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 701-800.
701. When Doom development started it was just John Carmack working on his own.
702. Sleeping Dogs began as an original IP called Black Lotus. It then became a True Crime game under Activision before being canned. It was then bought by Square Enix and published as the game we know.
703. Tracer Tong is the only character to appear in all three Deus Ex games.
704. Minecraft was originally called Cave Game.
705. Sony began working on the development of PS4 two years after PS3 launched.
706. Spyro The Dragon was one of the first PlayStation games to use a LOD, or Level Of Detail, system that made objects lower resolutions the farther away they were, therefore avoiding ‘fogging’ in the distance.
707. While the original Borderlands claimed to have ‘87 bazillion’ guns the actual number is 16,164,886.
708. Portal’s famous cake is inspired by a real Black Forest Gâteau from a bakery near Valve.
709. In Resident Evil Code: Veronica there’s a song called ‘The Code Is Veronica’ that plays towards the end when you have to enter a code to activate a self-destruct system. The code is… wait for it… ‘steve’. Nah, we jest, it’s ‘veronica’.
710. The Hashshashin, the real order that inspired Assassin’s Creed, reportedly died in the 15th century.
711. New developers at XCOM studio Firaxis had to finish the original game before they could start work on the reboot.
712. Twisted Metal is PlayStation longest-running firstparty franchise, lasting 17 years from 1995 to 2012.
713. According to the Guinness World Records 2009 Gamer’s Edition, GTA : San Andreas has the largest voice cast of any game with 861 credited voice actors.
GTA V Guinness World Records:
714. Best-selling action-adventure video game in 24 hours.
715. Best-selling video game in 24 hours.
716. Fastest entertainment property to gross $1 billion.
717. Fastest videogame to gross $1 billion.
718. Highest grossing videogame in 24 hours.
719. Highest revenue generated by an entertainment product in 24 hours.
720. Most viewed trailer for an action-adventure video game.
721. The most expensive British game to date is the Grid 2: Mono Edition, which costs £125,000 and comes with a BAC Mono Supercar.
722. Forget Nolan North or Troy Baker, the most prolific voice actor in games is Steve Blum who has over 333 credits to his name, including Grayson Hunt in Bulletstorm, Ares in God Of War, Killer Croc in Batman: Arkham City and over 300 more.
723. Minecraft holds the largest videogame area with a maximum possible world size. Technically it’s infinite but a limit on chunks or block groupings means the maximum world size is 4,722,366,482,869,645 km² - albeit not on PlayStation.
724. Trophies in Portal 2 suggest the rivalry between Aperture Science and Half-Life’s Black Mesa goes back to 1949.
725. Spec Ops writer Walt Williams states the game’s transitions differentiate between reality and hallucinations or delusions. A fade to black indicates the truth; to white, a lie. This means the ending where Walker goes home is false.
726. When South Park: The Stick Of Truth’s first publisher, THQ, went bankrupt, Matt Stone and Trey Parker didn’t know about it until they read the news.
727. Tomb Raiders have reached 35 million sales to date.
728. In 2013, Roc ‘Outconsumer’ Massaguer set a new world record for capturing the flag in Call Of Duty: Black Ops II: one minute 52 seconds. While blindfolded and taking directions from a friend.
729. The sound of Batman’s explosive gel in the Arkham games is whipped cream coming out of a can.
730. At one point Aveline de Grandpré from Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation was planned to be a love interest for Assassin’s Creed III’s Connor.
731. Hotline Miami is heavily influenced by the film Drive and its director Nicolas Winding Refn is thanked in the credits.
732. FIFA 14 is one of the most widely available games. It’s on 14 platforms across three generations including PS4, PS3, PS2, PSP and PS Vita.
733. Doom takes its name from a line about Tom Cruise’s pool cue in The Colour Of Money.
734. When the PS3 was initially revealed in 2005, it had two HDMI ports, three ethernet ports and six USB ports. These were later reduced to one HDMI and ethernet port, and four USB ports.
735. In 2011, Mafia II claimed the world record for sweariest game with an average of one f-word every two minutes.
736. Including all HDD sizes and configurations there have been 14 models of PS3.
737. Resident Evil 4 contains 47 unique death animations for Leon.
738. In 2009’s Copenhagen eSport Challenge, Henrik Lindholm set the record for the longest six star survival in GTA IV, lasting for 16 minutes and 16 seconds.
739. In 2013, FIFA Interactive World Cup set the record for the largest gaming tournament, with 2.5 million participants.
740. Bethesda’s first game was in fact an American Football game called Gridiron credited as the first physicsbased sports game.
741. A rejected enemy type in Bioshock involved savants who would have been brains in jars.
742. The team who created Watch Dogs originally started work on a new Driver game for which the engine, Disrupt, was created.
743. The Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs in Fallout: New Vegas are a reference to Calvin And Hobbes’ fave cereal.
744. In 2002, Dan Holmes legally changed his name to PlayStation2. That was his second option after he couldn’t find a vicar who would let him marry his console. A statement from Sony said, “This shows enormous loyalty.”
745. According to a Rocksteady producer Nathan Burlow, Batman: Arkham Asylum is directly influenced by Bioshock.
746. In Modern Warfare 3, the tac-lights on enemy weapons are attached to the enemies themselves not the guns, so the player can’t pick them up.
747. The end of Bionic Commando on PS3 includes a morse code conversation intended to set up a sequel that never happened.
748. The door code ‘0451’ is a reference to Ray Bradbury’s book 451 Fahrenheit. It first appeared in PC shooter System Shock and is now recurring Easter egg in games such as Deus Ex and Dishonored.
749. An Easter egg in God Of War: Ascension reveals a picture of Earth from space with the message ‘When Earth Stops. The journey begins…’
750. A Big Daddy cut from Bioshock was called the SloProFum. It would attack with a hook and gun that took a while to fire. The name’s short for ‘slow projectile/f*ckedup melee’.
751. Psychonauts’ hero Raz can be found in Alice: Madness Returns as a skeleton sitting in a chair.
752. The oldest asset in 2011’s Duke Nukem Forever (which had been in development since 1997) is a Pigman cop statue that came from a 2006 build of the game.
753. In Bioshock Infinite’s ending, Booker uses a Bathysphere. Since these are meant to be locked to Rapture founder Andrew Ryan’s DNA it suggests the two are related.
754. An early concept for Skylanders was Spyro’s Kingdom: a mature game featuring blood.
755. Over 3 million people played Heavy Rain. Of those:
756. 74% finished it.
757. 65% saved Shaun.
758. Only 33% kept every character alive.
759. 3% got the Platinum trophy.
760. 4% saw all the endings.
761. According to research, surgeons who play videogames regularly make 37% fewer errors and work 27% faster than those who don’t.
762. The original top-down GTA was based heavily on an arcade game called All Points Bulletin.
763. LA Noire was the first game to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.
764. Space Invaders speeding up wasn’t originally part of the game design, the processor simply ran faster as more enemies were destroyed.
765. Long before PlayStation, EA built part of its early fortune on Sega Mega Drive games. But it had to do so through questionable means – borrowing a dev kit, pulling it apart and reverse-engineering its own in order to develop.
766. Tecmo’s lawyers once sued a company called West Side for hacking Dead Or Alive 2 to make the character Kasumi appear naked.
767. Takayoshi Sato was one of the youngest developers working on Silent Hill, creating most of the characters models and FMV. He had to bargain with his superiors by threatening to withhold his work in order to get credited.
768. Resident Evil began life as a sequel to Sweet Home, a Japanese-only movie tie-in that shares many familiar features such as notes to fill in the back story and door opening loading screens.
769. Portal 2 originally featured an extra gel that lets you walk on walls but it was dropped after it gave playtesters motion sickness.
770. Before being based on the band Aerosmith, PS1 shooter Revolution X was originally going to be a Jurassic Park game.
771. Most Assassin’s Creed protagonist names mean eagle or bird, or are derived from words that do.
772. At certain points in Arkham City you can examine Joker with detective vision, revealing he has no bones, foreshadowing the ending twist that it’s really Clayface.
773. TES V: Skyrim’s main theme was sung by 30 people three times to make it sounds like a choir of 90.
774. Files hidden in Call Of Duty: World At War show it had a British campaign that was cut.
775. In The Saboteur, the cabaret women only appeared topless if you bought the game new. If you got it second hand you had to buy a $3 DLC pack called the ‘The Midnight Show’ to undress them.
776. The list of recent arrests in Arkham City’s Gotham City Police Department are actually Rocksteady employees.
777. If you fire at a wall in Bayonetta she’ll write a ‘B’ or a heart in bullet holes.
778. For The Beatles: Rock Band, the original four and two track master recordings had to be digitally unpicked to created the separated tracks needed for the game.
779. Retro City Rampage was originally an 8-bit demake of Grand Theft Auto III.
780. Haven: Call Of The King on PS2 was meant to start a big budget trilogy. It ended with the hero Haven chained to a rock as a cliffhanger. He’s still there as the game was such a flop there were no more instalments.
781. The original PlayStation 1 discs were black because it looked cool. There’s no actual tech reason for it.
782. In 2013 Sony sent a gold PSOne to Minecraft creator Markus Persson to invite him to an E3 VIP event.
783. The ‘S’ in Leon S Kennedy stands for Scott.
784. Mass Effect was nearly called ‘Science Fiction X’ which was the early development codename that the team became overly attached to.
785. Heavy Rain has 17 possible endings.
786. The Helghast, the villains from the Killzone series, look almost identical to the police armour in a long-running anime series called The Kerberos Saga.
787. As an external consultant, PS4 creator Mark Cerny has had a hand in almost every Sony first-party game.
788. All the voice work for Transistor was recorded in audio director Darren Korb’s closet.
789. One of Devil May Cry’s core mechanics – the ability to juggle enemies in the air – grew out of a bug in one of the Onimusha games.
790. You can see Ezio’s dead family in Assassin’s Creed II’s ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ DLC if you go Palazzo Auditore at a specific time and activate Eagle Vision.
791. Sackboy was originally a cube-faced character called Mr Yellowhead in Media Molecule’s first LBP prototype: Craftworld.
792. Ads for long-since-forgotten platformer Ty The Tasmanian Tiger on PS2 showed Sonic, Crash and Spyro in hospital beds. To be fair, bar Skylanders they ain’t healthy…
793. Little Sisters are meant to be invulnerable in Bioshock, however in Ryan’s Amusements in Bioshock 2 there’s one who can be killed.
794. MachineGames’ staff were such fans of the Wolfenstein series they designed most of The New Order before officially being greenlit.
795. Call of Duty 3 was developed, start to finish, in eight months. Because of this the PS2 version reuses old gun models and animations.
796. All of the enemy battle dialogue in the Borderlands series is recorded by Gearbox employees.
797. The entire plot of Resident Evil Survivor 2 Code: Veronica is revealed to be Claire Redfield’s nightmare. Which explains why Wesker appears as a zombie.
798. Because of strict Dutch gun laws many reloading sounds in Killzone were staplers and other pieces of equipment Guerrilla had around the office.
799. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas uses the f-word 365 times outside of the soundtrack and random NPC quips.
800. After the PS2’s launch, shortages saw consoles selling on eBay for over $1,000.