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 601-700.
601. Mortal Kombat was originally meant to star Jean-Claude van Damme as an adaptation of Universal Soldier but the deal fell through, leading to the creation of the Johnny Cage character (wearing his Blood Sport outfit) to replace him.
602. Gran Turismo is the best selling game on PS1 with 10.85 million copies sold.
603. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the best selling game on PS2, coming in at 17.33 million.
604. Gran Turismo 5 is the best selling game on PS3, crossing the finish line with 10.66 million copies sold.
605. Monster Hunter Portable 3rd is the best selling PSP game, with a tasty 4.8 million units shifted.
606. Uncharted: Golden Abyss is the best selling PS Vita game, pilfering an impressive 1.19 million.
607. At one point, a twist in Final Fantasy X was to reveal Tidus was a ghost, but it was removed due to similarities with The Sixth Sense.
608. GTA III was going to feature online multiplayer, but it was cut so the team dedicated to it could focus on GTA: Vice City instead.
609. During Doom’s development the creative director wrote a huge book called The Doom Bible detailing a long and complicated plot and backstory, including five playable characters.
610. When you hear the Illusive Man smoking in Mass Effect, it’s the sound of Martin Sheen sucking on a pencil.
611. In the birth scene in Beyond Two Souls, Aiden is deliberately uncontrollable as the developers feared he’d be used to get a look at the mother-to-be’s genitals, implying she has them.
612. Dialogue in TES V: Skyrim suggests the version of Sheogorath, the God Of Madness, you meet is actually the original hero from TES IV: Oblivion who took on the role at the end of The Shivering Isles DLC.
613. In GTA III, the Flashback 95.6FM radio station only plays music from the Scarface soundtrack.
614. Flatout 2 on PS2 contained over 5,000 fully destructible objects.
615. Kratos means ‘power’ in ancient Greek.
616. The lead designer of Gex on PS1 was frustrated about cuts made to the game and hid secret messages complaining about it. One of them included the head of product development’s phone number. Playtesters found them and he was fired.
617. The synth band Powerglove were commissioned to create Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon’s soundtrack before development started to help get the team in the right frame of mind.
618. Far Cry 3’s villain Vaas was originally a huge muscled brute, but was redesigned to look like voice actor Michael Mando after he was cast.
619. Final Fantasy staples such as chocobos and a characters called Cid weren’t in the original game, but were subsequently retconned in later remakes.
620. When the original PlayStation launched, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates preferred the machine over the Sega Saturn saying, “our game designer likes the Sony machine.”
621. The original PS1 used a ‘wobble’ burned into official CD-Rom tracks as an anti piracy method. It could be bypassed by wedging the door mechanism open with a pen and swapping disks once the PlayStation logo had loaded.
622. The PlayStation 2 is the best selling console in history, selling over 155 million units.
623. PS2 made $250 million on the first day in console, game and accessory sales.
624. 3,870 game titles were released over the PS2’s lifetime.
625. 1.5 billion games in total were sold for the PS2.
626. Just over 500,000 PS2s were sold at launch.
627. The best selling console the year PS2 came out was the slimline PSone.
628. PSN has over 110 million users worldwide.
629. Sony has sold over 28 million DualShock controllers.
630. PlayStation Home had over 31 million users worldwide.
631. In case you’re wondering where PS4’s Orbis codename came from, it’s the name of the operating system.
632. Sonic was originally called Mr Needlemouse.
633. The original Lego Batman sold more than Batman: Arkham Asylum.
634. R∞M, or Room, was a Home-like virtual meeting place for the PSP that was canned after negative feedback from a Beta.
635. The model 1887 shotgun that appears in the Modern Warfare games is based on the iconic weapon from Terminator 2 and has “Hasta La Vista, Baby” inscribed on the hammer.
636. Last year Christian Benteke was the most transfered player in FIFA 14.
637. Cristiano Ronaldo scored the most goals: 32.5 million.
638. ‘Ride the wave’ was the most popular celebration.
639. Real Madrid was the most supported club with 717K fans.
640. Real Madrid and Bayern Munich were the most popular pairing with 96,38,429 matches.
641. The XMB first appeared on the PSX, a digital video recorder and PS2 combo that Sony only released in Japan in 2003. It was expensive and didn’t sell well and was discontinued in 2005.
642. Unused code in the original Japanese version of Final Fantasy VII makes it clear the Honey Bee Inn is a brothel and includes a menu showing girls you can hire for set amounts of time.
643. Nearly all the cutscenes and movies were cut from the EU version of Twisted Metal Black due to their violent content.
644. Canis Canem Edit’s Bullworth Academy appears on a TV show in GTA IV suggesting it exists in the same universe.
645. In 2010, first, second, and third generation PS3s were affected by a ‘Leap Year Bug’ where the internal clock thought it was a leap year. The time and date reset to 31 December 1999 and the error prevented people going online or connecting to the store.
646. Two months before The Last Of Us was announced Neil Druckmann left his iPad on a plane with the reveal trailer on it. He never got it back and Naughty Dog spent the intervening time waiting for it to leak.
647. In Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s Nuketown 2025 multiplayer map, there’s a playable Atari 2600 you can activate by shooting all the mannequin heads in under two minutes.
648. The rarest Skylander character is Tarclops, a blob that was designed, crafted as a prototype toy, coded into the game and then canned.
649. Cybersquatter Anthony Abraham aquired the URL modernwarfare3.com before Activision and made it redirect to a Battlefield website. Activision had to take legal action to get it back.
650. The first force feedback controller for PlayStation was the JogCon Namco created for Ridge Racer 4. It featured a large central wheel players turned to steer.
651. The Japanese version of Spyro moves slower than the Western version. The original speed is accessible via a ‘Director’s Cut mode’.
652. Neil Druckmann’s first idea for The Last Of Us was that of a policeman protecting a girl during a zombie outbreak. However, he had a heart condition meaning the roles were reversed when it kicked in. This early version of the character was inspired by Sin City’s Hartigan.
653. In Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Drake and Elena wear Ottsel brand wetsuits. In Naughty Dog’s Jak & Daxter, Daxter is an ottsel.
654. Many of Metal Gear Solid’s idea are actually lifted from the earlier Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake on the MSX, including:
655. Both games start on a cliff edge before moving into a tank hanger with a lift.
656. Roy Campbell is Snake’s commanding officer in both games.
657. Master Miller gives advice on health and life in general life in both games.
658. Both games have you checking the back of the box to get a Codec frequency.
659. Both require you to use plastic explosives on a door to reach a new area.
660. In both games, Snake is chased up a spiral staircase by guards.
661. Both have you changing the temperature of an object to make it a key.
662. Both make you heat up frozen rations before eating them.
663. In both games Snake has a female contact on frequency 140.15 that he becomes romantically involved with. Holly in Metal Gear 2 and Meryl in MGS. They also both escape together chased by an army.
664. In both games there’s an anonymous character who helps Snake. Both turn out to be Gray Fox.
665. Both games feature an enhanced ninja: Kyle Schneider in Metal Gear 2 and Gray Fox in MGS, both of whom were previously presumed dead.
666. Both have an elevator ambush.
667. Both feature an attack from a cloaked enemy.
668. Both include a boss battle against a Hind D chopper with stinger missiles.
669. Both involve a battle against a piloted Metal Gear and a final fight with the pilot.
670. Call Of Duty: Black Ops grossed $650 million in its first five days of worldwide release.
671. The famous opening train sequence from Uncharted 2 began life as an idea for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune DLC.
672. In TES V: Skyrim, the Draugr are randomly generated meaning you can have female ones with beards.
673. At one point Rockstar was developing a spiritual sequel to The Warriors called We Are The Mods, which would have been set in ‘60s London.
674. PS4’s Blu-ray drive can read discs three times faster than PS3’s drive.
675. The fake movie posters in Uncharted 2 feature Naughty Dog employees.
676. Ellie swears the most in The Last Of Us, using the f-bomb 53 times.
677. Riley is the only character in The Last Of Us to be given a last name, revealed as Abel in the Left Behind DLC. Joel’s surname is apparently Miller according to a Japanese manual (supported by his daughter Sarah having a school award in her bedroom with her partially-obscured last name revealing the initial ‘M’).
678. In Assassin’s Creed III, Connor was originally going to be able to scalp enemies. It was dropped for being too brutal and an inaccurate representation of Mohawk tribes.
679. One Easter egg in Final Fantasy VII wasn’t discovered for eight years. The text on Jenova’s helmet reads ‘Made in Hong Kong. All Rights Reserved 1996 Square Enix Limited’. It wasn’t discovered until a high resolution image appeared in Final Fantasy Advent Children on PSP.
680. In Borderlands 2, there’s an enemy called Rakkman who’s a homage to Batman. When you play the game through a second time he’s called Rakkman Forever.
681. The infamous ‘No Russian’ level in Modern Warfare 2 was originally going to be set a real location: Domodedovo International Airport in Moscow.
682. A bug in Assassin’s Creed II means it’s possible to fight with a broom and perform an impressive throatcutting finishing move.
683. Michael Ironside initially rejected the offer to play Sam Fisher as he thought the character was flat.
684. In Ratchet & Clank 2, there’s a teleporter that only works between 3-4am. The idea being that you’d have to be an insomniac to access it. It leads to a museum full of unused concepts.
685. David Jaffe says the original idea for Twisted Metal came from being stuck in traffic.
686. The Devil’s Sea, also known as the Dragon’s Triangle, which appears in the 2013 version Tomb Raider is a real area off the coast of Japan similar to the Bermuda Triangle.
687. You were originally going to be able to get married in Fallout: New Vegas, but it was cut because the dev believed it didn’t add anything to the game.
688. Sims creator Will Wright was partly inspired to create a game about building a home from scratch after his burned down.
689. Sonic’s mortal enemy Dr Robotnik was originally designed as a hero.
690. Nearly all the names in the opening credits of Metal Gear Solid are fake as many of the actors weren’t sure if the game was supported by the Screen Actors Guild in the United States.
691. There have been over 13,657,117,836 kills in Uncharted 3’s multiplayer.
692. GTA V is actually the 15th GTA.
693. The very first Call Of Duty was codenamed ‘MOH Killer’, referencing the studio’s desire to beat Medal Of Honour.
694. The Yashichi name and symbol (an orange shuriken badge) is a Capcom Easter egg and power-up that’s appeared in nearly 40 games. It was originally an enemy in the 1984 shooter Vulgus.
695. PlayStation 4 architect Mark Cerny shouldn’t have been able to get his first PS1 dev kit but asked Sony to consider his then-team Crystal Dynamics to be Japanese to qualify.
696. According to Guerrilla, one Killzone 2 character had as many polygons as an entire level in Killzone 1.
697. Spyro’s original name was Pete.
698. While Resident Evil 4 is meant to take place in Spain the villagers speak a Mexican dialect.
699. The graves in Plants Vs Zombies reference Monty Python’s dead Parrot sketch and are inscribed with phrases such as ‘expired’, ‘ceased to exist’ and ‘just resting’.
700. When Jack opens his wallet in the opening moments of Bioshock you can see an Irrational business card.