Video Game Myths: Fact or Fiction?
01-29-08, 03:15 PM
#1
DVD Talk Special Edition
Thread Starter
Video Game Myths: Fact or Fiction?
Last edited by Gideon68; 01-29-08 at 03:20 PM.
01-29-08, 03:44 PM
#2
Video Game Myths: Fact or Fiction?
Nintendo's classic arcade game Donkey Kong was actually a mistranslation. It should have been called Monkey Kong.
We're the first to admit that the 'Donkey' in Donkey Kong is one of the more mystifying title choices in video game history (right behind the 'Final' in Final Fantasy), but it was just that - a choice, not a mistranslation.
It was also the brainchild of legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who was handed the reigns of this, his very first video game, back in 1981.Based loosely on the comic strip Popeye, Donkey Kong erupted into the public consciousness and skyrocketed to worldwide fame. As Nintendo's first bona fide hit in North America, it also launched the career of carpenter-turned-plumber Mario.
So what about that oddball name? For years, the popular theory was that something funny happened on the way to production - a blurred fax, perhaps - and those wacky Japanese misprinted the word "Monkey" as "Donkey." Inexplicably, this was accepted as fact by most gamers until Miyamoto himself cleared the air by insisting that "donkey" was intentional all along. According to the designer, the word was simply meant to indicate stubborn stupidity, while "kong" was just a doff of the cap to the great cinematic ape. Put the two together and you've got a 'stupid ape,' a landmark video game, and a myth debunked.
Fact or Fiction? Fiction!
Saddam Hussein purchased thousands of Playstation 2s to build military supercomputers.
Seven years before The Great Nintendo Wii Drought of 2007 (and, most likely, 2008), gamers faced similar troubles trying to locate units of Sony's unstoppable Playstation 2.
Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, however, was able to scoop up a whopping 4,000 PS2s without so much as a pre-order. And according to a report on the website worldnetdaily.com, the dictator wasn't just planning an all-night LAN party: he was securing PS2s in an effort to build a nefarious military supercomputer, since U.S. customs doesn't consider a 'toy' to be a potential military threat.
Sound ridiculous? It should. For starters, claims by an anonymous military insider regarding the sheer processing potency of the PS2 were at best vastly overstated and at worst, flat out untrue. Legitimate desktop PCs with far more processing power were as common in Iraq as anywhere else in the world in the year 2000; why cobble together a crippled network using thousands of networked Playstations when you could simply plug into a few Dells instead? In fact, no sooner had the article hit internet gossip channels than government officials in the U.K. thoroughly debunked the claim.
Guess Saddam just wanted to play some Ridge Racer.
Fact or Fiction? Fiction!
Sony first developed the Playstation for Nintendo.
With the Wii selling like Krispy Kreme hotcakes and the DS thoroughly thrashing the PSP, Nintendo can't seem to do anything wrong these days. Or perhaps they're just making up for the single biggest whoopsie in the history of the console wars.
This dirty little secret dates back to the late 1980s. At the time, Nintendo was considering introducing CD-ROM technology as an add-on to their forthcoming Super Nintendo system. Initially they inked a deal with Sony, but just before announcing the partnership at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1989, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi backed out due to poor contract wording that would have handed far too much control over the burgeoning format to Sony. Talks quickly fell apart, and eventually Sony decided to move forward with their technology by incorporating it into a Sony-branded machine. Injunctions by Nintendo were dismissed by the courts, clearing the path for Sony to start working on the newly dubbed Sony Playstation.
Interestingly, as late as 1993 Sony and Nintendo actually agreed to terms that would have provided a SNES cartridge port in every Playstation console, although those plans would soon derail when Sony decided to move forward solely with the CD format. It proved to be a brilliant decision: the Playstation quickly became the best-selling console of its era, while Nintendo bet on the wrong horse by releasing the cartridge-based Nintendo 64, paving the way for two full generations of Sony dominance.
Fact or Fiction? Fact!
Million of Atari games are buried in the New Mexico desert.
Anyone who experienced the mind-cramping pain of attempting to play E.T. for the Atari 2600 knows that one of two things should happen to any copy of that game: it should be burned or buried. As it turns out, Atari opted for the latter...in a big way.
In early 1983, things could not have been going worse for Atari. The one-time king of the home video game consoles had suddenly found itself in enormous debt after a series of unfortunate events: competing systems from Coleco and Mattel were stealing market share, the new Atari 5200 was panned for being unwieldy, and low sales of its troubled Pac-Man port and its legendarily bad tie-in to Steven Spielberg's smash hit E.T. gave the software giant a black eye. As consumer interest waned, retailers returned boatloads of unused stock to an Atari warehouse in El Paso.
And by boatloads, we mean millions of games. So what does an ailing company do with roughly 10 million cartridges it can't sell to a disinterested customer base? How about poke around New Mexico for a suitable dumping ground and bury the problem altogether?
That's precisely what happened. According to the Alamogordo Daily News and confirmed by the New York Times, a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico provided the answer to Atari's cartridge conundrum. To be safe, they steamrolled the mound of product flat and, for good measure, covered the resulting game pancake in concrete.
Fact or Fiction? Fact!
In the early 80's, the military released a subversive arcade game that caused its players to suffer terrible nightmares, nausea and amnesia.
It's perhaps the most alluring of all video game urban legends: unsuspecting kids play a cutting-edge game only to discover that it's actually messing with their minds, rearranging bits and pieces in some hush-hush government-funded experiment. Well, sorry, conspiracy theorists - this myth has more holes in it than that UFO they shot down at Area 51 back in the '50s.
Purportedly released to a select few arcades in Portland, Oregon in 1981, Polybius was unlike any game kids had seen before. Masquerading as a vector-based shooter akin to Tempest, Polybius was far more dastardly. Reports cropped up that undercover government officials - we assume they were wearing black suits and went by the names "J" and "K" - were routinely collecting some form of data from the machines. Meanwhile, those who spent hours playing Polybius were mysteriously afflicted with odd sleep patterns, frightening visions and, handily enough, amnesia.
Sounds sexy, right? Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the game ever existed, no less turned its users into babbling lunatics. No machines have ever been found and no ROMS have ever been produced. At best, Polybius could have been an unsuccessful game prototype, an urban legend that grew out of the early days of gaming in which some users would suffer vertigo or even seizures due to sensitivity to certain light patterns.
Still, Polybius has enjoyed cult-like status as a throwback to a more technologically paranoid era. It was even immortalized by The Simpsons, who included it in an arcade shot during the episode 'Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em." Not bad for a good hoax.
Fact or Fiction? (Science) Fiction!
A man died by playing video games nonstop.
Technically speaking, video game addiction is not an official mental disorder, having been denied inclusion in the DSM by the American Psychiatric Association pending more study. But tell that to the families of gamers who, believe it or not, gave their real-world lives just to spend more time in a virtual one.
There have been numerous accounts of compulsive gaming having tragic consequences, predominantly in Asian countries where cybercafes are open 24 hours a day. In August of 2005, a 28 year-old South Korean man died of heart failure at a cybercafe during a 50-hour gaming binge. Reportedly, the only time the individual left the machine was to visit the restroom, eat, or take a short nap. Known only by his family name of Lee, the troubled gamer had recently quit his job in order to spend more time playing.
That's hardly a new story. Three years prior in October of 2002, a 24 year-old South Korean man passed away from exhaustion following a stunning 86-hour marathon. It doesn't have to take that long for exhaustion to become fatal: only ten days later, a 27 year-old Taiwanese gamer died at another cybercafe after a mere 32-hour session. And as recently as September of 2007, a 30 year-old man fainted at a cybercafe in southern China after playing games for three straight days. Clearly, these cafes could use some sort of systematic power outage plan to help keep the patrons alive.
Fact or Fiction? Fact!
Nintendo's classic arcade game Donkey Kong was actually a mistranslation. It should have been called Monkey Kong.
We're the first to admit that the 'Donkey' in Donkey Kong is one of the more mystifying title choices in video game history (right behind the 'Final' in Final Fantasy), but it was just that - a choice, not a mistranslation.
It was also the brainchild of legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who was handed the reigns of this, his very first video game, back in 1981.Based loosely on the comic strip Popeye, Donkey Kong erupted into the public consciousness and skyrocketed to worldwide fame. As Nintendo's first bona fide hit in North America, it also launched the career of carpenter-turned-plumber Mario.
So what about that oddball name? For years, the popular theory was that something funny happened on the way to production - a blurred fax, perhaps - and those wacky Japanese misprinted the word "Monkey" as "Donkey." Inexplicably, this was accepted as fact by most gamers until Miyamoto himself cleared the air by insisting that "donkey" was intentional all along. According to the designer, the word was simply meant to indicate stubborn stupidity, while "kong" was just a doff of the cap to the great cinematic ape. Put the two together and you've got a 'stupid ape,' a landmark video game, and a myth debunked.
Fact or Fiction? Fiction!
Saddam Hussein purchased thousands of Playstation 2s to build military supercomputers.
Seven years before The Great Nintendo Wii Drought of 2007 (and, most likely, 2008), gamers faced similar troubles trying to locate units of Sony's unstoppable Playstation 2.
Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, however, was able to scoop up a whopping 4,000 PS2s without so much as a pre-order. And according to a report on the website worldnetdaily.com, the dictator wasn't just planning an all-night LAN party: he was securing PS2s in an effort to build a nefarious military supercomputer, since U.S. customs doesn't consider a 'toy' to be a potential military threat.
Sound ridiculous? It should. For starters, claims by an anonymous military insider regarding the sheer processing potency of the PS2 were at best vastly overstated and at worst, flat out untrue. Legitimate desktop PCs with far more processing power were as common in Iraq as anywhere else in the world in the year 2000; why cobble together a crippled network using thousands of networked Playstations when you could simply plug into a few Dells instead? In fact, no sooner had the article hit internet gossip channels than government officials in the U.K. thoroughly debunked the claim.
Guess Saddam just wanted to play some Ridge Racer.
Fact or Fiction? Fiction!
Sony first developed the Playstation for Nintendo.
With the Wii selling like Krispy Kreme hotcakes and the DS thoroughly thrashing the PSP, Nintendo can't seem to do anything wrong these days. Or perhaps they're just making up for the single biggest whoopsie in the history of the console wars.
This dirty little secret dates back to the late 1980s. At the time, Nintendo was considering introducing CD-ROM technology as an add-on to their forthcoming Super Nintendo system. Initially they inked a deal with Sony, but just before announcing the partnership at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1989, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi backed out due to poor contract wording that would have handed far too much control over the burgeoning format to Sony. Talks quickly fell apart, and eventually Sony decided to move forward with their technology by incorporating it into a Sony-branded machine. Injunctions by Nintendo were dismissed by the courts, clearing the path for Sony to start working on the newly dubbed Sony Playstation.
Interestingly, as late as 1993 Sony and Nintendo actually agreed to terms that would have provided a SNES cartridge port in every Playstation console, although those plans would soon derail when Sony decided to move forward solely with the CD format. It proved to be a brilliant decision: the Playstation quickly became the best-selling console of its era, while Nintendo bet on the wrong horse by releasing the cartridge-based Nintendo 64, paving the way for two full generations of Sony dominance.
Fact or Fiction? Fact!
Million of Atari games are buried in the New Mexico desert.
Anyone who experienced the mind-cramping pain of attempting to play E.T. for the Atari 2600 knows that one of two things should happen to any copy of that game: it should be burned or buried. As it turns out, Atari opted for the latter...in a big way.
In early 1983, things could not have been going worse for Atari. The one-time king of the home video game consoles had suddenly found itself in enormous debt after a series of unfortunate events: competing systems from Coleco and Mattel were stealing market share, the new Atari 5200 was panned for being unwieldy, and low sales of its troubled Pac-Man port and its legendarily bad tie-in to Steven Spielberg's smash hit E.T. gave the software giant a black eye. As consumer interest waned, retailers returned boatloads of unused stock to an Atari warehouse in El Paso.
And by boatloads, we mean millions of games. So what does an ailing company do with roughly 10 million cartridges it can't sell to a disinterested customer base? How about poke around New Mexico for a suitable dumping ground and bury the problem altogether?
That's precisely what happened. According to the Alamogordo Daily News and confirmed by the New York Times, a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico provided the answer to Atari's cartridge conundrum. To be safe, they steamrolled the mound of product flat and, for good measure, covered the resulting game pancake in concrete.
Fact or Fiction? Fact!
In the early 80's, the military released a subversive arcade game that caused its players to suffer terrible nightmares, nausea and amnesia.
It's perhaps the most alluring of all video game urban legends: unsuspecting kids play a cutting-edge game only to discover that it's actually messing with their minds, rearranging bits and pieces in some hush-hush government-funded experiment. Well, sorry, conspiracy theorists - this myth has more holes in it than that UFO they shot down at Area 51 back in the '50s.
Purportedly released to a select few arcades in Portland, Oregon in 1981, Polybius was unlike any game kids had seen before. Masquerading as a vector-based shooter akin to Tempest, Polybius was far more dastardly. Reports cropped up that undercover government officials - we assume they were wearing black suits and went by the names "J" and "K" - were routinely collecting some form of data from the machines. Meanwhile, those who spent hours playing Polybius were mysteriously afflicted with odd sleep patterns, frightening visions and, handily enough, amnesia.
Sounds sexy, right? Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the game ever existed, no less turned its users into babbling lunatics. No machines have ever been found and no ROMS have ever been produced. At best, Polybius could have been an unsuccessful game prototype, an urban legend that grew out of the early days of gaming in which some users would suffer vertigo or even seizures due to sensitivity to certain light patterns.
Still, Polybius has enjoyed cult-like status as a throwback to a more technologically paranoid era. It was even immortalized by The Simpsons, who included it in an arcade shot during the episode 'Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em." Not bad for a good hoax.
Fact or Fiction? (Science) Fiction!
A man died by playing video games nonstop.
Technically speaking, video game addiction is not an official mental disorder, having been denied inclusion in the DSM by the American Psychiatric Association pending more study. But tell that to the families of gamers who, believe it or not, gave their real-world lives just to spend more time in a virtual one.
There have been numerous accounts of compulsive gaming having tragic consequences, predominantly in Asian countries where cybercafes are open 24 hours a day. In August of 2005, a 28 year-old South Korean man died of heart failure at a cybercafe during a 50-hour gaming binge. Reportedly, the only time the individual left the machine was to visit the restroom, eat, or take a short nap. Known only by his family name of Lee, the troubled gamer had recently quit his job in order to spend more time playing.
That's hardly a new story. Three years prior in October of 2002, a 24 year-old South Korean man passed away from exhaustion following a stunning 86-hour marathon. It doesn't have to take that long for exhaustion to become fatal: only ten days later, a 27 year-old Taiwanese gamer died at another cybercafe after a mere 32-hour session. And as recently as September of 2007, a 30 year-old man fainted at a cybercafe in southern China after playing games for three straight days. Clearly, these cafes could use some sort of systematic power outage plan to help keep the patrons alive.
Fact or Fiction? Fact!
01-29-08, 10:46 PM
#3
DVD Talk Limited Edition
The last bit of news is disturbing...
I've heard so many stories about the landfill that I just turned it into myth over time.
I've heard so many stories about the landfill that I just turned it into myth over time.
