The one and only Marlon Brando recorded lines of dialogue for the Godfather game shortly before he passed away. But unfortunatelly for his fans his speech was already slurred, so the studios were forced to hire a sound-alike.
Way before becoming the first in a huge collection of games, which took the critics and players by storm, the very first Assassin's Creed game was conceived as a co-op version in the Prince of Persia franchise.
The best earning game of all times is still World of Warcraft, which has brought it's producers over 10 billion dollars. So far. And the fans say that it is far from over. Lara Croft was originally named Laura Cruz and was to be of South American origin.
The very first PC game to go to space (literally) was the one and only Starcraft. One copy was taken aboard the Discovery for Shuttle mission STS-96, making video game history on the 27th of May 1999. So the game would end up at the International Space Station, it orbited the Earth (over 150 times) and finally came back to Earth at the Blizzard headquarters.
Cranky Kong, the old nemesis from Donkey Kong Country, is really the original Donkey Kong from the arcade game which was such a hit in the '80s and at the beginning of the 90s, when Eastern Europe was rediscovering the Western games.
Final Fantasy, nowadays of the most succesful and legendary video game franchises in the world, was sort of a last chance for it's designer. After several flops Hironobu Sakaguchi simply gave it all, knowing very well that another failure would mean for him to abandon video game design. Lucky for him and for us the result was a hit and gave birth to a long and fascinating collection.
E.T. the video game is still one of the biggest flops in the history of this hobby, and it is taught as the best example of how not to do things. Following the success of the movie a video game was released for the nowadays forgotten Atari 2006 console, in 1982. But the game was simply bad, the market was coming to a crash, and although about 1.5 million copies were sold word of mouth was that E.T. was the worst game in history. So nobody wanted it, instead of a hit it was a dud, and Ataru was left with over 2.5 million cartridges on stock. And a large part of these were simply buried somewhere in New Mexico. It's ironic that as bad as it is, E.T. the video game is now a rare collector's item.
Surgeons who are also fans of video games and play them often are statistically less likely to make a mistake and end up working faster and better.
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