, a book about the 1893 World’s Fair and serial killer Dr H H Holmes, was considered required reading by Irrational Games.