You won't believe some of these Gaming facts! | Video Game Facts#

Hello friends Tim here again from Super Mayhem and boy howdy to we have a hot dang show for you today!

Not only do you get my usual awesomeness but today you get that by at least 4 times betterness, as today the myth, the legend, the all-around nice guy, Danger Dolan comes to the Mayhem…again!

That’s right Tim, sometimes I need to just say fudge it to all of it and jump on the dang Mayhem train!

Ah the Mayhem train, I literally rode that from that from Phuket to Bangkok Thailand once, but that’s a story for another time.

Today the two of us will be delivering you some crazy, ridiculous and silly video game facts and stories. So sit back, relax, smash that subscribe button, give us a thumbs up too if you can and away we go!

Ok I firstly have to nerd about some of the classic Mario stories. Like the fact that Mario wouldn’t even exist if Nintendo could get the rights to Popeye. That’s right, Mario was originally meant to be Popeye, Bowser would be Bluto and Peach Olive Oyl. What the hell? The only reason the protagonist was named Mario was because the company’s warehouse landlord at the time had that name!

Another classic example are Chain Chomps. These guys were inspired by Miyamoto being chased by a dog when he was a kid! I guess it takes some trauma sometimes to create such magical things, or maybe that’s just being too profound over a situation where a kid is running for his life away from an angry dog.

Ah that poor guy, all he wanted to do was go home and create Mario. Or maybe he was actually exploring caves and stuff. You know, that’s actually one of the reasons he created the original Legend of Zelda game. During the development of the Legend of Zelda, Shigeru Miyamoto was inspired by a game for the Atari 2600 called Adventure, which was one of the first graphic based adventure games in town. At one point the Legend of Zelda was even simply called “Adventure” which would have been pretty confusing if they had have stuck with the name.

The principal inspiration for the Legend of Zelda series actually comes from Shigeru’s explorations as a young boy. When he was a child he would venture into forests and even caves with the aid of a lantern. This sense of childhood adventure and mystery strongly influenced the game design. Miyamoto has even referred to the creation of the Zelda series as an attempt to bring to life a “miniature garden that they(gamers) can put inside their drawer.” Pretty magical stuff!

Yeah but in the original maps, dungeon 3 looks like a swastika!

Before you get too excited the swastika symbol Is actually just an ancient geometrical figure. It is a symbol of divinity and spirituality in some Eastern religions and Eurasian cultures.

You and your mastery of facts!

Getting back to Mario for a sec, did you know that the ghost Boo was originally named Boo Diddley! Interestingly these characters were actually based off the game designer Takashi Tezuka’s wife, who apparently would normally be quite shy and timid around people but also had an explosive temper, especially when Tezuka spent too much time at work! Mr. Miyamoto gave this quote during an interview with Nintendo Power Magazine when talking about the introduction of Boo Diddleys: “Mr. Tezuka got an idea about putting his wife in the game. His wife is very quiet normally, but one day she exploded, maddened by all the time he spent at work. In the game, there is now a character who shrinks when Mario looks at it, but when Mario turns away, it will grow large and menacing.” I guess it’s at least nice that he wanted to add his wife to the game though!

Speaking of Nintendo, didn’t they lose a court case because kids were getting blisters from too much gaming or something?

Haha, that’s right, those good old Mario Party games were the cause where kids would rotate the joystick with the palm of their hand and get a blister. Nintendo even issued some Nintendo gloves to solve the problem!

Well at least they tried to address the problem I guess. No one want’s Nintendo hand. Speaking of solving medical problems, back in 2005 when WoW released a new character called Hakkar they stumbled across an interesting medical dilemma. You see, Hakkar controlled a dungeon and also cast a highly contagious disease on anyone that fought him. Surprisingly this disease started to run rampant on the games servers where many players died because of it. The most interesting bit of this story however is that now real-world epidemiologists are looking into this situation actually occurring. Researches are taking in information about what helped or inhibited the spread of the in game disease and are working on models that will limit the actual spread of real world diseases. Take that Nintendo glove!

Hey Man, no glove, no love! But that is pretty awesome!

Video games do have a weird way of helping people out. I heard a story about one with “Words with friends”, you remember that word game that took the world by storm for like a month. Anyway, an Australian woman had a friendship with another lady from Missouri through the game’s chatting system. One day the Aussie lady told her friend that her husband wasn’t feeling well and described his symptoms. Luckily the Missouri woman’s husband was a doctor and was able to diagnose the symptoms and told him to go to hospital immediately. Good thing he did too because the quacks discovered a 99 percent blockage near his heart. The guy nearly freaking died but was saved by “Words with Friends”!

Yikes, it’s good to share word with friends then I guess. Or play video games in general really! Did you know there is proof that Video games train people to make correct decisions faster than average people? It even helps with driving, multitasking and navigating around town because video games help you develop a heightened sensitivity to what’s going on around you.

Some studies have even shown that surgeons who game on the reg actually make 37% fewer errors and manage to complete tasks 27% faster than doctors that don’t play games!

That’s pretty cool! It’s definitely a good reason to keep on gaming whether you are a surgeon or not. I have heard similar things like the DS helping people with lazy eyes even. Is there anything Video games can’t do? I remember still when people thought video gaming was the spawn of the devil or something, man I’m getting old.

Well, you are pretty old, but even before video games were being blamed for the actions of Children it already started back in 1979 and again in 1990 when kids were playing Dungeons and Dragons. Apparently that was a bad thing too! What is it with people thinking using your imagination and co-ordination skills is a negative thing?

It’s probably stories like the one back in 2011 where some nut job 46 year old man from Plymouth England found and attacked a 13-year-old kid just because he owned him too many times in COD! But even then that is the adult being the aggressor so who knows.

Yeah you do hear those sorts of odd stories where people go nuts about gaming or game themselves to death or something but I’m pretty sure the good outweighs the bad, after all there was intense violence long before Mario jumped on that first Goomba. Plus, what are you going to do? Be like South Korea and make it illegal for children under 16 to play video games after midnight?

Yeah that’s taking it a bit too far, especially when you look at the physical and financial benefits even of gaming. For example in 2008 when Guitar Hero: Aerosmith was released, not only did it sell over 3 million copies worldwide in 2 years but also following the release of the game the sales of the band’s music went up as far as 40%! Activision’s CEO even went on the record, possibly jokingly, that the Aerosmith Guitar hero game actually brought in more revenue than any of the band’s albums ever!

Now your’re playing with Power! As Nintendo would say anyway. And how popular are Aerosmith anyway? “I don’t want to miss a thing…” talk about FOMO (fear of missing out). Think about the best-selling game ever made too, Tetris. That bad boy has sold over 170 million copies in various forms! It just shows you, games don’t have to have too many bells and whistles to be peak performers. Just a nice solid game play loop can have you hooked for hours and also rake in some seriously big bucks for developers!

That kind of gets me thinking about the most expensive game to actually make as I don’t think Tetris would have been the most difficult thing to develop, even if it’s a great game. According to good old Wikipedia the title of most expensive game to produce goes to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 back in 2009! I wouldn’t have guessed that one, but with its budget of $50million to develop and insane $200million to market I can see why Activision really broke the bank with that one. It’s also a game I have never played actually!

It’s amazing what people will do to promote their games! In fact Rockstar Games even paid to receive negative press for their game Grand Theft Auto. So it’s quite interesting how people market their products!

Speaking of promotion we should probably wrap this spiel up! Thank you so much Danger Dolan for joining me in these random facts and things! If you haven’t already make sure you check out and subscribe to Danger Dolan’s channels, I’ll whack the links in the description below for you to check out!

We also just did a colab together on his channel too title: “Countries where Video Games were banned for unexpected reasons” check it out now!

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