12 Fun Facts About Classic Video Games 10 August 2020  |  AG

12 Fun & Weird Facts About the Classic Video Games You Love

1. Nintendo’s main man, Mario, first appeared in the arcade game Donkey Kong on the 9th July 1981, and he went by the name Jump-man.

2. In this game, Donkey Kong was Mario’s pet ape who escapes and kidnaps Mario’s girlfriend, Pauline.

3. When Mario made his debut in this game, his profession was a carpenter since the game took place at a construction site. It was not until Mario Bros. that Mario made the career change to plumber, as much of this game took place underground.

4. Due to the popularity of the Mario Bros. game in 1983 there was a huge increase in the number of people naming their children Mario during that time.

5. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney started Atari with just $500. Within 5 years the company earned $28 million, and by 1982, sales topped $2 billion. 

6. In addition to starting Atari, Nolan Bushnell also founded the popular pizza and entertainment company, Chuck E. Cheese.

7. Bowser, the main antagonist of Nintendo’s Mario franchise, was originally envisioned to be an ox. This is probably why he has horns and a defined snout, even though he is a turtle.

8. In Space Invaders, the more aliens you kill, the faster they come at you. This pattern of the game getting more challenging the more you play has become a staple in the gaming world, but it started as a fluke! The aliens were always supposed to come at you at the same speed, but with so many aliens on the screen the hardware could not handle it, so they were slowed down. The more alien's you killed as you played, the more system memory was freed up, so the game ended up running faster.

9. The design of the PlayStation 2 is based on an old Atari computer, the Falcon 030 Micro-box. Apparently, Sony bought the design patent when Atari was going bankrupt.

10. Atari’s E.T. the Extra Terrestrial is largely considered the worst video game of all time.

11. The urban legend – that turned out to be true – was that Atari had so many unsold copies of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial that they buried them in the desert. A documentary crew went out and dug them up!

12. Most of the above mentioned E.T. games (which originally would not sell) were eventually sold on eBay for a total of around $108,000

Credit to The Box Car Bar for complying these fun facts.