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Photo: Shadowgate, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.Step into the pixelated world of gaming history! Test your knowledge on classic consoles, legendary characters, and the surprising real-world stories behind your favorite games.
Tutorial Newcomer 0–4 · Seasoned Gamer 5–8 · Ultimate Speedrunner 9–10
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Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history, with more than 300 million copies sold. Grand Theft Auto V comes second with roughly 200 million. Minecraft's simple building fun and its availability on almost every device helped it reach the top.
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Software engineer Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris while working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Because of the Soviet system, the rights to the game belonged to the state for years before Pajitnov finally started receiving royalties in the late 1990s.
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Pac-Man was released in Japan as "Puck Man", referring to the Japanese phrase "paku-paku" which describes gobbling food. It was renamed for North America because publishers feared vandals would alter the "P" to an "F" on the arcade cabinets.
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Before finding his true calling as a plumber in the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario was actually a carpenter. This made perfect sense at the time, given that the original Donkey Kong game took place on a giant, unfinished wooden construction site.
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The British developers originally named their heroine Laura Cruz to give her a South American flair. They changed it to Lara Croft after flipping through a Derby telephone directory to find a name that sounded more British and accessible to English speakers.
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The Magnavox Odyssey, designed by Ralph Baer, was the first console families could plug into their televisions. It used simple plastic overlays on the TV screen to create colorful graphics, since the machine itself could only project basic white blocks.
Photo: Evan-Amos, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.
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While most players associate the code with Contra, it was actually created for the NES port of Gradius. The developer found the spaceship shooter too difficult to playtest, so he programmed the sequence to grant his ship a full set of power-ups.
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Minecraft creator Markus Persson was trying to model a pig but accidentally swapped the height and length of the body. Instead of deleting the strange, tall creature, he gave it a green texture and explosive behavior, creating the game's most famous enemy.
Photo: Xbox México, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.
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For decades, people believed Space Invaders was so popular it caused a 100-yen coin shortage in Japan. In reality, coin production was just lower that year, and the myth became a great marketing tool. The game was still a massive hit that revolutionized arcades.
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Sony originally partnered with Nintendo to create a CD-ROM drive add-on for the Super Nintendo. After Nintendo publicly backed out of the deal at a trade show, Sony's furious executives decided to develop their own console, which became the massively successful PlayStation.
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