8 Bits Of Science You Didn’t Know Ruin Iconic Video Game Scenes

A shoe-in for lists of top opening sequences in video games, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves opens with a shot of a bleeding and battered Nathan Drake coming to aboard a train dangling perilously over a sheer cliff. Cue a pulse-pounding sequence as the agile Drake must escape the creaking wreckage before he’s reduced to a red smear on the rocks below.

However, there’s a fatal problem with the sequence, one so subtle you likely didn’t notice it.

During the climb Drake looses his grip and falls vertically down the side of the train, saved only by a death-defying, fingertip grab at a narrow ledge. The fall lasts all of half a second, but that’s half a second too long.

As science communicator Kyle Hill explains, a mere 0.5 kilonewtons of force is all that is required to severely damage the tendons in your hands. That amounts to a fall of only a quarter of a second, a mere foot in distance. Now consider the frantic grabs the intrepid Mr. Drake is forced to make before the fall and he was lucky not to plummet to his death right then and there, never mind retain the grip strength to climb the sheer side of a train.

Nathan Drake. Ezio Auditore. Lara Croft. Their hands should all be ruined.

And needless to say, DON’T try this at home.