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BenBigToe

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BenBigToe
In 1990, Game Freak started making Pokémon Red and Green, but development took six years and nearly bankrupted the studio. Five employees quit, and creator Satoshi Tajiri stopped paying himself and lived off his father's income. Right before release, programmer Shigeki Morimoto secretly hid one extra Pokémon in the game without telling Nintendo. Kids started spreading rumors about the secret, sales took off, and that hidden Pokémon was number 151.
YouTube Video VVU3Ry1mSjh0UERwRzB6NUJ2a295c0F3LnJRNVRlOTlYdWJN

He Hid This From Nintendo

BenBigToe 7.7K views October 2nd

In 1991, Nintendo and Sony were building a console together: a Super Nintendo with a CD drive, known as the Nintendo PlayStation. Sony revealed it at the Consumer Electronics Show, but the very next morning Nintendo announced it was partnering with Philips instead. Humiliated, Sony took the project and, led by Ken Kutaragi, built its own console, the PlayStation, which went on to outsell its competitors. Only about 200 prototypes of the Nintendo PlayStation were made, and one sold at auction in 2020 for $360,000.
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Nintendo Made a Console With Sony

BenBigToe 1.4K views September 29th

In 2003, a German Half-Life fan named Axel Gembe hacked into Valve and downloaded the unfinished source code for Half-Life 2. A friend he shared it with leaked it online more than a year before the game came out. In 2004, Gembe emailed Gabe Newell, apologized, and asked Valve for a job, so Valve and the FBI set up a fake job interview in the United States to arrest him when he landed. German police got to him first, raiding his home at 6 a.m. He never got the job.
YouTube Video VVU3Ry1mSjh0UERwRzB6NUJ2a295c0F3LlRUN1dJUHI1bEs0

He Hacked Valve, Then Asked for a Job

BenBigToe 33.5K views September 28th

Grand Theft Auto was almost cancelled. In 1995, DMA Design was building a cops and robbers racing game called Race'n'Chase, and testers found it boring. They found a bug broke the police AI, and instead of pulling players over, cops started ramming them off the road. Testers loved it so much they skipped missions just to get chased, so developers rebuilt the game around the chase and renamed it Grand Theft Auto, released in 1997 by the studio that later became Rockstar North.
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GTA Was Almost Cancelled

BenBigToe 31.9K views September 27th

Roblox's famous oof death sound is older than Roblox itself. It first appeared in the 2000 PC game Messiah, and Roblox's founders got it from a stock sound CD sold as copyright-free. In 2019, composer Tommy Tallarico, whose studio made Messiah's sounds, claimed the oof as his, and Roblox struck a deal that made creators pay about a dollar to use it. In 2022, Roblox deleted the sound entirely over a licensing issue, even though the file's own metadata credits a sound designer who worked for Tallarico. In 2025, Roblox finally brought the oof back for free.
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Roblox's OOF Sound Is Older Than Roblox

BenBigToe 2.9K views September 26th

In 2024, Nintendo sued a Reddit moderator known as Archbox, a top mod of a Switch piracy subreddit. Nintendo says he asked people to donate eShop gift cards so he could buy games, copy them, and give them away, and that it tracked him down through an email linked to his Reddit account. He ignored the case for two years and never showed up to court. In 2026, a judge counted 30 games at $150,000 each and ordered him to pay Nintendo four and a half million dollars.
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Nintendo Sued a Reddit Moderator

BenBigToe 9.4K views September 25th

For seven years, GTA Online could take up to six minutes to load. In 2021, a player known as t0st opened up the game's code and found it reading a ten megabyte list of 63,000 items one character at a time. He built a fix that cut load times by roughly 70 percent and released it for free. Rockstar patched it into GTA Online, credited t0st by name in the title update notes, and paid him $10,000 through its bug bounty program.
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Rockstar Paid a Player to Fix GTA Online

BenBigToe 36.8K views September 24th

In 1997, a Pokémon episode starring Porygon aired in Japan, and Pikachu's Thunderbolt made the screen flash red and blue. 685 kids were taken to the hospital that night, police questioned the show's producers, and the episode has never aired again in any country. Porygon never got a real role in the anime again, even though Pikachu caused it. In 2020, the official Pokémon account posted that Porygon did nothing wrong, then deleted it.
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Pikachu Sent 685 Kids to the Hospital

BenBigToe 30K views September 23rd

In 2005, Ubisoft had a studio quietly building a South Park game that played like GTA. You could drive cars around town, beat up the locals, and the first mission had Cartman collecting a shoe, a helmet, and pants to enter the Special Olympics. The game was cancelled before anyone ever saw it. Years later, someone bought a used Xbox dev kit and found it sitting on the hard drive.
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South Park Had a Secret GTA Game

BenBigToe 37.9K views September 22nd

McDonald's Japan made a Nintendo DS game that was never sold in stores. Called eCDP, it taught new hires how to cook, serve, and handle customers, then scored their performance for managers to review. A few cartridges leaked out over the years, but none of them would start, because the password to unlock the game was printed on the McDonald's branded DSi it shipped with. Collectors spent almost a decade stuck on the login screen until someone finally tracked down a complete set and uploaded it online for free.
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McDonald's Made a Secret Nintendo Game

BenBigToe 49.7K views September 21st

Every Nintendo Switch shipped with a hidden copy of NES Golf, one of the first games Satoru Iwata ever programmed before he became Nintendo's president. Setting the console to July 11th, the day Iwata died, and holding both Joy-Cons out in his famous Nintendo Direct pose launched the game along with a recording of his voice. Japanese fans called it a charm left inside every Switch, and Nintendo quietly overwrote it in a 2017 update.
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The Game Nintendo Tried to Hide

BenBigToe 153.6K views September 20th

In the 90's and early 2000's rented games kept coming back with the manuals destroyed, so Blockbuster photocopied replacements to save the originals. Nintendo failed to get game rentals banned in Congress, so they sued over the photocopies instead. Blockbuster stopped within a week and wrote its own manuals, while smaller rental stores stopped handing them out entirely.
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Why Rented Games Had No Instructions

BenBigToe 31K views September 19th

In 2002's Animal Crossing, quitting the game without saving summoned Mr. Resetti, an angry mole who lectured kids, forced them to type apologies like 'I'm dirt,' and faked deleting their town. Nintendo warned parents about him in the manual. When New Horizons added autosave, the director said he'd been laid off.
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Nintendo Built This Character to Punish Kids

BenBigToe 80.8K views September 18th

In 1981, Nintendo hired a company called Ikegami to program Donkey Kong. Ikegami hid its name and phone number inside the code. When Nintendo reused that code for Donkey Kong Jr., Ikegami sued Nintendo for 580 million yen over both games. The case never reached a verdict and ended in a settlement.
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Nintendo Was Sued for Pirating Its Own Game

BenBigToe 42K views September 16th

In late 1986, a man went Christmas shopping and picked up a copy of Super Mario Bros. He never wrapped it. It went into the bottom of his office desk, where it sat sealed and forgotten for 35 years. When he finally pulled it out in 2021, it went to auction at Heritage in Dallas and sold for $660,000 — the most expensive video game ever sold at the time. That record has since been broken twice.
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The Christmas Gift Nobody Opened for 35 Years

BenBigToe 22.3K views September 15th

Assassin's Creed II hides 100 feathers across five giant regions and never marks one on your map. Find them all and you unlock the Auditore Cape — which locks your wanted level at the max and turns every guard against you.
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Assassin's Creed II's Cruelest Reward

BenBigToe 33.1K views September 14th

Pokémon Black and White shipped with anti-piracy code that let the game boot but quietly broke it. Pokémon gained no experience after battles, the Union Room threw errors, and some copies refused to load. It was meant to push pirates into buying a real copy. Instead it created a challenge run people now do on purpose.
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Pokémon Black and White’s Anti Piracy Failed

BenBigToe 34.6K views September 13th

The weirdest real life use of Miis happened in Japan. In 2008 police were looking for a hit-and-run driver, but no camera ever caught him. All they had was the victim's description. So the officers opened the Mii Channel on the Nintendo Wii and built his face out of the menus. That Mii went up on wanted posters around town, and Guinness made it an official world record.
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The Weirdest Real Life Use of Nintendo Miis

BenBigToe 33.8K views September 8th

In 1985, the Super Mario Bros instruction booklet states on page 2 that the Koopa turned the Mushroom People into mere stones, bricks and even field horse-hair plants. Page 8 adds that those transformed mushrooms reward you by giving you a power boost when you hit them. It also says only Princess Toadstool can undo the spell, which is why Bowser kidnapped her. Nintendo repeated the story in the 1999 Super Mario Bros Deluxe manual.
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Every Brick in Mario Was a Person

BenBigToe 18.9K views September 6th

In Pokémon Emerald, picking the girl actually makes the game shorter. If you look at the fastest speedrunners all choose May, and has nothing to do with stats. When you pick her, Brendan becomes your rival, and says fewer lines, which saves time.
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Speedrunners Pick the Girl for One Reason

BenBigToe 34.9K views September 5th

The Nintendo Wii was a massive hit in 2006 because of its motion controls, and Wii Sports was the game everyone was playing when the trouble started. The original Wii Remote strap used a cord just 0.6mm thick, and when players swung too hard and let go, the remote flew into the screen. Nintendo replaced 3.2 million straps worldwide, thickened the cord to 1mm, and later handed out free silicone covers. It happened again years later with Nintendo Switch Sports. Nintendo never called it a recall, officially it was a voluntary replacement program.
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Why the Nintendo Wii Kept Destroying TVs

BenBigToe 58.9K views September 4th

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