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 1-100.
1. One person designed all 200 dungeons in TES IV: Oblivion.
2. The original GTA started life as a racing game called Race’n’Chase. However, an AI glitch created overly aggressive police cars that rammed players off the road. Testers enjoyed the ‘bug’ so much it became a feature and the game was redesigned.
3. Devil May Cry was originally a Resident Evil spin-off.
4. The PlayStation began as a collaboration between Sony and Nintendo to make a CD add on for the SNES. Sony announced the ‘Play Station’ at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show only for Nintendo to betray them by announcing a deal with Philips for a peripheral called the CD-i. Sony went solo and the rest is history.
5. The only reason Sony continued work on the ‘Play Station’ was then-CEO Norio Ohga’s desire to spite Nintendo for its earlier betrayal.
6. The PlayStation specs were derived from a second, also aborted, deal with Sega to produce hardware. Virtua Fighter’s 3D capabilities drove the focus on 3D graphics.
7. Manhunt originally featured a boss called Binbag who was wrapped in black rubbish bags.
8. Early Mass Effect concepts included a single planet and no aliens.
9. Resident Evil 4 was cancelled and restarted three times. The ‘fog version’ saw Leon trying to survive hallucinations in Umbrella’s Castle HQ. The ‘Hook Man’ version saw him fighting ghosts and a third that was scrapped almost immediately featured traditional zombies.
10. Until a late stage in development you could kill children in TES V: Skyrim. Not only are there recorded death noises and SFX, unused dialogue options reveal that one mission involved murdering a child.
11. Silent Hill’s Midwich Elementary is based on the school in Kindergarten Cop.
12. Spec Ops was initially called Stealth Ranger and included an invisibility cloak.
13. Half-Life originally starred a hero called Ivan The Space Biker. The character that would eventually become Gordon Freeman started life with the name Dyson Poincaré.
14. Deus Ex’s New York horizon was missing the Twin Towers. This was explained by saying terrorists had destroyed them, a year before the real attack. The actual reason was that the game only used half a skyline to save memory – the half without the towers.
15. A gene in the human body that controls the placement of limbs in the embryo is called Sonic Hedgehog after spine-like mutations created in fruit fly experiments.
16. The same Sonic gene is inhibited by a protein named Robotnikinin after Dr Robotnik.
17. Metal Gear character designer Yoji Shinkawa’s first draft of Raiden was a freak who crawled around like Spider-Man and licked bird droppings. Kojima said no.
18. TES IV: Oblivion’s plot was predicted by a fortune teller in TES III: Morrowind.
19. If you don’t move for five minutes in Rage while holding the rocket launcher a display screen pops out and plays a video of Doom.
20. In Ape Escape, there are four monkeys named after South Park’s heros: Kyle, Stan, Kenny and Cratman. No one knows why Cartman’s misspelled.
21. Carmageddon was originally planned as a Mad Max game but no one could find out who owned the rights.
22. The audio tracks on a PS1 disc could be played in a normal CD player.
23. In the first Civilization on PS1, a bug could make Gandhi super-aggressive and favour nuclear weapons. It’s been a running joke ever since.
24. In the inaugural Colin McRae Rally, your car can be abducted by a UFO. It returns made of jelly.
The Doctor’s TARDI S appears in the following games:
25. Call Of Duty: Ghosts.
26. Contrast.
27. Lego Marvel Super Heroes.
28. XGRA: Extreme G Racing Association.
29. Taz: Wanted.
30. A total of 100,000,000 PS2s were sold in the five years and nine months that followed its launch.
31. As of March 2014, 725 million FIFA Ultimate Team matches have been played.
32. The PS1 survival horror game Clock Tower largely follows the characters and plot of the Italian horror film Phenomena, released in English as Creepers.
33. Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped contained a hidden Spyro The Dragon demo.
34. And Spyro The Dragon contained a hidden Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped demo.
35. Ratchet & Clank 3 contains a hidden Sly 2: Band Of Thieves demo.
36. An early idea for God Of War was to have Kratos accompanied by a guiding fairy who would annoy him. He’d end up slaying it before the end of the first level.
37. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back had a death animation removed for Japan because it resembled the M.O. of a Japanese serial killer active at the time. If Crash was crushed he became a head with two feet. The murderer left a severed head and shoes.
38. In Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, The Mudokon Pop was originally a head on a stick but was changed after a murder in Japan where the victim’s head was left on a stick.
39. In Borderlands 2, Handsome Jack’s list of construction casualties in the ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ mission are: Hartnell, W; Troughton, P; Pertwee, J and Baker, T. In other words the first four Doctor Who actors.
40. In The Beatles: Rock Band, Paul McCartney is credited as ‘Executive Tweaker’.
41. The first Crash Bandicoot contains a hidden level called Stormy Ascent that wasn’t discovered until 13 years after the game’s release. It was removed because it was too hard and prevented people finishing the game.
42. Leon was originally meant to rescue Sherry Birkin from Wesker in Resi 4, not Ashley from the Las Plagas.
43. Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud originally had slicked back hair to save polygons.
44. One of Gran Turismo 2’s discs featured a scratch and sniff panel that smelled of burning rubber.
45. FIFA 2001 also had a scratch and sniff panel, although that one smelled of grass.
46. According to its original creators, the first Grand Theft Auto owed much of its success to a media outcry engineered by disgraced PR guru Max Clifford.
47. In Metal Gear Solid, Psycho Mantis will recognise saves from the following games: Suikoden, Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night, Vandal Hearts and Azure Dreams.
48. In the Japanese version of MGS, if you have both Policenauts and Snatcher saves, Mantis will say, “So, you like Kojima’s Works?” A voiceover will then play from creator Hideo Kojima saying, “Thank you for your continuing support.”
49. When Mantis dies in the Japanese version of MGS he says that it feels, “nostalgic.” Something to remember considering he looks likely to appear in MGS V, which is chronologically before the PS1 game.
50. In the Metal Gear: Official Mission Handbook, Big Boss was originally a Japanese-American soldier born in Hawaii.
51. Many of the original Metal Gear Solid levels were designed in Lego.
52. Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus’ cutscenes were compiled into a 14-min film and submitted for an Oscar. It didn’t win.
53. In TES IV: Oblivion, you can find a troll under a bridge who’s committed suicide, leaving a note that reads: ‘Mee wurst troll evurr. nobuddy pay brijj tole. me nott sceary enuf. mee gett drunc an kil sellf. troll droun.’
54. According to dev Dontnod, Remember Me almost didn’t get made as most publishers rejected female lead Nilin.
55. The initial inspiration for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was the movie Hobo With A Shotgun.
56. The plot for Resident Evil 2 was originally continued in two Japanese radio dramas called ‘Chiisana Tobosha Sherry’ (Sherry, The Little Runaway) and ‘Ikiteita Onna Spy Ada’ (Ada, The Female Spy, Is Alive).
57. Don’t Starve grew out of a two day game jam entry in which you had to survive on a desert island.
58. The PS1 game Croc: Legend Of The Gobbos, which starred a small lizard, instead started life as a Mario game starring Yoshi.
59. In the Japanese release of Rayman 2: The Great Escape, Rayman was changed from purple to blue as purple is seen as the colour of death.
60. Rayman was originally created as a 10-year-old boy named Jimmy who was sucked into a computer.
61. Quake II was never meant to be a sequel, but all of id’s other name trademarks were rejected so they chose one they already owned.
62. Wesker was originally decapitated in an early version of Resident Evil’s ending.
63. Silent Hill’s fog was used to hide level loading.
64. An early version of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis included a section where you could play as a zombified Brad Vickers.
65. Roy, an unused member of the Raccoon City PD in Resi 2, is the only Resident Evil 2 character to be scrapped completely rather than redesigned or replaced.
66. Resident Evil’s Tofu character was originally just a block to test collision detection.
67. Sim City 2000 features a number of towns named after characters from Red Dwarf and Blake’s 7.
68. In Crysis 2, there are two soldiers having a disco inside a lift on the Dead Man Walking level, accessed by activating the control panel at the end of the hall.
69. MGS 4’s Metal Gear Mark II first appeared in 1998’s Snatcher. It talked.
70. Silent Hill Homecoming features a song called Wintery Mist, which is identical to a track called Winter Tundra in Spyro 2: Gateway To Glimmer.
71. The unlockable character Daisy in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 was voiced by former porn star Jenna Jameson.
72. Early in development Bioshock Infinite was to feature both a dynamic weather system and buildings so that Colombia moved and shifted at random.
73. In Dark Souls the Pendant starting gift has no function. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki added it as a joke.
Characters who began life as April Fool’s jokes:
74. Sheng Long from Street Fighter.
75. Fukua from Skull Girls.
76. Ermac in Mortal Kombat.
77. Mark Meer, the voice of Shepard in Mass Effect, also does the Vorcha characters.
78. A PS1 horror title called D: The Game got its scary cutscenes past censorship by showing a version of the game without them. Head developer Kenji Eno then submitted the game late knowing he would have to handdeliver the final disc, which he swapped for the scary version at the last minute.
79. Monkey Island’s Guybrush Threepwood is an unlockable character in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II.
80. Spyro The Dragon was originally green, but was changed to purple so he didn’t clash with the grass.
81. Sonic Generations was only created when Sonic Team director Takashi Iizuka realised there wasn’t a game planned for Sonic’s 20th anniversary.
82. In MGS4, Snake’s councillor Rosemary’s breasts jiggle if you shake the controller while talking to her. She also wears different jumpers for different days of the week.
83. Skylanders was nearly a Nintendo exclusive, but they turned it down.
84. Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation contains a hidden message from a programmer to his family: “Dedicated to my fiancé Jay for putting up with this game taking over our lives, my step sons Craig, Jamie & Aiden (Show this to your mates at school, they’ll believe you now!!), also for my daughters Sophie and Jody – See you in another hex dump – Richard Flower 11/11/1999.”
85. In an interview, Infinity Ward stated that the WW2 Captain Price is Modern Warfare Captain Price’s grandfather.
86. Polygon Man was originally meant to be the original PlayStation’s mascot, but Ken Kutaragi hated it and it was never used. He later returned as the final boss in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.
87. Skyrim is the only Western game to receive a perfect score from Japanese mag Famitsu.
88. Minecraft’s creepers are based on a pig that went wrong when the height and width of the character model were swapped.
89. GTA : San Andreas has an area of roughly 172 sq mi.
90. The DualShock button symbols mean something: the circle and cross roughly match the Japanese symbols for yes and no, the triangle symbolizes the head or player’s perspective while the square represents a document, menu or map.
91. No one told Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida that PS3 had motion control until a few weeks before its 2006 E3 reveal.
92. In Mass Effect 2, 90 actors play 546 characters.
93. Gwyndolin in Dark Souls is supposed to be a man raised as a woman although he actually has a female character model in the final version.
94. The VATS targeting system in Fallout 3 was conceptualised by a designer filming action figures fighting.
95. Ico originally started development as a PS1 game.
96. Final Fantasy VII was originally envisioned as a detective story starring a PI called Joe.
97. One of the rarest and most expensive PlayStation games is the Elemental Gearbolt Assassin’s Case, a special edition featuring a gold-plated Guncon. 50 were given away at 1999’s E3.
98. In the PS3 re-release of God Of War the trophy ‘Speed Of Jason McDonald’, is awarded for finishing the game in under five hours and references the senior combat designer’s office record for the fastest speed-run.
99. The PS1 was the first console to sell 100 million units.
100. Shinji Mikami once made a big fuss over Resident Evil 4’s GameCube exclusivity, telling Japanese press he would, “commit harakiri,” if it came out on another platform. This was badly translated in English to say that he would cut off his head. In God Hand, there’s a Chihuahua in the dog races called ‘Mikami’s Head’.