Video games are younger than many of the people playing them, yet the industry has already piled up more legends than an ancient religion — and some of them are even true. These fifteen run from a Kyoto card shop to a New Mexico landfill. Cover the answers and keep score.

In 1983, Atari really did bury truckloads of unsold cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. How do we know?

Someone dug them up — a 2014 excavation confirmed the legend, though it was roughly 700,000 assorted cartridges, not the millions of E.T. games the myth claimed.

What was Mario's original name — and original job?

Jumpman, a carpenter — he debuted in Donkey Kong in 1981 and only became a plumber when Mario Bros. moved the action into the sewers.

Who is Mario actually named after?

Mario Segale — the landlord of Nintendo of America's warehouse.

Why does Mario have a mustache and a cap?

Pixel budgets — the mustache saved drawing a mouth, and the cap saved animating hair.

What did Nintendo make when it was founded in 1889?

Hanafuda playing cards — nearly a century before the NES.

Who created Tetris, and where?

Alexey Pajitnov, at a Soviet computing lab in Moscow in 1984 — the state controlled the rights, and he saw no royalties for over a decade.

What was the first video game played in space?

Tetris — cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov carried a Game Boy up to the Mir space station in 1993.

The PlayStation began life as a partnership between Sony and which rival?

Nintendo — it started as a CD add-on for the Super Nintendo, and after Nintendo publicly backed out in 1991, a jilted Sony finished the project alone.

What is the best-selling game console of all time?

The PlayStation 2 — over 155 million sold.

What does "Atari" actually mean?

It's a term from the ancient board game Go — a warning that a capture is imminent, roughly Go's version of "check."

The Legend of Zelda is named after whom?

Zelda Fitzgerald — Shigeru Miyamoto's team borrowed the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife because they loved the sound of it.

Was Pac-Man really inspired by a pizza with a slice missing?

Half true, by creator Toru Iwatani's own confession — the shape also comes from rounding off the Japanese character for "mouth."

Did Space Invaders cause a 100-yen coin shortage in Japan?

Almost certainly not — the famous tale has no supporting records and is considered urban legend, though the 1978 hit really did swallow coins at a historic rate.

Where did the Konami Code — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A — come from?

Developer Kazuhisa Hashimoto slipped it into Gradius in 1986 because the game was too hard for him to test.

What "broke" the first Pong machine within days of its 1972 debut in a California bar?

Success — the coin mechanism had jammed because it was stuffed full of quarters.

The Atari dig is the keeper: an industry so young that its archaeology happened on camera, in a landfill, in 2014 — and the artifacts still had price stickers.