Newer Than They Think / Games And Toys

• Mahjong (a.k.a. Mah-Jong, Mahjongg etc.) is commonly supposed to be centuries if not millennia old, and even to have been invented by Confucius, but no evidence of it predating the 1880s can be found. In actuality, Go predated Mahjong by millennia. Even its card-based ancestor game, pènghú (which was likely also the ancestor to Bridge), only dates to the 18th century. The solitaire game Shanghai (often miscalled "Mahjong" because it's played with the same tiles and to get around Activision's trademark), which likewise has spurious antiquity claimed for it, was invented in 1981.
• While earlier variants appeared in France as early as the late 19th century, the first example of the game now known as Sudoku was invented in Indiana in 1979.
• Ouija (yes, it's a board game) was invented in 1890 and did not take on its infamous occult connotations until American spiritualist Pearl Curran began using one as a divination tool in World War I.
• The Powerball lottery began in 1992, and the first scratch-and-win tickets were sold in 1987.
  • The oldest state lottery in the US is New Hampshire's, which began in 1964.
• The first First-Person Shooter to feature a sniper rifle was GoldenEye 007, released in 1997.
  • The western-themed Outlaws, released slightly earlier in 1997, beat GoldenEye to it. The game's rifle can be augmented with a scope, and it's even the "picture in picture" kind where you see a magnified image on the scope itself without entering a separate scope view and/or zooming the whole screen.
• While LEGO has been sold since 1949, possibly making it Older Than They Think, it wasn't until 1978 that the first sets with minifigures (i.e., Lego people) were introduced. Also, Lego didn't start licensing other properties for themed sets until 1999, when the first Star Wars set debuted; prior to that it did offer "franchises", but ones of its own creation.
  • Until the 1990s, all Lego people had the same face, consisting of two dots for eyes and a smile.
• While Dragon Quest was the first JRPG with a menu-based battle system, you only fight one enemy at a time and there were not multiple party members. The first JRPG in which multiple party members could join you and in which multiple monsters could attack you was Dragon Quest II. Even then, you still could not select which monster you would attack. The first JRPG that allowed you to select the monster you were going to attack was Hoshi wo Miru Hito.
• The Cactuar, now considered one of the most iconic Mascot Mooks of the Final Fantasy series, didn't debut until Final Fantasy VI.
  • A huge chunk of the series' most iconic recurring creatures were absent from the original game. Malboros, Chocobos and Bombs debuted in Final Fantasy II, Moogles in Final Fantasy III, and Tonberrys in Final Fantasy V.
• The Tales Series intense focus on a Chosen One and deconstructing the concept didn't start until Tales of Destiny 2, the fourth game in the franchise, or maybe Tales of Eternia, the third game, though in Eternia the focus was very minimal.
• Many of the features taken as standard in the Fire Emblem series today, such as Fog of War, weapon exp and rescuing, first appeared in the fifth game in the series Thracia 776.
• The first video game to feature paid DLC was MechAssault, released in 2002. Paid DLC, in the sense of paying money for a specific piece of content, didn't exist at all before Xbox Live introduced it; before XBL, games either had new content patched in for free or had separate expansion packs on disc.
• Pinball in the popular consciousness would be unplayable without flippers, but they were actually among of the last of the staples of a pinball game to have been invented, with Humpty Dumpty in 1949—the Pinball Gag, as seen in Western Animation like Looney Tunes, actually precedes the flipper by several years.^note If you've seen enough cartoons, you might remember the Pinball Gag ends with a "Tilt" message. Yes, the tilt sensor was invented before the flippers, a full 20 years prior. It is recent enough that when Grampa Simpson in The Simpsons Pinball Party says, "Back in my day, we didn't have flippers!," he was actually right.
• Tarot cards for divination, that are distinct from playing cards, were not produced until the 18th century. Before then, Tarot cards were simply a style of playing cards and were not considered any better or worse for divination than any other style of playing card.
  • Not only that, the deck that many people think of as "classic" or "original" tarot cards is the Rider-Waite Deck, introduced specifically for divination in the 1910s. Much of modern Tarot's symbolism, and even some of the card identities, were invented for this deck.
• In chess, the now-familiar player ranking system, including the title of "grandmaster", has only existed since the FIDE introduced it in 1950.
• Terry Bogard's Buster Wolf, one of, if not the most iconic move in his arsenal thanks to the memetic "Are you okay? BUSTAH WOLF!", wasn't introduced until 1999 in Garou: Mark of the Wolves, the final game in the Fatal Fury franchise, and wasn't seen in The King of Fighters until 2003, where he dons his Garou appearance.
• Rock-paper-scissors is of Chinese origin, and was unknown in the Western world until the 1920s.
• The first known mention of the alleged 1981 arcade game Polybius dates to February 2000, when it was added to coinop.org's database by owner Kurt Koller, probably as an intentional hoax.
• Whac-a-Mole may seem like an old-timey carnival game, but it was only invented in 1975 for Japanese amusement parks and game centers by TOGO (which are more well known for making roller coasters like the iconic Big Apple Coaster in Las Vegas), and first imported into America in 1977 by Aaron Fetcher, of RAE fame.
• The Joker playing card was invented by American card manufacturers during the American Civil War as a Euchre trump card. It was originally part of a contemporary American trend of expanding decks beyond 52 cards with new ones, but the Joker was the only new card that caught on.
• The earliest form of Poker is first attested in 1829, in Mississippi. It was initially played with a 20-card deck (10s, Jacks, Queens, Kings, Aces), with the first 52-card variant appearing in the 1840s.
• The chess convention of white moving first is not a traditional rule, but rather a modern American innovation, first proposed in 1857 at the First American Chess Congress by player Johann Lowenthal. It became a standard rule in American chess in the 1880s, and later still in the rest of the world. Before then, the convention was to flip a coin or draw lots to determine whether white or black (or red) moved first.
• The sharp gender segregation of boys' and girls' toys is a recent phenomenon; the majority of toy advertisements as recently as the 1970s did not target a specific gender, and the now-familiar "pink aisle" for girls' toys did not appear until the 1980s at the earliest.
  • Some have suggested that this is also when video games also began to be marketed almost exclusively to boys. Previously, they were marketed as "family entertainment systems". But when it came time to sell them as toys, they chose the "blue aisle" over the "pink aisle". Had they chosen the "pink aisle", the entire video game industry could have been a very different thing now.
• The first playing cards were invented in China c. 850AD, and didn't appear in Europe until c. 1380. Initially, the four suits were swords, clubs, cups, and coins; the now-familiar French suits first appeared c. 1480.
  • While dominoes have existed in China since the 13th century, they didn't make their way to Europe until the early 18th century.
• Jenga is not a traditional game, as often assumed; it was first sold in 1983.
• The first nonogram (a.k.a. picross) puzzles were published in 1988.
• Although chess has been played across Europe since the 12th century, the first international chess tournament didn't happen until 1851.
• While the now-universal Handbuch-style algebraic chess notation ("1. e4", etc.) was introduced in 1843, it was only used in the German-speaking world for over a century; the Anglosphere continued to use descriptive notation (e.g., "Pawn to King's Fourth") until the 1970s, and FIDE only adopted Handbuch notation as its official style in 1981.
• Tingle is the Trope Namer for art that is widely disliked outside of its home-country. However, much of the Western dislike for Tingle didn't surface until his Wind Waker incarnation. When he debuted in Majora's Mask, his Manchild personality fit the game's Surreal Horror tone, the maps he sold were reasonably priced, and it wasn't required to talk to him to complete the game. In Wind Waker, he felt out of place, the maps he sold were given a significant price increase compared to Majora's Mask, and he was given increased focus to the point where talking to him several times is mandatory if you want to complete the game.
  • And, you know, forcing his brothers and some guy called David to dress in matching suits and rotate a giant statue of himself
• This is at least a major source of the accusations in the Starcraft and Warhammer 40,000 fandoms that one copied the other, particularly in the case of the Zerg and the Tyranids—both being a Horde of Alien Locusts. The main reason for this is the art director for Warhammers 3rd edition late went on to be the same for Blizzard.
• Many fans of the American Girls Collection believe that modern dolls have always been able to be designed or customized to look like the recipient. However, American Girl didn't offer designable dolls until 2017. The dolls that many people remember as "designed" to look like them are actually picked from a pool of options which aren't modified by the company—often with more options for white children—and are still a separate line from the design-your-own dolls. Even those are from a select set of options—options that are not or no longer available cannot be selected. The claim of dolls to look like them often is claimed in news articles due to people legitimately thinking a doll they received when younger was designed from their looks rather than selected by the purchaser to match their looks. There's also the possibility of people mixing their memories with the MyTwinn company; that brand was marketed on ordering dolls to resemble the purchaser, including having purchasers send in copies of photographs to have the artists pick the doll's features. The brand existed in the late 90s (but only sold larger dolls until the 2010s and later went defunct) and, considering many brands sent catalogs to target audiences (if your child wants one doll, they may want this one!), a person could easily misremember the marketing of MyTwinn as applying to AG.
• The first refractor cards — i.e., trading cards that shine in rainbow colors when held at certain angles — debuted in a 1993 Topps baseball card set.

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