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 801-900.
801. It would cost you more than £2,000 to buy every Skylanders figure on the market.
802. At one point in Resident Evil 5, Chris Redfield’s parter was going to be Barry Burton instead of Sheva and some of his files still exist in the game.
803. Silent Hill’s school monsters had to be reworked four times before the game could be released in Europe. The original Grey Child enemies, naked knife-wielding children, were eventually replaced with the Mumblers who were meant to appear later.
804. 1992’s Mortal Kombat was the first game ever to get a mature rating and led to the creation of the American ESRB, the Entertainment Software Rating Board.
805. Don’t tell anyone, but the voice of Paarthurnax in Skyrim is actually Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario.
Video animal cruelty condemned by PETA:
806. A rat-killing scene in Battlefield 3.
807. Dog killing in Call of Duty: World at War.
808. Whaling in Assassin’s Creed IV.
809. Final Fight began life as a sequel to Street Fighter.
810. Street Fighter II began life as a sequel to Final Fight.
811. The first concept for Street Fighter’s Dhalsim was a six-armed character with an elephant’s head, based on the Hindu god Ganesha.
812. The original ‘PlayStation 3’ logo was later changed to just ‘PS3’ because it was easier to fit on billboards.
813. Call Of Duty: World At War was nearly called Call Of Duty V.
814. Borderlands was originally photorealistic. The celshading effect was developed in secret and Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford originally went to the developers involved to, “shut them down.”
The Evil Dead movies are referenced in:
815. Outlast.
816. Shadows Of The Damned.
817. Fallout 3.
818. Spider-Man.
819. Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror.
820. Borderlands.
821. Doom.
822. At the end of Batman: Arkham Asylum there’s crate of Titan in the water that is grabbed by either Scarecrow, Bane, or Killer Croc. The choice is random.
823. In Thief, you can find a dead creature behind a waterfall in the game’s third chapter. It’s a Burrick, a type of enemy from the first game.
824. The first true prototype of PS Vita followed the PSP Go’s sliding case design, but was redesigned due to overheating issues.
825. Bioware started work on a Mass Effect FPS called Team Assault. It was eventually canned.
826. In the Tomb Raider movie, Angelina Jolie’s real father, Jon Voight, plays Lara Croft’s father.
827. Rock Band 2 features a trophy called ‘Bladder of Steel’ that is earned by playing every song in one unbroken playlist.
828. Tom Clancy initially rejected Sam Fisher’s multipurpose goggles as unrealistic.
829. In Aliens: Colonial Marines there’s a box of donuts – shooting it makes a giant ring donut roll down a hill.
830. Saints Row IV started life as DLC for the third game called ‘Enter the Dominatrix’. It was reworked into a full release when THQ hit financial difficulties.
831. In the original Silent Hill all the streets are named after famous horror and sci-fi authors including Stephen King’s Richard Bachman alter ego, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Michael Crichton, James Ellroy, Jack Finney, Dean R. Koontz, Ira Levin, Richard Matheson, Carl Sagan, John Sandford, Dan Simmons and F Paul Wilson.
832. The very first Street Fighter arcade cabinet featured large pressure sensitive buttons that had to be physically hit as hard as possible.
833. Silent Hill 2’s Pyramid Head didn’t originally have a pyramid head, he had flesh-like covering stretched between his face and crotch. The triangular helmet was added later by designer Masahiro Ito because the angles, “suggested pain.”
834. Al Pacino selected his own voice double for Scarface: The World Is Yours. The man he chose in a blind audition was actor André Sogliuzzo, his former chauffeur.
835. THQ made real life versions of the Penetrator, a purple dildo bat weapon that appears in Saints Row: The Third. OPM had two (one broke).
836. In Octodad: Dadliest Catch’s Gervason’s Grocery you can find Pewdie Pie, referencing the famous YouTuber.
837. In Resi 6, a mistranslation in a letter from Sherry created a new character called Ronny with connections to Claire Redfield. It should have said ‘Rani’ who appeared in the Resident Evil Degeneration movie.
838. InFamous’ original hero, Cole MacGrath, sort of appears in Second Son via a chain of electronics shops called ‘Cole Mcg’s’.
839. Original PS2 memory cards have an 8MB capacity. You could fit 6,400 of them on a 50GB dual layer Blu-ray.
840. At one point GTA III featured a homeless character called Darkel whose missions involved blowing up buildings. Rockstar says he was removed because he didn’t fit and not because of 9/11, which happened shortly before the game’s release.
841. In Just Dance 2014, Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed a Girl’ has the word ‘cherry’ censored in the line, “the taste of her cherry chapstick.” No one is sure why.
842. Journey and God Of War use the same original sounds to open gates and grates.
843. Other Journey sound effect sources include: a three foot box of sand dug up from Venice beach which was tipped, dug and poured to create the desert effects.
844. The noise of the character’s robe is the sound designer’s jacket.
845. The sounds of the character’s frozen robes in the later stages of the game were made by crushing various crisps found in Thatgamecompany’s kitchen.
846. The sound of cloth melting was made from ‘girls sighing’.
847. According to Capcom Producer Yoshinori Ono, Street Fighter/Final Fight character Poison is a post-op transexual in Japan but in America she, “tucks her business away to look like a girl.”
848. The first Call Of Duty is the only game in series not to feature shotguns.
849. Despite appearing in trailers and the game’s own opening movie the crossbow was cut from the original Assassin’s Creed when playtesters favored it over swords.
850. The voice of Commander Shepard in Mass Effect, Mark Meer, was originally a local actor hired to fill in while prototyping the early stages of the game.
851. The Buster Sword was originally meant to reappear in Final Fantasy X as a weapon for Tidus. It’s in the code, but never made the game.
852. Mass Effect 3’s entire story was built from a fourpage document outlining all the major plot points.
853. Publisher Acclaim once tried to pay people to place adverts for Shadow Man 2 on the gravestones of the recently deceased.
854. A mission in Shadow Hearts: From The New World has you fighting cat versions of famous action stars including The Meowmenator and Bruce Meow.
855. The lead character in Psychonauts was originally going to be an ostrich.
856. President Obama paid for in-game advertising to appear in Burnout Paradise while he was campaigning for a term in office.
857. Shadow The Hedgehog has a range of hero, neutral and dark missions in each level that create 326 possible story combinations.
858. Spin-off shooter Resident Evil: Dead Aim is actually considered canon according to the official timeline for the Resi series.
859. Lilith’s ‘sexy’ strutting and kiss blowing in the original Borderlands was in fact mo-capped by creative director Mike Neumann.
860. Cloud’s iconic Buster Sword in Final Fantasy VII was nicknamed the ‘the Giant Kitchen Knife’ by character designer Tetsuya Nomura.
861. An early demo of the Mad Max game featured Max with an American accent. It was immediately changed to Australian after fan outcry.
862. From October to December of 2013 18,000 billion minutes were played in FIFA. In the same time period the Premiership logged 11,430.
863. Manhunt is banned in New Zealand, making it illegal to own a copy.
864. Capcom is a portmanteau of ‘capsule computers’, a term it used to describe its early arcade machines.
865. Matthew Perry was asked to appear in Fallout: New Vegas after appearing on TV chat show Ellen talking about how much he loved Fallout 3.
866. According to director Neil Druckmann, the unused ending in The Last Of Us that saw Joel and Ellie together four years later with Joel about to get married was written as a ‘goodbye’ to the two characters.
867. The child-like church map that appears in Silent Hill 3 was actually drawn by one of the developer’s children.
868. Doom II originally came out the year Kurt Cobain shot himself. There’s a level called Nirvana that starts with you facing a shotgun.
869. The track Venice in Timesplitters: Future Perfect is basically a rave version of the 1695 orchestral piece Music For The Funeral Of Queen Mary by Henry Purcell.
870. There’s a version of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit called ‘EA Crew Edition 2010’ which was only given to EA employees and included seven extra cars.
871. Myth Makers: Trixie In Toyland, Ninjabread Man, Anubis II and Rock ‘n’ Roll Adventures by Data Design Interactive are all largely reskinned version of the same game. The tutorial levels of each, for example, are all identical.
872. We all know that Milla Jovovich is the star of the Resident Evil movies, but originally the role of Alice was going to go to Buffy actress Sarah Michelle Gellar.
873. During the Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time film the Prince climbs high and ‘synchronises’ à la Assassin’s Creed.
874. A Sony report claims that approximately 0.5% of PS3s suffered from the Yellow Light Of Death.
875. During the development of Crash Bandicoot, the developers would play it through squinted eyes to check the light/dark balance of the art.
876. Quantic Dream’s habit of modelling fully nude characters is said to be because David Cage never knows what camera angles he’s going to use in the final game.
877. At one point, Batman: Arkham Origins’ developer Warner Brothers Montreal revealed a special unlockable batsuit called ‘Worst Nightmare’ that showed Batman as a monster, but it was cut before the game’s release.
878. Die Hard Arcade on PS2 has nothing to do with the film. It was a completely separate game called Dynamite Deka in Japan that Fox Interactive branded to tie-in with the movie.
879. Destroy All Humans started as a joke by Pandemic writer Matt Harding who was tired of violent games. When the studio decided to make it he left the company.
880. PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale was originally called Title Fight but Sony changed the name because it was felt it didn’t explain the game well enough.
881. The first Gran Turismo had 140 cars and 11 tracks.
882. The image finally used to reveal the masked character’s Tali’s face in Mass Effect 3 is a generic stock image of a model.
883. When EA first started work on FIFA the publisher thought it would be a niche sports title and certainly never rival Madden, its top sports game at the time.
884. In Shadow Of Rome, Capcom’s PS2 Roman adventure, there’s a score in multiplayer for attacking someone in the gladiator arena when they’ve just wet themselves. It’s called ‘Urine Trouble’.
885. GTA IV contains 80,000 lines of dialogue.
886. Fallout: New Vegas has 65,000.
887. And Mass Effect 3 contains 40,000.
888. There’s a Weighted Companion Cube in Alice: Madness Returns.
889. Early on Kojima thought Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes would be on PSP.
890. Ken’s theme in Street Fighter is a barely disguised version of Cheap Trick’s Mighty Wings.
891. Rockstar Games started life as DMA Designs, the studio behind Lemmings.
892. There a Mass Effect reference in The Sims 3: travel to the future in the time machine and you’ll appear in a crowd cheering that Shepard saved the galaxy from an ‘ancient machine-god threat’.
893. The original ‘hero’ of Hotline Miami was a fat man in a pig mask. The sprites are in still in the game but the character was cut.
894. In Silent Hill: Homecoming, Alex Shepherd was originally an older, more military-influenced blonde man. While the character was redesigned to be younger and more average, the first design was left in several loading screens by mistake.
895. A Pandemic-developed Batman game was originally meant to accompany The Dark Knight movie. It missed the film’s opening and a Newsweek article estimated EA missed out on a potential $100 million revenue from lost sales.
896. In the original version of Bionic Commando, the enemy was a neo-Nazi group trying to resurrect Hitler.
897. A bug in Silent Hill 2 means that one of Mariah’s eyes is replaced by teeth.
898. In Don’t Starve, one of the creatures that attacks you in the dark is called a Grue, a reference to the early text adventure Zork.
899. In Minecraft, the Ghast noise is made by the sound designer’s cat.
900. The design of GlaDOS in Portal is a physical representation of her metaphorical situation: her arrangement represents a bound woman hanging upside from the ceiling.