The Finals has been my default game — if none of my friends are playing anything else — since it launched
The UI on the left isn’t labeled, so it’s hard to tell what any joke could be if you don’t know what it is
I’m sure there were other consoles that did it, but the one I remember is the NES; it had a physical switch on it for channel 3 or 4, and you had to have your TV tuned to the respective channel to get the game to show up. As to why that was necessary on a technical level, I’m not sure. But it was a thing you had to do.
They actually don’t have last names; their full names are Mario and Luigi.
From later in the article (emphasis author’s)