National Video Games Day

In 1972, Stanford University hosted the first-ever competitive gaming event for Spacewar!, a game played on early computers. The grand prize?

A year’s subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. While small, this event set the stage for the massive eSports industry that exists today, where tournaments have prize pools in the millions.

Star Citizen, a space simulation game in development since 2011, has raised over $600 million through crowdfunding.

Despite its record-breaking budget, it remains unfinished, making it one of gaming’s most ambitious (and controversial) projects.

For released games, Grand Theft Auto V holds the title, costing about $265 million—but it earned $1 billion within three days of launch.

Duke Nukem Forever holds the record, spending 14 years in development before its disastrous 2011 release.

Originally announced in 1997, it went through multiple game engines and developers before finally seeing the light of day.

Ironically, the game’s title became a joke in the industry, symbolizing a project that might never actually launch.

Some gamers believe certain games bring bad luck or even supernatural experiences. Berzerk, an arcade game from 1980, is infamous because two players suffered fatal heart attacks shortly after achieving high scores.

While likely a coincidence, this eerie connection made Berzerk one of gaming’s most infamous urban legends.

Old game cartridges, especially SNES and N64 games, sometimes emit a distinct metallic or burnt plastic smell.

This comes from aging capacitors inside the cartridges, which slowly break down over time. Some gamers nostalgically call it the “cartridge smell,” a scent that transports them back to the 90s.

Yes! In 2007, a 10-year-old boy named Gryffin Sanders saved his grandmother’s life by taking control of their car after she had a stroke.

He credited Mario Kart for teaching him how to steer at high speeds.

In another case, a gamer playing World of Warcraft recognized the symptoms of a stroke in another player, saving their life by calling emergency services.

In 2009, Capcom released a Resident Evil 5 special edition that included a life-size zombie-scented candle.

The idea was to enhance the horror experience by making your room smell like rotting flesh.

Even stranger, a promotional event for Hitman: Absolution sent journalists real dead flowers in coffins as invitations to play the game.

No Man’s Sky technically holds the record, with 18 quintillion planets—a number so large that even if one person discovered one new planet per second, it would take 585 billion years to see them all.

However, for handcrafted open worlds, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996) spans 161,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of England.

Yes! In 2008, Japan granted official residency to Pac-Man. Though it was a symbolic move, it recognized the character’s massive cultural impact.

Similarly, in 2016, Spain’s town of Zaragoza gave Sonic the Hedgehog a street name in honor of his role in gaming history.

In 2019, Blizzard Entertainment banned a professional player of Hearthstone for supporting the Hong Kong protests during a tournament.

The backlash was massive, with gamers boycotting Blizzard, staging digital protests, and even dressing up as Winnie the Pooh, a banned symbol in China.

The event remains one of gaming’s most significant political moments.