14 Hidden Backstories You Never Knew About Your Favorite Games

Almost every Mario game in existence follows the same basic premise: Bowser steals away with Princess Peach and it’s up to the Italian plumber to rescue her. However, Super Mario Bros. (1985) was slightly more gruesome. As it turns out, everyone in the Mushroom Kingdom had been turned into bricks and stones, so you were actually murdering innocent citizens when you ran through each level smashing blocks to collect coins and power-ups.

The instruction manual for the original game confirms this, saying: “One day the kingdom of the peaceful mushroom people was invaded by the Koopa, a tribe of turtles famous for their black magic. The quiet, peace-loving Mushroom People were turned into mere stones, bricks and even field horsehair plants, and the Mushroom Kingdom fell into ruin.”

Mario is arguably the most famous video game character in the world and is universally seen as a heroic protagonist. However, that was not always the case. The backstory for the original arcade version of Donkey Kong reveals that Mario was not exactly the most likeable person in his younger days. While the game establishes that Mario is attempting to rescue his girlfriend Pauline from the ape who has kidnapped her, extra material for the title explains why Donkey Kong stole her away in the first place. It turns out that the gorilla was actually Mario’s pet and that he had been cruelly mistreated at the hands of his owner, prompting his act of revenge.

When Centipede was first released in 1980 by Atari, many people assumed that the top-down shooter was about a spaceship fighting giant alien insects. After all, many other arcade games of this type featured science fiction scenarios and the limited graphics of the time meant it was difficult to render detailed sprites. However, future games and an entire comic series revealed that the backstory to the game was entirely different. The main character is in fact an elf named Oliver who is battling an army of forest creatures that have been turned against him by an evil wizard. 

Throughout the Halo series, players control super soldiers known as Spartans to battle the Covenant and the Flood. These armored combatants aren’t simply normal men and women placed inside special suits. The real backstory behind their creation is far more depressing: a fictional military known as the UNSC kidnapped the Spartans when they were young children and put them through years of extensive training to become the best soldiers. They then underwent a series of surgical augmentations and genetic enhancements that killed half of those involved before being sent into battle in the iconic suits.

Valve games are often teeming with complex and intriguing backstories, though in most cases, such rich details are presented in the form of hidden extras or additional media (like DLCs or comics). That's the case in Portal concerning Aperture Science, the fictional science organization credited with birthing GLaDOS. According to official sources, Aperture Science started life as a developer of shower curtains, with the portal technology created to assist in the production of shower curtain technology.

The company founder began to lose his mind as he became ill and set about creating a three-step R&D plan including the Heimlich Counter-Maneuver (a technique to counter the Heimlich Maneuver) and the Take-A-Wish Foundation (to take wishes away from terminally ill children and give them to healthy adults). As for the third, he stated, "Some kind of rip in the fabric of space… that would… well, it’d be like, I don’t know, something that would help with the shower curtains I guess." 

An evolution of the concept first introduced in Pong, Arkanoid is a game where players try to bounce a ball at a collection of bricks with their paddle to clear each level. While this type of game doesn't appear to need a backstory, the creators came up with one anyway. The paddle at the bottom of the screen is actually a ship called the Vaus, the sole surviving spacecraft fleeing from the destruction of its mothership, the Arkanoid. Unfortunately, the Vaus gets trapped in a warped version of space by a mysterious floating red head called Doh, and must escape the dimension by destroying the obstacles blocking its path.