21. There are currently over 100 million Game Boys in the world; both the original and the colour variant. 32 million of them are in Japan, and there are 44 million in America.

22. Before they settled on its unique, painted look, the developers of Okami, Clover, originally intended the game to look realistic. You can unlock a concept video of this by finishing the game. It was changed because the PS2's hardware wasn't sophisticated enough.

23. Online gaming isn't as recent a development as you may think; in the '90s, a modem peripheral called the Satellaview was released for the Super Nintendo. It let gamers download gaming news and specially-designed games. They were mostly remakes of retro classics.

24. Early iterations of Nintendo's failed Virtual Boy console included a gun you'd set vertical on a flat surface that would project a 3D image into the air.

25. GoldenEye's famously brilliant multiplayer mode originally contained three Bond actors as playable characters; Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton. Their data was left on the cartridge, but you couldn't select them without using a cheat device.

26. Namco developed a special PSone controller to be used with Ridge Racer Type 4. It was called the Jogcon and had a wheel in place of the analogue sticks.

27. In critically panned crime caper Driv3r, there was a Hawaiian shirt-wearing character called Timmy Vermicelli - a clear parody of the star of GTA: Vice City, Tommy Vercetti. The character wore swimming bands, poking fun at the GTA hero's inability to swim.

28. In Grand Theft Auto 3, one mission saw you chasing a "badly animated" (in the words of Asuka) character called Tanner, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Driver lead character of the same name.

29. The PSone was originally planned as a Nintendo console, with Sony set to design its electronic components. When Nintendo ditched the project, Sony decided to make a console anyway.

30. The death screams of the bad guys in the original Golden Axe are digitized from screams used in the films First Blood and Conan The Barbarian.

31. Star Fox Adventures originally started life as Dinosaur Planet, a game developed entirely by Rare. It starred a blue fox called Krystal, who later became part of the Star Fox crew.

32. The damsel-in-distress that Mario rescues in the original Donkey Kong is called Pauline. In the Japanese version she was known simply as 'Lady'.

33. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith wasn't the wrinkly rockers' first videogame appearance. In 1994 they starred in an on-rails shooter called Revolution X where you had to rescue the band from kidnappers in a dystopian future. No, really.

34. In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty, a scene was removed from the final game where Snake is chased through the sinking tanker by a rush of water. Kojima said it looked good, but wasn't fun to play. Footage still exists of this in early trailers.

35. The first western-developed Xbox 360 game to break into the top 10 of the Japanese game chart was Gears of War. It made its debut at number seven after selling 33,000 copies. It charted in January 2006, over two years after the Japanese launch of the console.

36. Attacking the fat, black pig on Outset Island in The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker will eventually cause it to attack.It's 100% invincible, though, so watch out.

37. Mega Man is known as Rock Man in Japan. This was changed in America because 'rock' is well-known slang for crack cocaine, and the name stuck.

38. The name Atari comes from the Chinese game Go. 'Atari' refers to a situation where a stone or a group of stones is in imminent danger of being taken by another player; a state Atari ironically found themselves in when the brand was bought by French company Infogrames.

39. The Xbox was originally named DirectXbox, as it was initially designed to show how Microsoft's Direct X graphics technology could benefit the console market.

40. The Texas Instruments TI-83 calculator has more graphics processing power than the Commodore 64. Amazingly, some basic C64 games can even be programmed into it.