Why is the Media Play/Pause key interpreted as the "G" key by some applications?

When pressing the play/pause button on my Microsoft Wired Keyboard 600, I noticed that it sends a G keypress to certain applications (mostly games, I first noticed it in Lethal Company). After some googling, I found that it's a widespread issue, with people posting about it affecting games from War Thunder to Halo MCC to CSGO . With how this affects such a wide variety of software I would think that it was an issue with an underlying API that they all use. I took a look at the win32 keyboard API documentation , but that shows that there's a distinct keycode for the VK_MEDIA_PLAY_PAUSE, separat

Question by Chunky Is Dead on Super User, licensed CC BY-SA. We show a short excerpt and link to the original thread as credit.