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 901-1001.
901. Battlefield 4 is banned in China due the story’s focus on a Chinese Admiral going to war against America.
902. Tetsuya Nomura designed some of the outfits in Final Fantasy X to test the artists’ abilities to recreate them in game. Lulu has multiple belts that are supposed to be arranged in a specific order.
903. The closing theme for ‘90s Nickelodeon program The Amanda Show is actually music from Spyro that was reused by composer and Police drummer Stewart Copeland.
904. In the loading screen for the first Diablo on PS1, there’s a hidden message saying ‘Natalie Portman rocks’.
905. At one point the Sonic character Knuckles was going to be sponsored by Nike and have the logo on his chest.
906. GTA IV character Niko’s first crime recorded in the Liberty City Police records is grand theft auto committed in 2008, the year the game came out.
907. It took four years to render Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within – so long, earlier shots were redone with better tech.
In inFamous 2, there are a number of movie posters poking fun at various other games, including:
908. Assassin’s Need (Love Too) (Assassin’s Creed).
909. Solid Serpent The Man, The Movie (Metal Gear Solid).
910. Little Big Unit (Little Big Planet).
911. Latch It and Skank (Ratchet & Clank).
912. Uncharted Love (Uncharted).
913. Call Of Booty (Call of Duty).
914. Sly! (Sly Cooper).
915. Hey, Low Reach (Halo Reach).
916. No Need For Speed (Need For Speed).
917. Epic Hickey (Epic Mickey).
918. Sega is a portmanteau of its original name, Service Games, from when it made entertainment equipment for the American military in Hawaii.
919. In Final Fantasy X-2, the character Lulu is nine months pregnant and gives birth during the game despite showing no outwards signs. The developers simply didn’t want to redesign the character model from FFX.
920. In the German version of Alien Trilogy, all the human enemies, such as soldiers and androids, were replaced with aliens because of censorship issues. They still dropped guns and ammo though.
921. Technically game publishers should pay a licensing fee to gun manufacturers to use real life weapons.
922. Portal 2 features audio clips suggesting Cave Johnson forced his secretary Caroline to become GlaDOS against her will. Actor JK Simmons refused to record his part because he found it disturbing and it was dropped.
923. Global videogame revenue is predicted to be $111 billion in 2015.
924. In Japan, Dark Souls’ Xanthous King Jeremiah’s turban is nicknamed ‘Borraginol’, after a brand of suppositories it resembles.
925. Naughty Dog had to specifically request female gamers be involved when The Last Of Us was being focus tested.
926. In 2013, the US recognised pro-gamers as professional athletes, providing them the same visa privileges when travel to competitions.
927. When Alone In The Dark 2 came out on PS1, the Sheffield Star ran the headline, “Ban Kids From This Computer Sickness,” after interviewing a local detective chief superintendent who said, “It’s sick. It can terrify them, damage their thought processes and make them insecure for life.”
928. Naughty Dog asked Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg several times to make the Uncharted movie. They’ve declined every time because they can’t work out how to make it different to Indiana Jones.
929. The PS4 controller’s touchpad has a rather nice 1920x900 resolution.
930. In France, Mortal Kombat: Deception was changed to ‘Mortal Kombat: Mystification’ as ‘déception’ is French for ‘disappointment’.
931. Okami’s soundtrack is five and a half hours long, consisting of 215 tracks across five CDs.
932. Despite being the most famous death in videogames, Final Fantasy VII’s Aerith has unused dialogue on discs two and three (after she’s supposed to have died) that suggests either she could be revived or wasn’t originally meant to die.
933. Japanese fans of the online Resident Evil Outbreak recreated their own servers to keep playing after the official ones shut down.
934. Both Portal 1 and 2 owe their mechanics to Valve hiring student developers whose ideas they liked. Narbacular Drop originally created portals while Tag: The Power Of Paint originated the gels.
935. Biohazard was renamed Resident Evil in the West because a game had already been published with the name, and it was used by a ‘popular’ band at the time.
936. Dragon Age: Origins has a ‘Zombie Kitten Army’ – nine cats that appear in a row in Denerim Market District.
937. Full Spectrum Warrior, a PS2 strategy shooter, had a more advanced version called Full Spectrum Command that was used by the US army for training.
938. A laugh used by the character called Kefka in Final Fantasy XI also happens to appear in Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger.
939. The PlayStation 4’s GPU can perform 1.843 teraFLOPS, a measurement of computing power, which makes it the world’s most powerful console.
940. In Call Of Duty’s lifetime, 100 million people have played it.
941. 32.3 quadrillion shots have been fired.
942. 5 billion cars have been destroyed.
943. 25 billion hours have been played. That’s 2.85 million years. Modern humans have only been on planet Earth for 200,000 years.
944. The Stargazer, who appears at the end of Mass Effect 3, was voiced by real life astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
945. YouTuber MSuraev holds the record for a GTA III speed run with a video of him completing the game in 1 hour, 12 minutes and ten seconds.
946. In Dead Space 2, the most powerful weapon in the game is a hidden foam finger that makes ‘pew pew’ noises when you shoot it.
947. According to popular legend, the original PS1 Lara’s bust size was the result of an accident. Creator Toby Gard hated the sexualisation of the character by Core however and left two months after the game was released.
948. Mortal Kombat’s Raiden is based on the character Lightning from Big Trouble In Little China. Both have a big straw hat and attack with electricity.
949. In 2008’s Prince Of Persia, the main character is never actually called a prince or referred to as one.
950. If you played a pirated version of Spyro 2, Zoe the fairy would mention it. You’d also find crucial items missing and be unable to interact with some characters.
951. Metal Gear Solid 2 had a level where Snake had to escape from water flooding a ship. It featured in early trailers, but ended up being cut because it wasn’t fun.
952. A truck found in Metro Last Light has a message written on the side which translates as ‘Delivering crap to your home’.
953. When Rocksteady completed Batman: Arkham Asylum, there were 60 people working at the studio, an increase from the 40 that started the game.
954. Giraffe toys and images appear repeatedly in The Last Of Us and are symbolic of innocence – they nearly always appear in relation to children.
955. There’s a poster in Guacamelee! advertising a fight between Batman and Bane, ‘For One Night Only’.
956. Guile was added to Street Fighter as a ‘normal character’ for Americans to use.
957. The world record for the longest gaming marathon is held by Okan Kaya, who played Call Of Duty: Black Ops II’s multiplayer for 135 hours.
958. One of the alternate endings in Saints Row IV reveals the narrator to be Jane Austen, who was kidnapped via time machine.
959. The combined amount of lawsuits directed at the GTA series totals over $1 billion.
960. The lights on the front of the Vice Point Langer Hotel in GTA: Vice City make the shape of a penis between the hours of 11pm and midnight.
961. Bioshock Infinite’s Elizabeth was originally meant to be mute until Irrational realised the only way she could effectively communicate was to grab the player and force them to look at things.
962. During the development of inFamous, Cole had several different names including Dylan, Talon, GearWolf and Chance.
963. In Fallout: New Vegas, the perk ‘In Shining Armor’, which is meant to protect against energy weapons if wearing metal armour, doesn’t actually work. A typo in the game’s code means it checks for a non-existent weapon type and can never be triggered.
964. Some of windows in the first Assassin’s Creed are designed to look like the front of Optimus Prime.
965. LSD: Dream Emulator is one of the weirdest PS1 games ever made and consists of playable scenes based on the developer’s ten-year dream diary.
966. In The Godfather: The Game, there’s a gang of red jacketed bellboys in the sewer who attack you on sight. It’s never explained why.
967. In the Japanese version of MediEvil, Sir Dan wears a helmet as the developers worried the audience wouldn’t accept a dead skeleton as a hero.
968. An early title for Plant Vs Zombies was the hilarious ‘Lawn Of the Dead’. *Sigh*
969. Final Fantasy IX contains a hidden side-quest that was only discovered 13 year later.
970. Sofia in Assassin’s Creed Revelations is based on a famous Albrecht Dürer painting called ‘Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman’.
971. The Mudokons in Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (along with various Western characters elsewhere) had a finger removed for Japan because the number four, and four-digit hands, are seen as bad omens.
972. Will ‘BigTymer’ Johnson is the highest-earning pro-Call Of Duty gamer, and earned $135,000 from four different tournaments between 2009 and 2012.
973. The ‘Dennis’ wolf mask in Hotline Miami is a reference to co-creator Dennis Wedin’s band F*CKING WEREWOLF ASSO.
974. Laura Bailey, the voice of Fetch in inFamous Second Son is also Lady Comstock in Bioshock Infinite, Helena Harper in Resi 6 and over 135 other videogame characters.
975. In the original Metro 2033 novel, the inspiration for the shooter of the same name, protagonist Artyom only fires a gun three times.
976. For some reason the word ‘tart’ was censored in the UK release of Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon…
Indiana Jones’ Ark Of The Covenant appears in:
977. Bloodrayne.
978. Spider-Man.
979. Tomb Raider.
980. Former Bayern Munich’s goalkeeper Oliver Kahn sued EA because it used his name and image without permission in 2002 FIFA World Cup.
981. The church on the cover of Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night is Mont Saint-Michel Abbey in Normandy.
982. In Aliens: Colonial Marines, there are literal Easter eggs: a secret room full of painted alien eggs.
983. Saints Row The Third was originally going to star a cop infiltrating the gang.
984. Metal Saga features a character called Klepto Cobain who can be found in Morgue Town speaking in Nirvana lyrics.
985. In The Last Of Us, when Ellie finally learns to whistle she whistles the theme from Uncharted.
986. For PS3 game Gladiator: Sword Of Vengeance, publisher Acclaim wanted to use bus stop adverts that bled.
987. In the Ghostbusters game, the proton packs are modelled on Dan Ackroyd’s version in the film and recreated some ‘lights’ that were actually chips in the paint.
988. In Final Fantasy XII, the summon Gilgamesh wields swords all previously used by other Final Fantasy heroes.
989. Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning did nearly all the voices for the games in the series.
990. An Easter egg in Mirror’s Edge involves a giant rat and references an Alzheimers drug known to make rats grow larger in trials.
991. Gravity Rush was originally a PS3 game before being moved to PS Vita.
992. You can do an Assassin’s Creed Leap Of Faith in Lego Lord Of The Rings if you climb to the top of Weathertop and jump off.
993. In PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, inFamous’ Cole was only going to appear in his ‘good’ form. Sucker Punch didn’t think that represented the character well enough and pushed for the evil version to be included too.
994. In Batman: Arkham Asylum, there’s a prisoner who’s actually a gamer, Luke Oliver, who won a competition to appear in the game.
995. There’s a Plants Vs Zombies Peashooter hidden on the Dawnbreaker map in Battlefield 4.
996. There are eight incredibly hard to find stars in Braid (one involves waiting for two hours before it appears), and the game’s plot is a metaphor for the creation of the atomic bomb.
997. The first version of the PlayStation Portable Sony showed off had no analogue stick.
998. To date, the Grand Theft Auto series has featured 519 different cars.
999. Developer Suda51 didn’t know Michigan: Report From Hell had been released in Europe until it was mentioned in an interview four years later.
1000. God Of War’s angry poster boy Kratos has appeared, in some form or another, in at least eight other games: Hot Shot Golf, Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny, The Simpsons Movie game, ModNation Racers, LittleBigPlanet, Mortal Kombat, Heavenly Sword and Shovel Knight.
1001. All the weapons in Resident Evil 4 are actually based on real life guns with the exception of the Bowgun, mine thrower and Plaga Removal Laser 412.