There have been two non-profit Chrono fangames which received a substantial amount of coverage that were ultimately shutdown by Square Enix.
The first was Chrono Resurrection, a 3D remake of the original for PC, Xbox, Gamecube and the Nintendo 64. The second was Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes, a ROM hack of the original game which served as a sequel set five years after.
Both projects were stopped in 2004 and 2009 respectively, after receiving a cease and desist letter from Square Enix. An alpha version of Crimson Echoes has since been leaked online.
Eliza's Story Mode text data commentary contains an ASCII picture based on fan art of Maya Amano from Persona2. When questioned about it, programmer Jonathan Kim explained that many messages and pictures like that found in the game's code were the result of him venting off steam while working on the game, and that after the game had been datamined by fans, he was forced to remove the majority of those messages and pictures, with some exceptions like the Maya Amano fan art.
In the end credits of the Japanese release, three additional images with captions underneath them are shown during the montage of official artwork. These images appear to be drawings and fan mail sent by young Japanese fans to Capcom that influenced the game's development:
• The first image shown in the credits, submitted by 14-year-old Masahiro Onuma from Osaka, reads:
"Kobun Mole It comes out of the land on the ground, and comes out of anywhere in the cave. You can hit the body with a drill and crush the scattered soil and stones!"
This drawing appears to be the first design for the Servbot Borer that was later simplified for the final game and later modified again in Mega Man Legends 2.
• The second image, submitted by 11-year-old Takumi Miyayoshi from the Ishikawa Prefecture, reads:
"Kobun's Bomb Dummy dolls are passing one after another from right to left. (It's a bomb)"
This drawing may be the first design for the Servbot training minigame in the Gym, where a Servbot has to dodge and catch bombs volleyed at it by two other Servbots and then throw them back at targets behind them.
• The third image, submitted by 10-year-old Masashi Kaga from Tokyo, reads:
"Bonne Rocket Bazooka There is a roller under the trigger, so you can move while doing something!!"
This drawing appears to be the first design for the Bonne Bazooka, a weapon used by the Gustaff that can be developed by Servbot #31 after he obtains his skill and the Pipe from the Nakkai Ruins.
The text featured on the fan drawings themselves have been left untranslated in this submission as the pictures were scaled down to fit in the credits and thus appear smaller, grainier and more difficult to read.
Two background characters featured in the Pizzascare level, a pink-clothed Peppino and a dark-skinned blue-clothed heterochromatic Noise, are fan characters known as Peddito and the Doise created by a fan named Robbie1scool. The Doise would be included as The Noise's exclusive boss in the Noise Update.
It is jokingly implied in a trailer for Antonblast that Anton is the father of Amy Rose from the Sonic the Hedgehog series. This is a reference to a fan art trend following the reveal of Sonic Origins, where fans would portray Anton as a friend or family member to Amy after her spinning hammer attacks were shown to have an aesthetic resemblance to Anton's hammer attacks.
The Battle Cards from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories were intended to appear in Super Smash Flash 2. They would have summoned characters from Disney movies, with Genie; Stitch; and Jack Skellington being named as planned summons. The item was scrapped due to conceptually overlapping with Assist Trophies and Poké Balls.
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During the heyday of Creatures' fandom, a user nicknamed "AntiNorn", a late US Army officer, started posting videos of Norns (the pets featured in the game, which were coded in a manner more closely resembling the human brain than a regular pet simulator game) being abused as a counter-cultural response to the Creatures community favoring idealized fan content that ignored or removed elements of conflict or danger from the game.
AntiNorn provided an abused Norn called "Slave" for visitors to download and import into their games, which horrified certain members of the Creatures fandom. While many players downloaded Slave with the intention of protecting her, she turned out to have a fear of the player character, which she named "God". She had also been trained to eat poisonous weeds as food, could fall unconscious out of sheer stress, and was too frail to live a particularly long life.
Some players did manage to rehabilitate Slave and allow her to live a full life, but AntiNorn later revealed that he had her DNA genetically modified to produce alcohol in her bloodstream, meaning that if players had bred Slave, their entire Norn lineage would be contaminated with perpetually drunken Norns. The response to this was immense and fierce, to the point of AntiNorn receiving graphic death threats, castration threats, plans to inject his eyeballs with hydrogen peroxide, accusations of him being a demon, and descriptions of acid etching his entrails.
Following this, AntiNorn would start a website called "Tortured Norns", which contained more provoking downloadable content including cocaine pipes for Norns, recipes made from Norn babies, and a Norn wired to associate reward with punishment and therefore only able to experience pain.
In Garfield's showcase presentation, the narrator remarks "It's time to kick Odie off the table!" when showing Garfield's light neutral attack. This is a reference to "Garfielf", a surreal fan animation by YouTube animator PilotRedSun. While kicking Odie off the table is a recurring gag in Garfield comics, the specific quote "It's time to kick Odie off the table" originates from the Garfielf video and seems to not be from any official Garfield media.
On the OverClocked Remix website, the remix "Picolescence", based on Tails & The Music Maker, was created by user zircon in response to a tweet from Sega's official Twitter account jokingly calling out the site for not having any Sega Pico-related remixes.
HHGregg's Quest for Coupons, a fangame based on the online retailer's HH mascot who became a niche meme, was officially endorsed by HHGregg on their Twitter account in 2018.
Rivals of Aether's "Workshop Character Pack" - comprised of Mollo, Hodan, Pomme, and Olympia - is made up of fan-made characters originally created for mods, revised to match the quality of the base game characters.
Aftonbuilt was created as a pitch to Scott Cawthon for an original game made for the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative, but it was declined. The game's existence, as well as a demo, were first revealed on April 22, 2022.
According to Kane Carter (creator of the POPGOES series of fangames), Scott Cawthon had contacted IvanG about possibly allowing the Jolly series to become part of the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative, unaware that the series was based on the real-life Filipino fast food chain Jollibee. Before accepting Scott's invitation, IvanG posted a picture on his Twitter of Jolly with a PlayStation 4 controller. This alerted the other Fanverse devs, who promptly told Scott about both the copyrighted material in Jolly and the fact that Ivan was teasing the Fanverse, ultimately leading the series to be dropped from the project.
A fangame called Chomper's was in development, with the hope that it could become a new title in the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative. However, due to drama involving the game's director, the whole game was cancelled before it was even sent to Scott Cawthon. Despite this, a pitch demo was eventually released for free on Game Jolt.
In 2023, an unknown person by the name of Brandon White bought the UK rights to Cookie's Bustle under the fake company name of "Graceware" and began filing DMCA takedowns against any website or video with documentation of the game, in some cases fraudulently using the name of Nintendo, believed to be in an act of copyright trolling. This led to an uptick in interest in the game, with many content creators streaming, making fan works based on, and reviewing the game in retaliation.
In a rare instance of Kingdom Hearts being referenced outside of KH-related Disney media, the Kingdom Key and Sora's hair can be seen within Sweet Pete’s assortment of cartoon props in the 2022 film "Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers". An interesting detail about this cameo is that Sora's hair appears to have been traced or taken from DeviantArt user kimbolie12's fan art of Sora from Kingdom Hearts III.
Oddity started life as Mother 4, a fanmade sequel to the EarthBound trilogy, and was advertised as such in initial marketing. However, in 2017, the development team decided to rebrand the game following a wave of cease-and-desist notices against other high-profile Nintendo fangames.
Vector's artwork in this game is based on a fan render made by DeviantArt user Nibroc-Rock, who would later work with Sega and contribute official renders used for the Sonic the Hedgehog social media accounts and the mobile game Sonic Speed Simulator.
In 2021, an auction was put up on eBay for an "Among Us-shaped chicken nugget", supposedly obtained from the McDonald's promotional tie-in meal with the K-Pop boy band BTS. This played off of a then-recent meme depicting Among Us players as suffering from pareidolia and mistaking simple everyday objects for impostors, the general cultural distaste for boy bands like BTS, and a viral 2017 eBay listing of a Cheeto supposedly shaped like the deceased gorilla Harambe. The nugget would come alongside a packet of Szechuan Sauce, a McDonald's condiment that had received a controversial limited release provoked by a joke in "The Rickshank Redemption", an episode of the animated series Rick & Morty. The auction sold to user polizna for $99,997.00 USD, outclassing the price of the Harambe Cheeto by $97.00.
In June 2023, the character models for the game received complaints on Twitter by fan artist Rafa Knight, who noted that they resembled her own models of the characters that had been used for merchandise, even having the same minor imperfections as the toys. She claimed she had not been credited for her work either, instead being ignored by Sega and other related figures. In response, Katie Chrzanowski, the social media manager for Sega of America, apologized for the misunderstanding and explained that the models were custom-made for Sonic Superstars, and promised to privately email Knight with more details later on. It's unknown if any more developments in this controversy happened since.
There have been two non-profit Chrono fangames which received a substantial amount of coverage that were ultimately shutdown by Square Enix.
Eliza's Story Mode text data commentary contains an ASCII picture based on fan art of Maya Amano from Persona 2. When questioned about it, programmer Jonathan Kim explained that many messages and pictures like that found in the game's code were the result of him venting off steam while working on the game, and that after the game had been datamined by fans, he was forced to remove the majority of those messages and pictures, with some exceptions like the Maya Amano fan art.
In the end credits of the Japanese release, three additional images with captions underneath them are shown during the montage of official artwork. These images appear to be drawings and fan mail sent by young Japanese fans to Capcom that influenced the game's development:
Two background characters featured in the Pizzascare level, a pink-clothed Peppino and a dark-skinned blue-clothed heterochromatic Noise, are fan characters known as Peddito and the Doise created by a fan named Robbie1scool. The Doise would be included as The Noise's exclusive boss in the Noise Update.
The Battle Cards from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories were intended to appear in Super Smash Flash 2. They would have summoned characters from Disney movies, with Genie; Stitch; and Jack Skellington being named as planned summons. The item was scrapped due to conceptually overlapping with Assist Trophies and Poké Balls.
On the OverClocked Remix website, the remix "Picolescence", based on Tails & The Music Maker, was created by user zircon in response to a tweet from Sega's official Twitter account jokingly calling out the site for not having any Sega Pico-related remixes.
According to Kane Carter (creator of the POPGOES series of fangames), Scott Cawthon had contacted IvanG about possibly allowing the Jolly series to become part of the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative, unaware that the series was based on the real-life Filipino fast food chain Jollibee. Before accepting Scott's invitation, IvanG posted a picture on his Twitter of Jolly with a PlayStation 4 controller. This alerted the other Fanverse devs, who promptly told Scott about both the copyrighted material in Jolly and the fact that Ivan was teasing the Fanverse, ultimately leading the series to be dropped from the project.
In a rare instance of Kingdom Hearts being referenced outside of KH-related Disney media, the Kingdom Key and Sora's hair can be seen within Sweet Pete’s assortment of cartoon props in the 2022 film "Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers". An interesting detail about this cameo is that Sora's hair appears to have been traced or taken from DeviantArt user kimbolie12's fan art of Sora from Kingdom Hearts III.
Oddity started life as Mother 4, a fanmade sequel to the EarthBound trilogy, and was advertised as such in initial marketing. However, in 2017, the development team decided to rebrand the game following a wave of cease-and-desist notices against other high-profile Nintendo fangames.
Vector's artwork in this game is based on a fan render made by DeviantArt user Nibroc-Rock, who would later work with Sega and contribute official renders used for the Sonic the Hedgehog social media accounts and the mobile game Sonic Speed Simulator.
In 2021, an auction was put up on eBay for an "Among Us-shaped chicken nugget", supposedly obtained from the McDonald's promotional tie-in meal with the K-Pop boy band BTS. This played off of a then-recent meme depicting Among Us players as suffering from pareidolia and mistaking simple everyday objects for impostors, the general cultural distaste for boy bands like BTS, and a viral 2017 eBay listing of a Cheeto supposedly shaped like the deceased gorilla Harambe. The nugget would come alongside a packet of Szechuan Sauce, a McDonald's condiment that had received a controversial limited release provoked by a joke in "The Rickshank Redemption", an episode of the animated series Rick & Morty. The auction sold to user polizna for $99,997.00 USD, outclassing the price of the Harambe Cheeto by $97.00.
In June 2023, the character models for the game received complaints on Twitter by fan artist Rafa Knight, who noted that they resembled her own models of the characters that had been used for merchandise, even having the same minor imperfections as the toys. She claimed she had not been credited for her work either, instead being ignored by Sega and other related figures. In response, Katie Chrzanowski, the social media manager for Sega of America, apologized for the misunderstanding and explained that the models were custom-made for Sonic Superstars, and promised to privately email Knight with more details later on. It's unknown if any more developments in this controversy happened since.