5 gaming facts you need to know

The world of gaming has some deep dark secrets, and its time that our favourite pastime’s hidden side comes to light.

Here are 5 gaming facts that you need to know:

Angry Birds meet an epidemic

While mobile game maker Rovio was developing Angry Birds, the team needed an enemy for the birds to blow up.

The swine flu pandemic gave the developers the idea to use pigs as enemies, and therefore created the evil pigs (with the sickly green colour) to represent the idea.

Angry Birds

Nintendo’s pint-sized record-breaker

In 1999, Nintendo release the GameBoy Camera, which could take 256×224 (down scaled to half resolution on the unit with anti-aliasing), black & white digital images using the 4-color palette of the Game Boy system.

At the time, the GameBoy Camera had the official Guinness World Record for being the smallest digital camera in the world.

Gameboy camera

Mel? Mel? Meeeeeelll!

In any Metal Gear game, you’re going to have a lot of codec conversations. And for those of you who’ve played 1992’s Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, you probably stared at the character images for quite some time, thinking they look familiar.

Well, they should, because they were all copied from various film stars and influential icons, such as Mel Gibson for Snake and Sean Connery for Big Boss.

Big Boss / Sean Connery

Hitman: Silent Ass-assin

While Square Enix were prepping to show off Hitman: Absolution, the publisher first released a teaser trailer that showed a barcode, which revealed the date of the release, along with the number “47”, obviously referring to series’ protagonist Agent 47.

One Reddit user inverted the colours on the barcode (so that the iPhone’s RedLaser app could read it) and scanned the barcode.

What it led to was an Amazon product page for a “Drawstring Double Dong D**do Bag,” – a bag specifically designed for sex toys.

Was this a weird joke by Square Enix, or some awkward mistake?

Hitman Barcode error

I don’t remember

While the first Super Mario Bros. on the NES is one of the most acclaimed and classic games in gaming history, there is one thing people don’t know about it – its release date.

The game was released in Japan on 13 September 1985, and made its way to North America shortly after, but no one knows the actual release date.