| 1. | The play area of GTA: San Andreas is roughly 17 square miles. That’s about five times the size of Liberty City and four times the size of Vice City. |
| 2. | Cancelled Megadrive 32X game Ratchet & Bolt boasted a boss character that was 30 screens tall, and packed some 33 weapons. |
| 3. | God Hand’s Chihuahua races feature a dog called Mikami’s Head, a reference to the Resi creator’s claim that he’d rather lose his head than see Resident Evil 4 converted to PS2. |
| 4. | The maximum achievable score possible in a game of Pac-Man is 3,333,360 points. |
| 5. | Unreleased titles in the Oddworld series include The Hand of Odd, Squeek’s Oddysee and SligStorm. |
| 6. | Sega’s Space Channel 5 had a lawsuit brought against it by Lady Miss Kier, once a member of Deee-Lite, over similarities between her and lead character Ulala. She lost. |
| 7. | The first ever product released by Sony was a rice cooker. |
| 8. | PS2 robot action game Armored Core Nine Breaker has a training mode that features some 150 lessons. |
| 9. | The strangest videogame cameo? That would have to be Alien Hominid in an episode of The Sopranos. |
| 10. | Bizarre PS2 RPG Metal Saga (unreleased in Europe) features an ending sequence you can access from the introductory cut-scene. |
| 11. | In the original arcade Donkey Kong game, Mario was called Jumpman and he was a carpenter, not a plumber. |
| 12. | A six-digit number can be found on the Scorpion tanks in Halo, which refers to the birth date of the game’s art director, Marcus R. Lehto. His initials also appear on Master Chief’s boots. |
| 13. | The first ever videogame Easter egg is considered to be that found in Adventure for Atari 2600, where the player could access a room displaying the name of the game’s creator. |
| 14. | First-person shooter Doom 3 contains a reference, found on an in-game PDA, to Brit sitcom The Office. |
| 15. | Guy Cihi, who played James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2, is a high-powered venture capitalist who was unexpectedly cast while taking his daughter to audition for a different game. |
| 16. | There are 504 pieces of character equipment in Final Fantasy X on PS2. |
| 17. | Michael Jackson, in some form or other, has appeared in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Ready 2 Rumble Round 2, Space Channel 5 1 & 2, GTA: Vice City and, obviously, Moonwalker. |
| 18. | Back in 1995, Nintendo claimed that over 100 third-party titles were in the works for its subsequently stillborn Virtual Boy system. |
| 19. | Everybody Loves Katamari features a bonus level that involves collecting one million roses. It doesn’t have to be completed in one go, thankfully. |
| 20. | FIFA 2001 is the first and only game to date to use a "scratch and sniff" CD. The disc smelt of turf. |
| 21. | Fable: The Lost Chapters features Peter Molyneux’s gravestone. |
| 22. | Red Dead Revolver was originally being made by Capcom, before it sold the rights off to Rockstar. |
| 23. | US-only PS2 and Xbox boobfest The Guy Game (seriously, a DVD-style quiz based on ladies flashing their breasts) was banned when it transpired that one of the contestants was underage. |
| 24. | Halo 2 is the bestselling Xbox title ever, selling some eight million copies. It’s closely followed by five million for the original Halo. |
| 25. | Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind contains a secret talking crab tucked away on a small island, who’s also a trader. |
| 26. | The title of PS2 game ICO is a pun on the Japanese word for ‘let’s go’. |
| 27. | In the original Animal Crossing for Nintendo 64, unreleased outside of Japan, you have to input the time and date every time you boot up the game. |
| 28. | Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime used to be the senior director of national marketing at Pizza Hut. While there he launched the Bigfoot Pizza and The Big New Yorker. |
| 29. | Squat braniac Raz wasn’t always intended to be the lead character of Psychonauts. It had initially been an ostrich. |
| 30. | Before going on to create classic games like Outrun, Shenmue and Virtua Fighter for Sega, Yu Suzuki had considered becoming a dentist. |
| 31. | Tomb Raider's Lara Croft was originally called Laura Cruz. |
| 32. | Nintendo has never given Mario an official surname, even though ‘Mario Bros.’ suggests that it’s Mario Mario. |
| 33. | PS2 game Asterix & Oberix XXL 2 features over 100 parodies of videogame characters/titles, including Pac-Man, Tetris, Tomb Raider, Street Fighter and Super Mario Sunshine. |
| 34. | The development code name for Half-Life was Quiver, after the Arrowhead military base in Stephen King's novella The Mist. |
| 35. | The very first Dynasty Warriors game was actually a one-on-one beat ‘em up. |
| 36. | Gran Turismo 2 featured some 650 cars, a total that Gran Turismo 3 couldn’t pip. |
| 37. | According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average US game player is 33 years old, and has been gaming for 12 years. Not in one session, we’re hoping. |
| 38. | Former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi owns a majority share of the Seattle Marines baseball team, which is now managed by former Nintendo of America head, Howard Lincoln. |
| 39. | Keita Takahashi, director of the PS2 Katamari Damacy games, cites both Picasso and Little Shop of Horrors as part of their inspiration. |
| 40. | In the early stages of Final Fantasy XII’s development, there were plans to let a second player join in the game. |
| 41. | In 2001, a pair of art students created a version of Pong known as the PainStation, where losers could be inflicted with genuine whip, heat or electrical damage. |
| 42. | David Hayter, the voice of Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid games, wrote the screenplay for the movie X-Men. |
| 43. | Nearly half the disc space on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is taken up with dialogue. |
| 44. | When GTA first appeared (at E3 in 1997), attendees were told that to drive from one side of the game's city to the other would take players around three minutes. |
| 45. | In Halo 2’s Metropolis level of its single-player campaign, a giant football can be found tucked away on a rooftop. |
| 46. | Before settling on its nonsensical ‘Simlish’ dialogue for The Sims, the game’s creators experimented with languages such as Ukrainian, Navajo and Tagalog. |
| 47. | A total of 57 games have been released for Nokia’s N-Gage phone/handheld gaming hybrid. |
| 48. | The sprouting, titular Pikmin from the GameCube games were named after Shigeru Miyamoto’s dog. |
| 49. | Sega’s classic sunshine racer Outrun has appeared on 19 different formats. |
| 50. | A game of Animal Crossing on GameCube can last up to 29 real-time years, potentially. |