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Virtual Lab
5
Attachment In an interview with the Bad Game Hall of Fame, Megumi Ayase, who programmed Virtual Lab singlehandedly, stated that the large-breasted woman who appears next to the playing field was based on the idealized image that she wanted to attain as a transgender woman. This is reflected in her name, Megu, a truncation of Ayase's given name. Ayase also stated that the decision to make Megu 13 years old was done without her consultation, and that she didn't find out about this until she read the game's manual, much to her surprise.
The Mysterious Murasame Castle
5
Attachment In 1986, Nintendo and Fuji Television produced a 70-minute TV special based on The Mysterious Murasame Castle for the weekly one-shot drama series "Getsuyou Drama Land" (Monday Drama Land). The special, like many other episodes in the later years of Getsuyou Drama Land's run, featured members of the popular J-Pop girl group Onyanko Club as cast members, and starred Masaki Kyomoto as the game's protagonist Takamaru. The special aired once on December 8, 1986, almost eight months after the game's release, and never aired again. It was later released on DVD in 2005 as part of the box set "Onyanko Club in Getsuyou Drama Land DVD Box 2".

The special's existence and DVD release flew under the international radar until 2023, when a user named Ruka, after being prompted in a 4chan thread to verify claims that the special was lost media based on an uncited edit on the game's English Wikipedia article, discovered that copies of the box set were actually being offered on Yahoo! Auctions. Ruka subsequently placed a bid and won a copy from the auction, and YouTuber Haruko Please uploaded the special to YouTube the following week. With its rediscovery, it's thought to be one of the first live-action adaptations of a video game, and is also the earliest known product to come from Nintendo's collaborations with Fuji, which after this special's airing continued with Yume Koujou: Doki-doki Panic.
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month November 8, 2023
Wild Woody
subdirectory_arrow_right Shady Lewd Kart (Game)
4
On April 1st, 2024, Shady Lewd Kart added Wild Woody from the game of the same name as a free DLC character. Notably, it was revealed in a comment on the DLC's announcement trailer that Sega did not actually own the rights to the Wild Woody IP, instead being owned by the original creators. This was further emphasized on the DLC's Steam page, which includes a disclaimer that Shady Corner Games was in no way associated with Sega, and that they were given permission to add Wild Woody to the game by the creators of the IP. Wild Woody's original voice actor Joseph Kerska also reprised his role for the appearance and a story campaign, and that despite the date it was released, the DLC was not considered an April Fools joke.
person chocolatejr9 calendar_month April 2, 2024
Company: Atari SA
subdirectory_arrow_right Infogrames Entertainment SA (Company)
4
Attachment In 2001, Infogrames Entertainment SA produced a corporate anthem entitled "Infogrames Rocks My World", which was used at industry events starting with E3 2001 as part of a heavy marketing push to promote their slate of IPs after a series of acquisitions throughout the 1990s. According to YouTuber Larry Bundy Jr. during a video researching the development and release controversies surrounding the game Driv3r, Infogrames' public relations division reportedly spent $50,000 creating the song, but due to the song being relentlessly mocked following its reveal, everyone involved with the song's production was reportedly fired. While Bundy also claimed that the song was first leaked to the Internet by a disgruntled Driv3r developer in 2004, the song was actually distributed by Infogrames to other gaming news outlets as part of digital press kits. The earliest known upload of the song appears to be by software developer Phil Bak to his personal website sometime during or immediately after E3 2001 in May, and the earliest known surviving upload is through a 2001 IGN article covering Infogrames' Gamers' Day press event in August. The song was later uploaded to ZDNET in 2002 on a special article ranking it at #9 on a list of their Top 20 Corporate IT Anthems.
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month November 21, 2023
Infogrames Entertainment SA's PR department - "Infogrames Rocks My World":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxEQOv2g0JA#t=1041

Larry Bundy Jr. video on Driv3r development and release controversies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxEQOv2g0JA

3000 AD forum post of the Phil Bak link to the song days after E3 2001:
https://www.3000ad.com/forum/topic/7001147-infogrames-e3-theme-song/

2001 IGN article and embedded link to the song:
https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/08/08/infogrames-state-of-the-union-at-gamers-day
https://pcmedia.ign.com/media/news/sound/infogrames.mp3

2002 ZDNET Top 20 IT Anthems archived article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021004141104/http://www.zdnet.co.uk/specials/2002/it-anthems/
Platform: PlayStation 2
subdirectory_arrow_right Nuon (Platform)
4
While DVD video playback was a major selling point for the PlayStation 2, Sony didn't plan to support the feature at first, as they were already intending to manufacture standalone DVD players through their home entertainment department. However, after seeing a demonstration for the Nuon, a DVD player by VM Labs with video game support, Sony Computer Entertainment head Ken Kutaragi demanded that a similar level of multimedia functionality be incorporated into the PlayStation 2. The move was met with resistance from Sony's home entertainment wing, who believed that doing so would cause the console to cannibalize sales of their standalone DVD players. However, Kutaragi won out in the end due to the clout that the PlayStation brand had given him.
person VinchVolt calendar_month November 13, 2023
Collection: Brain Age
4
Dr. Ryuta Kawashima turned down over ¥3,292,377,000 JPY ($22 million USD) in Brain Age royalties, and instead donated them to Tohoku University’s Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, where he works, to help build a laboratory.
3
Attachment Ben Hurst, one of the writers for the 1993 "Sonic the Hedgehog" animated series, attempted to pitch a continuation of the show to Sega in 2002 as either a third season or a movie. He consulted DiC Entertainment, who produced the show (as well as two other Sonic cartoons, "Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog" and "Sonic Underground"), and was given the name of a Sega executive who wanted to talk with him more about the idea. Hurst then received a call from Ken Penders, at the time the head writer for Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog comics, who had been made aware of Hurst's interest in making a movie based on the series. Hurst offered to include Penders in the project, and told him his strategy for the pitch was to develop a satisfying storyline to conclude the show, and simultaneously giving Sega ideas for new games. This resulted in a long-standing controversy where Hurst claimed that Penders sabotaged his plan by telling Sega that he was trying to co-opt the franchise, resulting in Hurst's dismissal from the project. Over 13 years after Hurst's death, Penders would give his side of the story in a 2023 blog post, claiming that Hurst's joint proposal between the two would involve asking Sega to pay them to produce the series, and doubted that Sega would even schedule a meeting to let them pitch it if Sega funding the pitch was the premise, stating that "the owner of any IP is looking for a payday when it comes to using the rights for their properties."

In September 2003, Penders pitched his own concept for a Sonic the Hedgehog movie, titled "Sonic Armageddon". Four pieces of concept art were produced, and even a homemade pitch video was made to show to Sega executives. From what is known about the pitch (which seemed to borrow elements from both the 1993 series and the Archie comics), it would have involved the planet Mobius being destroyed and changed the depiction of the roboticization procedure to something much more gruesome than what had been previously seen. Notably, several major characters (such as the Freedom Fighters sans Sonic, Tails and Sally) are not shown in either the pitch video or the concept art, and the characters that are shown are given major redesigns. A common belief is that DreamWorks Animation was Penders' choice to produce the film, but Penders would later state in 2019 that he had pitched the idea to Sega only, and that DreamWorks had no involvement. The film never materialized; Penders would later claim on separate occasions that the idea was dropped because of "massive corporate upheaval", as well as the development of the animated series "Sonic X" affecting talks regarding the film.
person chocolatejr9 calendar_month April 6, 2024
Palworld
3
During Palworld's development, Pocket Pair hired over forty additional employees on a budget of one billion yen. Some of the staff hired notably came about under varied circumstances. For example, the character animator (despite having no prior industry experience) was hired by Takuro Mizobe after seeing his works on YouTube, where he posted combat animation videos and fan content based on the game Girls' Frontline as a hobbyist animator. Likewise, the director applied for the role during a Twitter recruitment run despite already lining up for a position at NetEase at the time. Finally, the main character designer for the game's Pals was initially rejected during a separate recruitment drive dedicated to finding illustrators that occurred in October 2020, but was ultimately hired after reapplying in February 2021.
Roblox
subdirectory_arrow_right Five Nights at Freddy's (Franchise)
3
"Five Nights at Freddy's: Survival Crew" is an upcoming Roblox game made in direct collaboration with Scott Cawthon, himself a fan of Roblox and playing it regularly with his children. However, due to miscommunication between Scott and the game's developer, Metaverse Team Frights, regarding one of the game's skins, a beta version of the game was accidentally released on December 20, 2023. The game was set to private two hours afterwards.
Darkened Skye
3
When a Skittles game was first proposed to eventual Darkened Skye executive producer Elizabeth Braswell by her boss, she responded "well, you have two choices: you can fire me now, and make the next year and a half much easier on me, or you can, like, not make me do this." The following night, she went to a bar and got drunk over the Skittles project, which she deemed "the end of [her] career". While intoxicated, she conceived the idea of using Skittles as a vehicle to do a self-aware high fantasy adventure game she had always wanted to do, but never got the chance.
3
The Nintendo Vs. Series originated as a way to gauge Nintendo's ability to court the North American market following the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. Because the crash had only affected the region's home console market, Nintendo believed that the still-thriving arcade scene would be a good way to test consumer interest in the Famicom library, porting select games to an arcade format. Despite the collapse of a deal with Atari to distribute the Famicom overseas, and despite the pessimistic results of market research, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi still believed that the company could successfully enter the field.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
subdirectory_arrow_right Ace Attorney (Franchise)
3
According to series creator Shu Takumi in a 2017 interview, Capcom executives issued two mandates affecting the writing of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. The first mandate was that the game had to include Phoenix Wright in the story, which went against Takumi's original idea for a reset of the series. The second mandate was to incorporate the Lay Judge system, a real-life judicial system, into the story, resulting in the creation of Spoiler:the MASON System game program and the trial run of a new Jurist System in the game's last case "Turnabout Succession". The Ace Attorney series began as a critique of how Japan's legal system handles criminal offenses, but around this time, that system was changing. While Japan previously suspended an older jurist system in 1943, their legislative body, the National Diet, gradually implemented a new lay judge system (裁判員, or "Saiban-in") from 2004 to 2009. This system, resembling more democratic systems in North American and European countries, calls upon six random common citizens to serve in serious criminal trials as inquisitorial judges sitting alongside three professional judges. Together they make up the judicial panel and actively analyze and investigate evidence presented to them throughout the trial before ruling on guilt and sentencing. Reflecting this, Spoiler:the Jurist System seen at the end of Turnabout Succession is made up of six random jurors guided by Phoenix Wright, where the player from the sixth juror's perspective has to rule the defendant Guilty or Not Guilty.

Takumi revealed that as part of the game’s promotion, Capcom collaborated with the Japanese Ministry of Justice and even gave a presentation of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney at the ministry's head office, implying that the system's mandated inclusion in the game was political propaganda. Despite Capcom cooperating in the Japanese government's push for this new system and despite participation experiences being reported as positive and easy to understand, the reception to other aspects of the system were largely negative. Complaints included gradually more severe sentencing since its implementation, the risk of criminal penalties for lay judges publicly discussing confidential deliberation room details after trials come to an end, and most starkly, calling upon Japanese citizens to put aside time to participate in the system, who have been increasingly unwilling to do so. This decline in interest has been largely attributed to the length of lay judge trials and even the length of pre-trial proceedings increasing significantly over the next decade, and due to aging populations and people simply not being able to make these commitments, more citizens refused to serve or even show up to be vetted for serving in the first place, making it harder to fill out the jury.

As a result of this reception, the Ace Attorney series has not used Spoiler:the MASON System and the Jurist System since, sticking with the series' traditional Initial Trial system in future games.
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month January 9, 2024
Poptropica
3
In December 2023, a Discord user posing as a representative of the developers of Poptropica stated on the server for the fan website Poptropica Help Blog that the game would be shutting down after December 29th. The account first appeared on the server in 2022, and while the blog did not do a complete screening to ensure the account was officially associated with the developers, it was eventually given the role of "Poptropica Creator" after they determined it was official based on its posting history. Many players initially believed the announcement was legitimate after Poptropica suddenly closed membership registrations earlier in the month. Shortly after the shut down announcement, the official Poptropica Twitter and Instagram accounts decried the Discord account as being unofficial, and assured players that the game would still be playable after December 29th, with all memberships up to the end of the year being available for free. The blog posted an apology for perpetuating the rumors the following day, but within the next year, the validity of the rumors being false would come into question.

On January 18, 2024, possibly in response to the rumors the prior month, Coolmath Games revealed that they had been in talks with the team behind Poptropica to host the game on their site exclusively, with the game remaining playable on Steam and mobile devices. This would later be confirmed by Poptropica themselves through a pop-up message on their website shortly afterwards. Notably, in a blog post expanding upon the news, Coolmath Games revealed that "the original Poptropica decided to wind down", something that had never been officially stated by Poptropica themselves. This would suggest that there was some degree of truth to the initial hoax as well as various rumors.
person chocolatejr9 calendar_month December 19, 2023
Poptropica Help Blog post about the shutdown claims:
https://poptropi.ca/2023/12/16/is-poptropica-shutting-down/

Official Poptropica statement regarding December shutdown rumors:
https://twitter.com/Poptropica/status/1735509964381372710

Coolmath Games announcement:
https://twitter.com/TheRealCoolmath/status/1748068741743555024

Poptropica Help Blog about the news:
https://poptropi.ca/2024/01/19/moving-coolmath/

Coolmath Games blog announcement:
https://www.coolmathgames.com/blog/poptropica-migration
Company: Nintendo
3
Despite Nintendo's current image as a family-friendly company, their initial success came from ties to organized crime. When the company was founded in 1889, hanafuda, which Nintendo manufactured cards for, was becoming increasingly controversial due to it being one of few betting games not covered by the Japanese Empire's anti-gambling laws, resulting in it becoming popular among the yakuza. While other companies were slowly exiting the hanafuda business as a result, founder Fusajiro Yamauchi pressed on, resulting in Nintendo becoming the country's most successful playing card manufacturer thanks mostly to strong sales among gang members.
Super Mario 3D All-Stars
subdirectory_arrow_right Super Mario Bros. 35 (Game), Mario (Franchise)
3
Attachment When Super Mario Bros. 35 and Super Mario 3D All-Stars were released, they were criticized for being preemptively planned to be pulled from digital storefronts on March 31, 2021. This, along with the DIC Mario cartoons coincidentally being moved from Netflix to Paramount+ on the same day, spawned an internet meme depicting Mario as receiving a medieval public execution by Nintendo on that date.
person Rocko & Heffer calendar_month November 17, 2023
Dottori-kun
subdirectory_arrow_right Head On (Game), Arcade (Platform)
3
Dottori-Kun, a 1991 demake of Sega's 1979 maze game Head-On, was created not to be played, but rather as a legal loophole around Japan's Electrical Appliance and Material Control Law which claimed that all arcade machines must contain a game when sold. Dottori-Kun allowed Sega to sell generic Astro City arcade machines which the arcade owner could swap the contents of at their leisure, and included test features to ensure the machine worked properly before installing a proper game. The game did not support coin insertion, and therefore was not a viable option for arcades even if an owner believed there was an audience for its simplistic gameplay and graphics, leading to the board being scrapped most of the time.
Code Vein
2
Attachment In a pre-release gameplay video from 2018, at the end of a tour of the Home Base, a lit sign featuring the logo for the pizza restaurant chain Domino's can be seen hanging on a wall near the refrigerator. This sign would be removed in the final game, but within the game's files are several voice lines spoken by the game's main cast (Coco, Davis, Eva, Io, Jack, Louis, Mia, Rin and Yakumo) talking about eating freshly delivered pizza in an unusually glorifying manner without mentioning the company by name. It's unclear how these voice clips would have been used in the game, but when taken with the unused Domino's sign, it's believed that this was all part of a planned promotional tie-in that fell through when the game was delayed to 2019, where Domino's would have somehow survived the apocalypse in the game's story and adapted to the Revenants and the Lost.
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month April 29, 2024
Code Vein - Domino's voice lines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNnNoC32N1k

Code Vein - Home Base early gameplay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGhVIQShNz0

The Cutting Room Floor article:
https://tcrf.net/Code_Vein#Domino.27s_Pizza_Promotion_Leftovers
Fallout 3
subdirectory_arrow_right Bethesda Softworks (Company)
2
According to former character artist Jonah Lobe, the response from Fallout fans and the fan website "No Mutants Allowed" to Bethesda purchasing the series from Interplay Entertainment and developing Fallout 3 consisted of "a lot of excitement, a lot of enthusiasm, and a lot of death threats." Lobe claimed that while he and other employees at Bethesda were not "privy" to most of the details on the threats due to the company shielding them from its workforce, as a result of the overwhelmingly vocal and mixed responses from fans, Bethesda had to hire a security guard for the first time in its 21-year history.
Fallout: New Vegas
subdirectory_arrow_right Fallout (Franchise)
2
During an interview with Variety Fair, Todd Howard revealed that the 2024 live-action "Fallout" TV series was considered canon to the games, having wanted to tell an original story within the game's world rather than adapt any of the previous games. However, when the show came out, this lead to complaints from fans accusing the show of retconning the events of Fallout: New Vegas. Specifically, the sixth episode "The Trap" featured a shot of a blackboard seemingly depicting the fall of Shady Sands (the capital of the New California Republic) as taking place in the year 2277. Fallout: New Vegas takes place in the year 2281, yet Shady Sands is stated to still exist in the game without any mention of a fall (although the city cannot be visited in-game). Emil Pagliarulo, a design director for Bethesda, would try to assure fans on Twitter that Fallout: New Vegas is still considered canon, claiming to being overprotective of the series' lore and going as far as to post a timeline of the Fallout series. While the timeline not only featured both Fallout: New Vegas, the TV series, and also confirmed that Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel is considered canon to the series, it did not address the timeline inconsistency brought about by the blackboard scene in the show. This reportedly lead some fans to accuse Bethesda of holding a grudge against Obsidian Entertainment for making what many fans consider to be the best Fallout game and using the show as a way to spite them. However, it's worth noting that there are three other possible explanations for the inconsistency:

• Whoever wrote "2277" was misinformed due to the post-apocalyptic setting forcing many to rely on guesswork for event dates.
• It could be a simple mistake in writing for a series with large amounts of lore to it.
• It could be a reference to the "Lonesome Road" DLC expansion for New Vegas, where the player is given the option to nuke the NCR, though there is no confirmation that this ending is canon.

Howard would later defend the TV series and insist the game is still canon in an interview with IGN, claiming he had an emotional reaction when the TV series writers brought up the idea of bombing Shady Sands (which he also clarified was not a nuclear bombing) and carefully talked through the decision with them. When asked specifically about the 2277/2281 inconsistency, his response was that they were "threading [the needle] tighter there" to make it land in the TV series, move the Fallout series forward, and insisted that the fall of Shady Sands took place just after the events of the game. He reiterated that Bethesda was careful about sticking to the series timeline, admitting that there "might be a little bit of confusion at some places" and claimed that what was most important to them was what was happening in the time period of the TV series.
person chocolatejr9 calendar_month April 14, 2024
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
2
Attachment Shortly after the game's release in 2020, the government of China ordered gray market online storefronts to stop selling the game. While no official reason was given for the ban, fans and analysts speculated that it was due to players in Hong Kong using the game's customization features and online connectivity to broadcast messages in support of protests that were occurring at the time against changes to the region's extradition laws. Around the same time, the game was also used by Joe Biden's campaign team to advertise his candidacy in the 2020 United States presidential election by creating a dedicated island and customizable items.

16 days after the election in November, Nintendo updated the game's Usage Guidelines for Businesses and Organizations, significantly narrowing how they could use the game for advertising. This included a rule requesting that offensive content be refrained from being created in-game, along with a statement asking to "refrain from bringing politics into the Game." However, this rule does not clarify what "politics" specifically Nintendo wanted to keep out of the game, and it appears to be in effect for any content created after the update, as it seems that none of the Hong Kong protest content or the Biden campaign's promotional content were taken down.
person VinchVolt calendar_month March 28, 2024
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