The South Korean version of the game (released two years after the original Japanese edition) contains eleven unused maps not found in any other release, featuring fully 3D environments which do not line up with any locations present in the finished product. All assets related to these maps are dated after the game's Japanese release, with intervals ranging from five days to just over three months. Additionally, the maps' texture names are written in Romanized Japanese rather than Korean, indicating that they were not created by Nintendo of Korea.
Two of these maps, kri_04 and kri_05, additionally feature various cat NPCs, all drawn in substantially different art styles compared to not only each other, but also the final game. Each one is named after a developer from the Super Paper Mario staff: yamada_neko02 (Koichiro Yamada), koba_neko (Sayuri Kobayashi), tuka_neko (Naoko Tsukamoto), and kawa_neko (Chie Kawabe).
Of these four, kawa_neko is the most unique, and was apparently designed as a player character. Firstly, the cat's name is only given to its mesh, with its sprite instead being named bc_all.1. Additionally, kawa_neko features an animated tail and a mesh that is centered on the ground rather than the middle of the room. Furthermore, new_neko_18, a redesigned version of kawa_neko with white fur instead of black, can be found in kri_08, kri_09, and kri_10; new_neko_18's mesh is explicitly labeled "PLAYER" in the data for these maps.
Taken together, all of these elements imply that these early rooms were created as a proof-of-concept for an original project by Intelligent Systems that ended up cancelled for unknown reasons.
The source code for Doubutsu no Mori contains references to a variety of non-Nintendo Famicom ROMs that would not appear in the final game, including Arkanoid, F1 Circus, and most bizarrely, the bootleg port of Tekken 2 by Hummer Team.
In Super Fall Brawl, one of the many reskins of Jingle Brawl, the new character was intended to be Sheen Estevez from Jimmy Neutron, in promotion for his then-new spin-off series Planet Sheen. However, Sheen was not coded correctly, making him near-impossible to beat in a fight. The game's second update would remove Sheen and his stage completely, and he would never be added back in, making Fall Brawl the only Super Brawl game without any new combatants. Sheen would return in Super Brawl 2, though the House of Pain stage, based on the first episode of Planet Sheen, would be swapped for a Zeenu stage generally based on Planet Sheen instead of a single episode.
In the game's code is evidence of an unused Event Pokémon. Event Pokémon are exclusive Pokémon throughout the franchise's history which usually have movesets or other unique properties that would not otherwise legitimately occur in normal gameplay.
A code string indicates that Diglett learns the move "Acid" at Lvl. 1, found at the end of Diglett's Generation 1 move pool, as this programming method was the manner in which the programmers ensured Event Pokémon transferred via the Game Pak to Stadium could function properly during gameplay.
To date, a Diglett with Acid being legitimately learned in it's moveset has never been released or distributed by an official Event by Nintendo nor Game Freak.
In the source code for Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales, a string of text can be found reading "no smutty comments please", suggesting there were previously inappropriate developer comments in the code thet were deleted.
While Super Donkey is thought to have ultimately evolved into Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, the project was likely tossed around as a Mario or Zelda game at various points in development.
Various development assets associated with Super Donkey, which were uncovered alongside the prototype in the 2020 Gigaleak, include sprites and animations for Link, Mario, and Donkey Kong; the animation files for Link are dated to fall 1990, while Mario's animation files are dated to winter of that year. Additional files for all three characters span overlapping periods in 1991. Link's sprites and animations indicate that Super Donkey was at one point planned to be a side-scrolling Zelda title similar to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, while Mario's animations imply that the iteration that starred him and Donkey Kong eventually morphed into the 1994 Game Boy title Donkey Kong.
The game’s files have four .txt files titled DEUTCH.TXT, ENGLISH.TXT, ESPANOL.TXT and FRENCH.TXT, suggesting German, Spanish and French versions were planned for the game. In the end, only an English version exists.
This game originally started out as a racing game for the Wallace & Gromit series, called "Wallace & Gromit: The Grand Tour". Unused graphics and codes relating to Wallace & Gromit can still be found within the game's data, such as codes describing the main characters' appearance, as well as pictures of Wallace, Gromit, Preston & Wendolene.
There's a few unused messages hidden in the ROM that differ from the US and EU version. In the US, there are 3 messages of "Hello there!" whereas in the EU version they read: "Wow Salem, so this is what the inside of a hex editor looks like..." "Hello there!" "Hey look! Someone ripped our game!!!"
There is also a large chunk of uncompiled code, and for some reason the file path to the developer's ZoneAlarm settings: "C:\PROGRAM FILES\ZONE LABS\ZONEALARM\ZONEALARM.E"
The Dragon Quest-esque overworld area, colloquially known as FC World, features a large island on the right-hand side of the map that is not accessible during the normal course of play despite taking up the majority of FC World's land mass. No events or exits are associated with this island, popularly known as FC World C, meaning that hacking the game to place Madotsuki there would prove fruitless.
Despite this, there is evidence that this area was meant to be explorable at one point in development. In the Version 0.09 build (the last one before the "final" Version 0.10 release in 2007), the Dense Woods and Windmill World areas feature the player character from the minigame NASU as an NPC; however, a flag is set to render it invisible (and therefore non-interactable). If the player uses RPG Maker 2003's debugging tools to render the character visible, interacting with it teleports Madotsuki to another unused area in FC World, a small island with four statues on it and an exit at the bottom. Going through this exit takes Madotsuki to FC World C.
While FC World C is still as barren as in other versions of the game, the unused chain of events leading up to it in Version 0.09 indicates that the area was intended to play some kind of role in the final game and that Kikiyama continued to try implementing it late into the game's update history.
Certain in-game enemies are only able to be fought by Mario & Luigi or Bowser. Despite this, a few Bowser-oriented enemies have unique behaviors for Mario & Luigi, which can only be seen through hacking the game:
• All of Naplock's attacks can be dodged or countered by jumping, with its snot bubble attack also missing Mario & Luigi entirely even if nothing is done. • Dark Mechawful's punch attack can be countered with Mario & Luigi's hammers, while its countdown attack is replaced by the same star attack used by the Dark Mechawful head, which can fight Mario & Luigi in normal gameplay if Bowser inhales it. However, in a hacked Dark Mechawful fight, this attack progresses extremely slowly. • The smoke signals at the start of Choomba's charge attack are changed from fist and shell icons to "M" and "L" ones, indicating which brothers it will charge at and in which order; the attack can also be countered by hammering. • Dark Trashure's thrown items can be avoided or countered by jumping, similarly to its standard counterpart. However, the items move far faster than those thrown by a regular Trashure or a Dark Trashure fought by Bowser.
While most of these behaviors appear to be failsafes, Choomba is unique in that the "M" and "L" smoke signals are not present anywhere else in the game, indicating that at one point in development, Mario & Luigi would've been able to explore the Tunnel, where Choombas are fought.
Meanwhile, when hacking the game to allow Bowser to fight enemies that can only be encountered by Mario & Luigi, most of them will either crash the game, flee immediately, or display glitchy behavior. One unique case is Magifoofas, which can be inhaled by Bowser (despite the Vacuum Block not indicating this), indicating that the developers considered letting him encounter them in some form.
In an interview with the developers at Blue Tongue, they mentioned several buildings they wanted to include in this game, but had to drop due to design decisions or memory constraints on home consoles:
•Hotels, which would provide extra accommodation for guests. •Dino-Vet Station, which would have been vital for keeping dinosaurs healthy. •Hunting Platforms, which would let visitors hunt down carnivores in the park from afar.
The Dino-Vet Station can be found in earlier promotional material for Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis and also within its game files. Likewise with the Hunting Platform, which also still has Audio, Ini and even Rig Files within the game.
In the seventh episode of each course, the player is required to chase down and defeat Shadow Mario to obtain a Shine Sprite, which spawns from his dematerializing body as he teleports away. In actuality, the Shine Sprites are stored at fixed locations and are simply teleported to his location by the flag "appearShineFromKageMario". If the flag is replaced with "appearShineFromNPC", the Shine Sprites appear where they are stored, implying that these were their originally intended locations. The fixed points in "Shadow Mario Revisited", "Hold It, Shadow Mario!", and "Shadow Mario Runs Wild" also feature dedicated cameras for spawning cutscenes, corroborating the idea.
Of note is that the internal location for the Shine Sprite in "Shadow Mario Runs Wild" places it partially inside Pianta Village's golden mushroom, which further implies that this object had its height raised at some point during development.
Within the data for Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum is code to spawn in a Level 40 Darkrai as a roaming Pokémon, tying in with its nature as a malevolent counterpart to Cresselia (which similarly becomes a roaming Pokémon after meeting the player on Fullmoon Island). In the final game, Darkrai is instead encountered as a stationary opponent at Newmoon Island after obtaining the Member Card as a Mystery Gift item at select in-person events.
There are eight Titanite Demons in Dark Souls, but the one on the bridge connecting the Demon Ruins to Lost Izalith is the only one that respawns due to a typo in that Titanite Demon's event ID. However, it's unknown if this was an accident or a deliberate typo to remove a limit from upgrading weapons.
There are fully functional unused Diggin' Chuck, Bullet Bill, Fishbone, and Spiny enemies in the code of Hummer Team's Super Mario World, as well as sprites for crushers, Lakitu, and Clappin' Chuck without associated coding.
The Saturn release's demo, "Silhouette Mirage: Trial Version", normally ends after level two. However, hidden on the game's disc is an early pre-release build of the retail game, dated 1997-07-16, while the final game has a build date of 1997-07-30. The full game is inaccessible without modifying the data.
Within the Saturn port's data is an unused English language option, suggesting that the title may have been considered for a Western release. Fan translator Malenko made the discover before creating a patch to re-enable the option.
Atari 2600's Asteroids has an unused functionality for showing graphics of the spaceship as a life counter instead of the number, much like the arcade version. This was most likely changed for processing power reasons, as only six ships can be displayed at a time.
The South Korean version of the game (released two years after the original Japanese edition) contains eleven unused maps not found in any other release, featuring fully 3D environments which do not line up with any locations present in the finished product. All assets related to these maps are dated after the game's Japanese release, with intervals ranging from five days to just over three months. Additionally, the maps' texture names are written in Romanized Japanese rather than Korean, indicating that they were not created by Nintendo of Korea.
In the game's code is evidence of an unused Event Pokémon. Event Pokémon are exclusive Pokémon throughout the franchise's history which usually have movesets or other unique properties that would not otherwise legitimately occur in normal gameplay.
This game originally started out as a racing game for the Wallace & Gromit series, called "Wallace & Gromit: The Grand Tour". Unused graphics and codes relating to Wallace & Gromit can still be found within the game's data, such as codes describing the main characters' appearance, as well as pictures of Wallace, Gromit, Preston & Wendolene.
The Dragon Quest-esque overworld area, colloquially known as FC World, features a large island on the right-hand side of the map that is not accessible during the normal course of play despite taking up the majority of FC World's land mass. No events or exits are associated with this island, popularly known as FC World C, meaning that hacking the game to place Madotsuki there would prove fruitless.
Certain in-game enemies are only able to be fought by Mario & Luigi or Bowser. Despite this, a few Bowser-oriented enemies have unique behaviors for Mario & Luigi, which can only be seen through hacking the game:
In an interview with the developers at Blue Tongue, they mentioned several buildings they wanted to include in this game, but had to drop due to design decisions or memory constraints on home consoles:
Atari 2600's Asteroids has an unused functionality for showing graphics of the spaceship as a life counter instead of the number, much like the arcade version. This was most likely changed for processing power reasons, as only six ships can be displayed at a time.
