All about Video Games: 3400 Facts and Trivia Bits about enjoyable entertainment landmarks

Play on!

Video games help develop cognitive ability, problem solving skills, reaction times, and team work. Video games give the brain a thorough workout in a simulated real life environment. They are the dominant form of two party entertainment these days, and this book is a tribute to all the great games that have delighted billions of players over the past 50 years.

Are you a Tetris tyrant? Or a Mario maniac? Or a Call of Duty connoisseur? Or a Fortnite fan? Or a PacMan purist? Or a Doom Demon? Whichever video game you’re a hardcore fan of, this trivia quiz book will give you all you ever wanted: a chance to test your knowledge of the most popular video games of all time. We sit at a very interesting point in history. After a year when every member of the human race was more or less confined to one spot, video game sales spiked to an all time high – whether you are a console player or a PC gamer or a mobile player, odds are that you have contributed to the huge boom in the video game market.

With an expansion in the market has come a fresh influx of AAA titles – of games that take player engagement and world immersion to new, and unprecedented, heights. One only has to compare the open world beauty of Breath of the Wild to the original The Legend of Zelda to marvel at the incredible leaps that a format of art can take over the course of three short decades. Game studios pump out works of astonishing creativity in a few years each, and we have to respect their hard work and genre-bending mindset. Interactive movies are no longer something that we can hope for in the distant future: they’re right here, and we call them video games!

The benefits of video games are also beginning to be understood by a broad cross section of society. From their use in training (for example, in pilot simulators) to their use in experiential industries (the VR tech used in tourism was largely developed by and for gamers), video games are at the cutting edge of technology, and its interactions with humans and societies. No longer are they seen as time sinks: in addition to the benefits listed above, platforms like Twitch have made streaming a legitimate revenue stream, and created millionaires out of people who are able to share their therapeutic gameplay with a large audience across the world.

This is a trivia contest with a difference: to do well, you will need to be a video game fan (casual and devoted fans are both welcome, since the level of difficulty slopes upwards gently), and you will need to have an alert brain, that is able to bring together many different pieces of information, and process all of them to come up with an overall coherent message. You can attempt the video game based puzzles in this book at your own pace. There are 5 hints for each question (in addition to the main clue about the game’s name or title), so you will have all the information you need to guess each title.

Even if you can’t, the wealth of information in the hints (and the answers provided at the end of the book), will ensure that you leave each clue with more knowledge than when you came in; your brain will definitely be expanded, even as your fingers each to be reunited with your controller again, so that you can experience the games that filled your youth with hours of innocent fun. I have tried to include as many different game platforms as possible. From the Nintendo 64 to the PlayStation 4, from the original XBox to PC exclusive games, everything is represented!

I am sure that you will have tons of fun with this book, and that you will do really well, as you prove that you are the ultimate fan of the most engaging works of art that our civilization has created in the past century. Let us play!