Did You Know? 14 Video Game Facts With Real History

Video game history is unusually well documented and unusually badly remembered. Because so much of it happened inside companies that did not expect to be studied, the stories that survive are often the ones repeated in interviews, and a fair number of them are wrong. The facts below are the ones with a solid paper trail.

Almost everything people find charming about early games was a constraint. Sprites were small because memory was small. Backgrounds repeated because tiles had to be reused. Colour palettes were narrow because the hardware could only address a few colours at a time, which is why so many early games share the same handful of hues.

Several defining mechanics in games are accidents that testers enjoyed too much to remove. Techniques discovered by players in fighting games have been formalised into official systems in later entries. Movement exploits found in first-person shooters became expected skills in competitive play, and sequels were designed around them rather than patching them out.

The North American games market collapsed in 1983, and the usual explanation blames one bad film adaptation. The real cause was a flood of low-quality cartridges from publishers with no quality control, sold at the same price as good ones, in a market where buyers could not tell the difference before purchase. Retailers were left with unsellable stock and stopped ordering. Nintendo's later insistence on licensing and approval seals was a direct response.

Some of the most successful titles in the medium were rescued from cancellation. Donkey Kong was designed to give Nintendo something to install in unsold arcade cabinets. Several long-running franchises started as internal experiments with no marketing support, and were greenlit only because a small team kept working on them.

Arcade games could not save, so they were designed around short sessions and escalating difficulty. Battery-backed cartridges and memory cards made long narratives viable, which is why role-playing games expanded so dramatically once saving became standard. The shift from quarters to a single purchase price also removed the incentive to make games punishingly hard.

A significant share of games from the first few decades exist only on physical media that degrades, or on servers that have been switched off. Digital-only releases with online requirements can become unplayable when a service closes. Museums, archives and hobbyist projects now do most of the preservation work, often without the cooperation of rights holders.

Test yourself on the hardware side with our console history quiz, or take the Nintendo quiz for the company that shaped most of this.