Trivia / Joust

• Follow the Leader: The game was a huge influence on the Nintendo games Balloon Fight and Mario Bros..
• Port Overdosed: Wikipedia counts at least 18 different releases for the original game.
• Referenced by...:
  • Milo Murphy's Law: In Secrets and Pies, Milo and friends order from a Renaissance-themed pizzeria. After delivering, the incredibly badass delivery woman rides away on an ostrich.
  • Pocket God: Journey to Uranus has a minigame that is this exact game IN SPACE! WITH DRAGONS!
  • Joust plays an important part in the book Ready Player One, where the Copper Key can be found by navigating the Tomb of Horrors and beating the demilich Acererak at a game of Joust.
  • The Simpsons Game has this as one of the mini-games you play at the end of the NeverQuest section.
  • A quest in World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion lets you play a three-dimensional version of the game, and even starts you off with the title quote above.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The NES port had been co-developed by Nintendo and HAL Laboratory in 1983. It was intended to fufill a stipulation of the deal Atari had with Nintendo to distribute the Famicom outside of Japan. A confluence of factors related to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 caused the deal to fall through, but HAL published the game by themselves in 1987, four years later.