From the first PC through to XBox One and Playstation 4, gaming is something that connects us across the world.

Whether you prefer an open-world fantasy quest or a retro platform game, we can guarantee that you have picked up a video game at one point in your life.

Gaming can both entertain and inform us no matter what our preferred form is – from computer monitors to the wonder of virtual reality headsets.

Here, we take a look at some facts about gaming that are sure to have you picking up a control pad:

  • The average gamer age is 35 and has been playing video games for 14 years.
  • The game Sonic Hedgehog has inspired a gene in the human body called SHH (Sonic Hedgehog). It is responsible for ensuring all our limbs and organs grow where they are supposed to.
  • A whopping 59 per cent of Americans play video games, and 42 per cent of those play regularly.
  • E-Sports has been around since the 1980’s but has gained popularity from the late 2000’s.
  • Studies indicate that surgeons who regularly play video games make 37 per cent fewer mistakes and operate 27 per cent faster than their peers.
  • Studies have found that playing video games train the person to swiftly take the correct decisions. Video gamers are also found to be better in multitasking, driving and navigating around the streets.
  • Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s favourite game was Tetris.
  • According to Toru Iwatwani, the creator of Pac-Man, he wanted to create a game that will attract women to play it. And the reason he chose Pac-man as always eating something was because he thought the women were always eating something.
  • South Korea has a rule called Cinderella Law which disallows under-16 gamers to play online video games after midnight.
  • Players of online video game called Foldit decoded the crystal structure of an AIDS structure using the puzzle that had baffled scientists for over 15 years.
  • Nolan Bushnell founder of Atari also founded the famous kid’s fast food chain Chuck E Cheese as a way to get kids play Atari arcade games.
  • Gunpei Yokoi, the creator of the Game boy, worked as a janitor in Nintendo.Taito’s arcade game, Space Invaders was so successful in japan that rumors have it that it caused a shortage of 100-yen coins.
  • Starcraft is so famous in South Korea that the top gamers receive huge salary and prizes to play the game at various competitions. Starcraft is also the first game to be played in space.
  • Guitar Hero: Aerosmith has made more money for the Aerosmith band than the sale of any of their previous albums.
  • Xbox was originally named as DirectX Box as a reference to Microsoft’s graphics API, DirectX.
  • Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokemon, got the idea for super successful game after collecting caterpillars as a child and watching them change into butterflies.
  • Mortal Kombat is one of the most successful fighting games of all time. It was developed in 10 months by a team of just four people.
  • Player reaction to a simulated disease in World of Warcraft so closely resembled historical records about real plagues that epidemiologists are currently using the data from WoW to evaluate how people would respond to a potential future virus outbreak.
  • The PlayStation 2 remains the best selling video game console of all time, having sold 155 million units to date.
  • Super Mario Brothers was the first video game to be made into a movie.
  • The SEGA Saturn was the first gaming console to ship with internal memory.
  • The original Resident Evil PlayStation game holds the record for worst video game dialogue, according to Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition.
  • The very first playable female video game character was found in the 1985 Taito arcade game Typhoon Gali.
  • Even when you split gamers out into “core” and “casual” based on money and time spent on games, whether on console or mobile, the gender split remains pretty close – a slightly greater percentage of the most casual players are women, and a slightly greater percentage of the most “core” players are men.
  • Physical-only games barely exist any more – most are released digital and physical, or digital only. Only 10 years ago in 2009, most releases were physical only.
  • The title of the most expensive video game goes to the 2013 version of Grand Theft Auto V. It took approx $137 million to build the game and an additional $128 for its marketing.
  • China is the greatest video game market, generating more than $27 billion in the past year.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The first game to feature multiple endings depending on how you played the game was Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest on the NES.
  • By the end of its release month of July 2017, Epic Games announced that they had sold over 500,000 digital copies of Fortnite. By the next month, the game’s player count exceeded one million.