Game

Nintendo began in 1889 as a maker of Hanafuda cards. Founder Fusajiro Yamauchi handcrafted them from mulberry bark in Kyoto. When Japan banned gambling in 1882, rival makers fled to avoid yakuza ties, but he persisted and soon led it — over 80 years before any video game.

In January 2022, porn featuring Tifa Lockhart from Final Fantasy VII was played during an Italian Senate Zoom meeting. A senator had exposed the login credentials on Facebook, allowing an outsider to hijack the session and stream the video for about 30 seconds.

Two games that each guarantee a loss can become a winning strategy when played alternately. One game's result influences the other's conditions, allowing you to selectively hit favorable outcomes. This is known as 'Parrondo's paradox.'

Chess, Go, and gomoku are proven to have unbeatable strategies (Zermelo's theorem). The theorem proves they exist—not what they are. In gomoku, the winning strategy is known, so tournaments use modified rules.

When Venezuela's economy collapsed, playing RuneScape for about $100 a month became more profitable than a typical Venezuelan college graduate's salary. The game became a genuine source of income for many Venezuelans.

A mom who started playing RuneScape with her son in 2002 built an in-game business empire with recruiters, trainers, managers, and security. She held the #1 Runecrafting rank by 5× and it stood for 3 years after she retired. On her last day, she gave everything to new players.

In 2013, during a game Super Mario 64 speedrun, Mario suddenly teleported. A $1,000 bounty yielded no answers for 8 years. The cause: space radiation flipped a single bit in the console's memory, altering Mario's position coordinates.

The game Doom is the quintessential example of software porting. Porting Doom to seemingly impossible devices — pianos, notepads, microwaves — has become a programming tradition, and someone has even ported Doom to run inside Doom itself.