Video Game Trivia: 20 Facts for Gamers

Gaming rounds are becoming a quiz-night staple. Whether you grew up on arcade cabinets or modern consoles, the history of video games is full of surprising origins, hidden secrets and record-breaking numbers. These 20 facts will help you rack up points.

Arcade Classics

1. Pong (1972) was Atari's first big hit and one of the first commercially successful video games. Earlier experiments, like Tennis for Two in 1958, were never sold.
2. Pac-Man (1980) was designed by Toru Iwatani to appeal to a wider audience at a time when most arcade games were about shooting. The shape was reportedly inspired by a pizza with a slice missing.
3. The four Pac-Man ghosts are Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde — and each one has its own way of chasing you.
4. Space Invaders (1978) was created by Tomohiro Nishikado for Taito and became a cultural phenomenon in Japan and around the world.
5. Tetris was created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a software engineer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Its worldwide success came when it was bundled with Nintendo's Game Boy in 1989.

Famous Characters

6. Mario first appeared as "Jumpman" in Donkey Kong (1981), and he was a carpenter before he became a plumber.
7. Mario's moustache and cap were a technical choice. With so few pixels available, a moustache was easier to draw than a mouth, and a cap avoided animating hair.
8. Sonic the Hedgehog was created by Sega in 1991 as a fast, cool mascot to rival Nintendo's Mario.
9. Lara Croft of Tomb Raider (1996) became one of the first globally recognised female game protagonists.
10. In The Legend of Zelda, you play as Link — Zelda is the princess. It is one of the most common gaming mix-ups.
11. Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri was inspired by his childhood hobby of collecting insects. Pokémon is often ranked as the highest-grossing media franchise in the world.

Records, Consoles and Companies

12. Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto, originally making hanafuda playing cards — long before video games existed.
13. Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, with sales reported at over 300 million copies.
14. Grand Theft Auto V earned around $1 billion in its first three days in 2013, setting records as one of the fastest-selling entertainment products ever.
15. The video game industry is commonly reported to earn more each year than the film and music industries combined.
16. The PlayStation 2 is among the best-selling home consoles ever, with sales of more than 150 million units.

Secrets and Firsts

17. The first famous "Easter egg" was hidden in Atari's Adventure (1980). Programmer Warren Robinett secretly put his name in a hidden room because Atari did not credit its developers.
18. The Konami Code — Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A — was created by Kazuhisa Hashimoto to make Gradius easier to test. It became a pop-culture legend.
19. Atari buried thousands of unsold cartridges, including copies of the poorly received E.T. game, in a New Mexico landfill in 1983. They were dug up in 2014.
20. One of the first video game tournaments took place at Stanford University in 1972, playing Spacewar!. The prize was a year's subscription to Rolling Stone magazine.

How Gaming Questions Are Asked

• Character to game — Master Chief (Halo), Kratos (God of War), Samus Aran (Metroid).
• Company to console — Nintendo (Switch, Game Boy), Sony (PlayStation), Microsoft (Xbox), Sega (Mega Drive / Genesis).
• Creators — Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario, Zelda), Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear), Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris).
• Firsts and records — the oldest games, the best-sellers and the record-breaking launches.

Level Up Your Knowledge

Gaming history is easiest to learn in eras: the arcade age of the 1970s and early 80s, the home console wars of the late 80s and 90s, the arrival of 3D and online play, and the mobile era. Place each fact in its era and the timeline starts to make sense.

Learn a handful of these and the gaming round becomes easy points. Ready to level up? Jump into the free Video Games quiz and see how high you can score.