Did You Know Gaming? Forums

In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Luigi's theme has a remix of the fanfare that plays when you beat a world in Super Mario Bros 3.








(skip to 0:58)

Also In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Lord Crump's Theme has the Atari 2600 sound effect of Pac-man dying.




(Skip to 0:45)





In Sonic 3, when playing it alone, at the end of Launch Base Act 2, you fight Big Arms. With Sonic and Knuckles attached, you skip the Big Arms fight and go directly to Mushroom Hill Zone (But as Knuckles you still fight Big Arms.)

In Epic Mickey, when Beluga Billy gives you a stop watch, he says " It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!" a reference to the original Legend of Zelda.

In Generation 1 of Pokemon, all areas are named after colors, even though being released before the Gameboy Color. When playing Red & Blue on a Super Gameboy, or Yellow on a GBC, the areas change into the colors they're named after. However, this only happens with Yellow when using Pokemon Stadium 1 and 2's GB Towers.

In Sonic Adventure 2, Knuckles can go faster than Sonic.

In Super Mario Sunshine, in Bianco Hills, if you load the first mission, the bridge to Petey Piranha is broken, but if you use the water spiders to bounce across broken gap, you can get to the windmill. If you get to the top, and talk to the man dancing, he'l say, "Hey aren't you getting ahead of yourself? shouldn't you be doing something else first?" referencing the fact that you skipped the entire first mission and went straight to the second.

I never knew about the Pac Man theme in Lord Crump's theme...Nice find!

The Atari PacMan "death and start of next life" sound effect sequence is also the most heavily overused gaming sound effect in film and television. Over the past 30 years, any time you would see characters playing a video game -- be it a generic made-up console, or holding actual controllers, even more modern ones like a Dualshock or XBox -- you would hear that sound mixed in with the background noise of the scene. It's even more hilarious when they actually show what is being played, and the sound STILL plays (because it's totally believable that a PS1 would be making Atari blips & bleeps).

I'm not sure how that one sound specifically got optioned as the one-size-fits-all canned "video game" sound effect, but once you realize that it's there, you'll have a really hard time unhearing it. It's like the Wilhelm Scream of video games.

And the most bizarre fact is that the sound is STILL USED in movies and TV shows today! The most hilarious instance I remember recently was when it popped up on a recruitment ad for a college specializing in game design. It was put in during a sequence where the "students" were testing a brand new 3D game they were making. Using Atari sound effects. Yeah, you know those guys will land jobs after graduation..

Oh yeah, I remember that last one. I used to skip to the second mission of Bianco Hills just because I liked messing with the order of the Shine Sprites.