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 404-500.
404. Carrie Swidecki holds a world record for playing Just Dance 4 for 49 hours straight.
405. Tomb Raider model Nell McAndrew was fired after appearing in Playboy. Core Design took legal action to get the game’s logo hidden by a sticker on the magazine’s cover.
406. In Uncharted 3, you can find a newspaper with the headline ‘Scientists Struggle to Understand Deadly Fungus’, referencing The Last Of Us. Technically it was a leak as the game’s announcement had been pushed back but the studio forgot to remove the Easter egg.
407. Deus Ex designer Harvey Smith says the main character, JC Denton, is a descendant of Jesus Christ.
408. A crop circle Easter egg in Metal Gear Solid 4 reveals that Colonel Campbell thinks he was abducted by aliens.
409. Mass Effect’s Mordin Solus’ face is based on an old Clint Eastwood, with the art team using a photo as a basis for his squint and wrinkles.
410. The line ‘I took an arrow to the knee’, from TES V: Skyrim first appears in the 2007 fantasy book The Name Of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.
411. Assassin’s Creed’s Animus is named after a term in Jungian psychology for ‘the masculine inner personality’.
412. In The Last Of Us, you can find Nathan Drake, and Jak & Daxter, toys and board games.
413. When Naughty Dog first started work on PS3 and PSP, the frustration at learning the new hardware and creating new tools lead to 25 of its 60 developers leaving.
414. Disney once planned a cartoon series based on Kingdom Hearts.
415. Assassin’s Creed IV was originally meant to follow Edward over 30 years.
416. CJ’s voice actor, rapper Chris Bellard, wasn’t an actor when he appeared in GTA: San Andreas. Someone just overheard him making a phone call and liked his voice.
417. Former US President Bill Clinton was asked to voice President John Eden in Fallout 3.
418. Marlon Brando actually recorded dialogue for the Godfather game but it was too mumbled to use.
419. Real criminals were used to voice several parts in GTA V, one of whom had only got out of prison the day before recording his role.
420. In Red Dead Redemption’s Undead Nightmare DLC, the trophy for killing the sasquatch is called ‘Six Years In The Making’, a reference to the beast’s mythological presence in San Andreas. The French version translates as ‘No Need To Seek It Anymore CJ’.
421. Shin Megami Tensei’s Kazuma Kaneko designed Dante and Vergil’s Devil Trigger forms in DMC3.
422. When Destiny was first conceived, it was a high fantasy game featuring warriors, castles and dragons.
423. During the PS2 development of Saints Row the gang’s colour was green. It was changed to purple after GTA : San Andreas used the colour instead.
424. At one point during development, Naughty Dog was asked to move Ellie to the background of the box at as there was a fear such a prominently placed female character would hurt sales. The studio refused, obviously.
425. In Half-Life 2, all the characters’ faces are modeled on real people. Eli Vance was based on a homeless man.
426. According to writer Anthony Burch, Axton, the commando in Borderlands 2, is bisexual.
427. Shawn Fonteno, the actor who played Franklin in GTA V, says Stephen Ogg (Trevor) sometimes worked naked with Ogg responding that it, “helped me get into character.”
428. Dead Or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki says he was tricked into releasing an unfinished version of DOA2 on PS2 after someone asked to borrow a copy of the code.
429. GTA : San Andreas’ CJ actor Chris Bellard and GTA V’s Franklin actor Shawn Fonteno are cousins.
430. According to Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida, some of PS4’s social features were inspired by Demon’s and Dark Souls. Specifically the ability to leave messages and his love of watching other people’s gameplay videos.
431. Leslie Benzies, the president of Rockstar North, bought a church to stop it being turned into flats.
432. All the monkeys in Ape Escape are named according to locations or activities. For example, Indiana is in a temple, Elvis is on a throne and Mulder flies around in a UFO.
433. Resident Evil 6 recycles several unused bits of Resi 5 including the submerged ruins, giant monster attacks while supporting other characters, a train boss fight, and the monster Ricardo Irving transforms into.
434. Daylight is the first PS game to use Unreal Engine 4.
435. In the first Metal Gear Solid, you can watch Meryl doing exercises from an air vent. If you keep leaving the vent and returning she will do different exercises and eventually work out in her underwear.
436. At one point, Portal 2 featured a competitive multiplayer where players used portals to try and win control of a ball.
437. The marine in Doom, usually just called ‘Doom Guy’, has a name in the novelisation, Flynn ‘Fly’ Taggart.
438. The South Park episode ‘Insecurity’ was actually an idea cut from the game, The Stick Of Truth.
439. Developers at Visceral Games looked at pictures of car crashes and war victims as research for the corpses found on the USG Ishimura.
440. A conspiracy theory in the Portal universe states that the Weighted Companion Cubes contain the bodies of previous test subjects.
441. The PS4 is 29% times faster than the 1997 ASCI Red supercomputer, which took up 1,600 square feet.
442. Saints Row IV’s Super Dangerous Wad Wad Edition cost $1,000,000 and included the following extras: Virgin Galactic space flight, full size dubstep Gun, a hostage rescue experience, plastic surgery, spy training day, personal shopper, capsule wardrobe, seven nights at the royal suite in the Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai, a week for two at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, first class flights to both Dubai and Washington, a Lamborghini Gallardo, a Toyota Prius and one year’s insurance. It could only be bought by emailing Koch directly.
443. Killzone was originally called Marines and started as a tech demo based on an oil rig.
444. Deus Ex started out as an action-orientated FPS codenamed ‘Trouble Shooter’.
445. The original PS1 Lara Croft character model is made of 230 polygons. In the first Uncharted game, Drake had 30,000.
446. SOCOM: Navy SEALs was the first online PlayStation game using the PS2’s network adaptor peripheral.
447. Remedy creative director and writer Sam Lake was the original face of Max Payne.
448. In GTA V, Trevor’s Canis Bodhi pick-up is named after the actor Stephen Ogg’s son, Bodhi.
449. You can see the mountain from Journey through a telescope in The Unfinished Swan.
450. In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Jar Jar Binks can be found frozen in carbonite.
451. The very early prototypes for the first Tomb Raider featured a male character model.
452. There’s an inaccessible room in TES V: Skyrim used to store dead NPCs so they aren’t accidentally respawned.
453. In GTA III, there’s an area you can only reach by using a truck to climb over a wall. In it there’s a sign that says ‘You weren’t supposed to be able to get here you know’.
454. You can reach the same area in GTA: Liberty City Stories where the sign says ‘Hello again!’.
455. In the PS2 version of GTA : Liberty City Stories, it was updated – it now reads ‘You just can’t get enough of this alley, can you?’.
456. In GTA: San Andreas, there’s a sign on top of the San Fierro bridge that says ‘There are no Easter Eggs up here. Go away’.
457. In Metal Gear Solid 2, there are pans hanging in the ship’s galley that play different notes when shot. You can play tunes on them.
458. In Borderlands 2, Tiny Tina has a lazy eye. It was originally a bug, but Gearbox decided it fit the character so it left it in.
459. The original ending of 2013’s Tomb Raider had Lara sacrificing the character Sam so the rest of the crew could escape. It was scrapped because Crystal Dynamics didn’t want players to feel like they had failed.
460. The Japanese version of Resident Evil 4 has a different chainsaw death where Leon’s face is partially cut off rather than his entire head.
461. Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood’s pre-order bonuses included a copy of the soundtrack. Ubisoft gave out a torrented version of the music encoded by someone called ‘arsa13’.
462. In Dead Space, Isaac Clarke’s name is a reference to science fiction authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke.
463. Alan Young reprised his role as Scrooge McDuck for DuckTales: Remastered at the age of 93.
464. In Dragon’s Dogma, one of the undead that appears in a cutscene is a copy of the first zombie that appears in Resident Evil.
465. Lara Croft began life as a South American woman called Laura Cruz and was based on Neneh Cherry.
466. In Shadow Of The Colossus, there’s an item called The Eye Of The Colossus that would have let you see battles from the Colossus’ point of view. It was in early previews of the game but was removed from the final version.
467. In Batman: Arkham Origins, one of the prisoner mug shots has the same number as OJ Simpson’s arrest photo.
468. The Radiant AI system that was meant to motivate NPCs in TES IV: Oblivion had to be toned down because many important characters would get themselves killed or perform game-breaking actions such as buying all the armour available in a town.
469. The first skater in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was actually Bruce Willis as Neversoft reused his character model from a previous game (Apocalypse) in early prototypes.
470. Metal Gear Solid’s diarrhoea-ridden Johnny Sasaki is named after character model designer Hideki Sasaki who was regarded by the rest of the team as a slacker.
471. In the Spanish translation of TES IV: Oblivion, verbs and nouns were confused so that characters talked about ‘a train’ when they meant actual training, leading to numerous meaningless conversations about locomotives.
472. Warhawk’s multiplayer servers were actual PS3s.
473. An early pitch for The Last Of Us was called Mankind and involved only women being infected by a virus. Director Neil Druckmann said the, “reason it failed is because it was a misogynistic idea.”
474. The PS4 has the same amount of RAM as 16 PS3s.
475. Abe from Oddworld and Dart from Legend of Dragoon were planned DLC characters for PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, but were cancelled thanks to poor sales.
476. Platforming marsupial Crash Bandicoot has no neck because it reduces the polygon count of the character and made him easier to render.
477. When you break into Area 69 in GTA : San Andreas you can see Gordon Freeman’s crowbar in one of the labs.
478. An Oblivion spin-off was once in development for PSP.
479. Final Fantasy’s iconic battle system was inspired by American football.
480. The Air Force Research Laboratory Condor Cluster is a supercomputer built from 1,760 PS3s. When it was created it was the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world.
481. In several Mass Effect locations you can hear strange noises which are believed to be the songs the Rachni sing to each other.
482. Chris Moyles’ face was used for an enemy in the 24: The Game.
483. When Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley started work on what was to eventually become The Last Of Us, they were originally planning to make a Jak & Daxter reboot.
484. When you enter the VATS mode in Fallout 3 the noise you hear is the combat-turn sound from the original Fallout.
485. In Jak X: Combat Racing, you can unlock a movie called ‘Hot Coffee’. It’s a clip of the characters Daxter and Tess drinking coffee.
486. There’s an area under the sea in Far Cry 3 with no water. You can walk around as if on dry land while fish ‘swim’ around in thin air.
487. Early on in Batman: Arkham Asylum’s development, the rhythmic combat system was more like playing Guitar Hero, with a 2D perspective as you matched button prompts to fight bad guys.
488. At one point, Link from Zelda and Samus Aran from Metroid featured as playable characters in Marvel Ultimate Alliance because of the game’s dual Wii/PS2 development. Nintendo said no.
489. Gamestop honoured a 2001 pre-order for Duke Nukem Forever when it was finally released in 2011.
Portal’s ‘The cake is a lie’ has been referenced in the following games:
490. Dragon Age: Origins.
491. Duke Nukem Forever.
492. Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow.
493. X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
494. Grand Theft Auto V.
495. Minecraft.
496. If you find the Delorean and take it up to 88mph in Driver: San Francisco, it unlocks a new version of the first Driver’s garage tutorial.
497. Sucker Punch co-founder Chris Zimmerman says that for the first year of development inFamous was an Animal Crossing-style game about a superhero fighting purple gorillas who were stealing balloons. The studio switched to the game we finally got because Zimmerman says, “it really wasn’t coming together.”
498. Every clock in Dead Space 2 is stuck at 12:00. 499. Videogame voice actress Melissa Disney, who appeared in Kingdom Hearts II, is fourth cousin to Walt.
500. To raise money early in its life Sony made an electrically heated cushion for the winter. The lack of thermostat or fire retardant materials meant it was sold under a false name to avoid tarnishing the company’s good reputation.