Retro Facts ⭐

The original Final Fantasy credited one person for its programming: Nasir Gebelli. One programmer, helping bring an entire RPG to the Famicom, while still needing its towns and battle screens explained to him. When Square was building the original Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi had to walk its programmer through conventions that RPG players barely think about. There was an overworld. There were towns. And when a fight started, the game would cut… Read more

The Atari 7800 source code for Asteroids and Centipede ended up in a dumpster in 1996. Actual disks, behind the company's Sunnyvale building, waiting to disappear with the trash. The reason we can still look through some of those files is that someone went in after them at 3 a.m. There are glamorous ways to spend a night in the video-game business. Recovering Atari ST diskettes from a filthy dumpster probably doesn't… Read more

Sonic CD's first boss has a name that looks as though somebody forgot to replace a part number: EGG-HVC-001. Then you look up Nintendo's original Famicom and find its model number: HVC-001. Oh, Sega. Even the paperwork? That's a wonderfully petty little discovery for anyone who remembers choosing sides in the console wars. You could argue about Mario and Sonic all afternoon, then boot up Sonic CD and unknowingly spend your first… Read more

Courteney Cox and David Arquette arrived at Los Angeles Center Studios on October 16, 2008, for the Fallout 3 launch party. The arrival photographs are still in WireImage's archive. Bethesda was celebrating its trip into the Capital Wasteland with a guest list that looked considerably more glamorous than the people you'd meet outside Megaton. There was another connection, too, at least according to Bethesda's own reported trivia: Cox had briefly worked there… Read more

Dr. Eggman is a feminist. That's the assessment of the North American Sonic Heroes manual, which introduces him as “a romanticist, a feminist, and a self-professed gentleman.” Quite a character reference for a man whose usual response to a setback is to build a larger robot. The mustache says supervillain. The biography says he would like a moment to discuss how unfairly the mustache has been portrayed. The actual English biography from… Read more

Surgeons used Super Monkey Ball 2 as a warm-up before practicing laparoscopic surgery. Yes, the one with the bananas, the transparent balls and the alarming number of places to fall off. Dr. James “Butch” Rosser helped investigate whether playing selected games could get surgeons ready for delicate training tasks. The story reached gaming news in 2013 through reports about Rosser at Florida Hospital Celebration Health. Health News Florida covered it that October,… Read more

Yoshi has a name that sounds as though it should come with a museum plaque: T. Yoshisaur Munchakoopas. That's how a 1993 Nintendo character guide introduces Mario's green friend. Suddenly, keeping it to “Yoshi” seems like a favor he was doing everyone. In Super Mario World, you don't need much of an introduction. An egg cracks open, out pops your new ride, and before long he's swallowing enemies and making an awkward… Read more

Atari had wireless controllers planned in 1981. The Atari 2700 would have let you play your VCS cartridges without a cord running from your hand to the television. There were prototypes, an advertisement and a rather handsome new console. What there wasn't, in the end, was a release. Picture a round of Combat: two tanks, two players and someone trying to land a shot around the edge of a wall. The 2700's… Read more

After a day of climbing on Everest, there could still be hours to fill before morning. Neal Mueller and Chris Grubb packed an answer to that problem in 2005: Nintendo DS systems. They could play against each other wirelessly, draw pictures and send messages while waiting for the next day's work. The little handhelds turned out to be rather better expedition companions than their plastic shells might suggest. A contemporary report in… Read more

Fallout’s Vault Boy was directly inspired by Mr. Monopoly, the smiling board-game mascot also known as Rich Uncle Pennybags. Once you put Mr. Monopoly beside Vault Boy, the family resemblance is hard to miss. One wants you buying property. The other seems perfectly relaxed about what happened to the property after the bombs fell. But Leonard Boyarsky wasn't simply looking for a mascot. He was trying to make Fallout's skills easier to… Read more

Before Solid Snake was sneaking around Shadow Moses, Kurt Russell had already given the movies a Snake of their own. In 1981's Escape from New York, Snake Plissken walks into a nightmare wearing an eyepatch and looking thoroughly unimpressed. Hideo Kojima was watching. That influence eventually reached Metal Gear. And years later, John Carpenter said the people who shared ownership of his film wanted to go after Metal Gear Solid. He discouraged… Read more

Samus could handle space pirates, lava and a planet about to explode. Nintendo's three-pronged controller was apparently a different sort of problem. Yoshio Sakamoto, the director of Super Metroid, said he couldn't picture how to move her with it. Nintendo 64 went through its life without a new Metroid adventure. Anyone who remembers picking up that pad for the first time will understand the pause. Three grips. Two hands. A thumbstick in… Read more

Crash washes up on the beach, gets his bearings, and finds his first crates waiting a few steps away. That's the opening most players know. But the original Crash Bandicoot could have greeted you with something much closer to a Saturday-morning cartoon. Universal had hand-drawn animation made during development, with an introduction and ending intended for the game. The footage exists. It just never made it onto the adventure players bought. Universal’s… Read more

Crash Bandicoot has a fossil named after him. And the name isn't some lab nickname that stuck: the extinct animal is officially Crash bandicoot. Somewhere between the crates and the boss fights, our orange idiot made it into scientific classification. The animal lived about 15 million years ago in what is now Australia. The PlayStation obviously arrived a little later. When researchers named the species in 2014, they borrowed Crash's name for… Read more

Before Jill Valentine had Nemesis chasing her through Raccoon City, Resident Evil 3 was supposed to take place on a luxury cruise ship. HUNK would be the star, trying to bring back a sample of the G-Virus. Capcom was planning to put the next numbered Resident Evil on a boat. It’s a pretty good place for something to go horribly wrong. In a mansion, you can at least dream about reaching the… Read more

The Cole Train has survived plenty of trouble in Gears of War. Add a likeness lawsuit to the list. In 2017, former football player and wrestler Lenwood “Hard Rock” Hamilton sued Epic Games and others, claiming Augustus Cole borrowed his appearance, voice and persona without permission. Hamilton thought the resemblance was obvious. The courts weren’t persuaded that it entitled him to stop the character. Cole kept his armour, his attitude and his… Read more

Before Epona carried Link across Hyrule, Nintendo had talked about giving Mario a horse in Super Mario 64. Picture that for a moment: the plumber, the cap, the overalls, and a horse waiting outside Peach’s castle. Yoshi would have had questions. It never happened. But Yoshiaki Koizumi hadn’t lost interest in the idea, and when he worked on Ocarina of Time, he was determined to make horse riding happen there. Mario went… Read more

Mario’s first job had nothing to do with pipes. When he appeared in Donkey Kong in 1981, he was a carpenter. The game took place on a construction site, so Shigeru Miyamoto gave its little hero a job that fitted the surroundings. The plumber everyone knows came later. There’s a nice reminder in an old Donkey Kong sticker card: underneath Mario, it says “The Brave Carpenter.” He’s got the cap, moustache and… Read more

Some people do their best thinking in the bath. While working on the original Donkey Kong in the early 1980s, Shigeru Miyamoto had a particularly convenient one: Nintendo’s company bath. Its hot water came from the boiler used by the playing-card factory. That’s quite a long way from an arcade cabinet, but apparently a good place to get your thoughts in order. He was staying in Nintendo’s company housing and bathing at… Read more

Snake Eater asks you to worry about camouflage, stamina and whatever might be hiding in the grass. Apparently, somebody also had to worry about how Snake looked walking away. Even his backside got some attention during development. Snake got that cake! WIRED’s November 2004 profile described Kojima making sure Snake had a “nice butt” for the rear view. Kojima quickly added: “I’m married, with a son.” Then came the instruction: “Put that… Read more

In the 1990s, Joe Rogan got so hooked on Quake that a computer upgrade wasn’t enough. He had a T1 line installed at home to improve his connection. Recalling it with Kevin Rose in April 2016, Rogan said it had been worth the expense. Rose remembered those lines costing around $10,000 a month. That’s a lot of money to put between yourself and a bad ping. But if you played online back… Read more

Arnold Schwarzenegger could have been Mario’s movie villain. He was approached to play King Koopa in the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film, but passed. Dennis Hopper got the part instead, leaving us with a casting what-if that’s almost as strange as the finished movie. Try picturing Arnold in Dinohattan for a moment. This was already a Mario adaptation with a human-looking reptilian ruler, so a different leading villain could have taken it… Read more

Link never needed a fedora, but Indiana Jones helped get his adventure started. Shigeru Miyamoto wanted some of that excitement in a game: the ruins, the danger and the feeling that something worth finding was waiting inside. Years later, he named the films when Nintendo asked him about the beginnings of The Legend of Zelda. Once you know that, it’s hard not to think about it when you enter a dungeon. There’s… Read more

David Hayter says a joke about Snake’s “Shriveled Snake” almost slipped into Metal Gear Solid 4. The cast had been messing around during recording. Someone caught the take before release, sparing players a very unexpected moment with Naomi Hunter. It’s an easy blooper to remember. Naomi is supposed to be worried about Snake’s health. In this take, she was apparently worried about something rather more specific. “So… shriveled…” In a 2012 interview,… Read more

Before there was a plumber clearing pipes, there was a young designer trying to get someone to pay him to make interesting things. Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to create toys. Nintendo looked like a place where that ambition might fit, except for an inconvenient detail: it was not hiring designers. The familiar internet version turns this into a neat rejection story. Nintendo supposedly passed on the man who would create Mario, then somehow… Read more