In an interview with TechRaptor, lead developer Ryan Koons stated that the decision to make HuniePop a gameplay-centric title instead of a story-centric one like other dating sims didn't happen until months into development. The original intention was to make a traditional dating sim, only for Koons – who already had little interest in storytelling in video games – to overhaul the concept due to his growing ennui.
In the same interview, Koons stated that he deliberately sought to avoid many of the cliches associated with dating sims, particularly "the usual innocent waifu style character types." Consequently, the game's cast are based on people from his own life, and the writing is much more irreverent than other dating sims. In particular, Koons described deuteragonist Kyu Sugardust as a raunchy fictionalization of her voice actress, Jaclyn Aimee.
The virtual YouTuber KSon voices the character Kei in both the English and Japanese dubs of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. KSon noted that while she found it easier to voice act in Japanese, the staff in the studio praised her pronunciation during voice recording.
Darryl Kurylo, who originally voiced Kazuma Kiryu in the English dub of Yakuza, also voiced many generic enemies including their groans and grunts throughout the game.
The original English dub voice actor for Kazuma Kiryu, Darryl Kurylo, received a copy of the first Yakuza game after starring in it. Kurlyo played the game with his son for a brief period just so he could get a feel for how his voice work was implemented into the game. While Kurlyo was looking forward to reprising the role in future games, Sega decided against producing English dubs for the series at the time and only providing subtitles, a decision that Kurlyo supported due to the expenses from dubbing delaying the release of the game. His son Bailey Kurlyo kept playing the game on his own and finished it in just a few days, becoming one of his favorite games and turning him into a longtime Yakuza fan, while Darryl never kept up with the story of the series after the first game.
For the game's English dub, Spike Chunsoft requested that NIS America keep Monokuma's name intact. He would end up becoming the team's favorite character to localize, working to keep him both funny and threatening like in the Japanese version. This, however, led to difficulties finding a suitable voice actor for the character, as they wanted somebody that could embody Monokuma's "hyperactive psychopathic nature", not helped by how beloved the original Japanese voice actress was. When asked what Monokuma was like in the English version, script editor Phoenix Spaulding stated:
"We like to think he’s not all that different from the Japanese version – which is to say, kind of all over the place. He’s bossy, condescending, smarmy, goofy, quick to anger, quick to forgive, quick to anger again, devious, and totally lovable."
Akio Otsuka voiced the series main antagonist, Nobunaga Oda, in the Japanese dub of Onimusha: Warlords, and would reprise the role for three more games in the series until 2004. He would also later go on to voice and lend his likeness to Miyamoto Musashi, the protagonist of the 2024 "Onimusha" ONA series.
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.
The "Woohoo!" sound effect played when rescuing a Bikini Bottomite in Drawn to Life: SpongeBob SquarePants Edition appears to be a plagiarized, sped-up sound effect of Homer Simpson from The Simpsons.
The Poostall Dude is voiced by a fan known as Christian Hunter, who also did uncredited voice work as the announcer for the Postal: Redux and Postal 2 DLCs of the game Zaccaria Pinball.
If you insert the PlayStation or PC versions of the game into a CD player, or play the Sega Saturn version's disc in the console's music player, you can access a hidden song on track 6 titled "Motty's Rap". The song consists of humorous phrases recorded by longtime FIFA commentator John Motson that mostly comment on the song's techno/rock instrumental with some mild innuendos, including: "That is the fattest bottom end I've ever heard" and "This reminds me of touring with the Sex Pistols". The song was the work of EA composer/audio designer Robert Bailey, who got Motson to record lines for the song during his time in the recording booth. In a 2024 interview, Bailey stated that the song was one of many obscure Easter eggs involving Motson's dialogue that the developers put together, with "Motty's Rap" being pulled from "just all of the stupidest phrases John said" and were put into the context of the music. The song was approved to be put into the game by its executive producer Bruce McMillan.
In an interview with the game's composer Yuzo Koshiro published in the Japanese book series Game Maestro in 2001, he clarified that while there were dozens of people on the game's music staff, there were only four main composers actually writing and arranging the music, making them the smallest group within the project (this also included people working on sound effects and voice acting). The main theme of the game was written by composer Mitsuyoshi Takenobu. Koshiro believed Takenobu had "the hardest time of us all" during development as he also helped fine-tune the game's music in line with the programmers and director's requests. Koshiro also mentioned that at the beginning of the project, the offer made to get him on the project was that Takenobu would write songs, and Koshiro would orchestrate and arrange them. However, as the project went on, they both went on the opposite direction.
BlazBlue: Central Fiction is the first title in the BlazBlue series to not feature an English dub for its international release. According to Aksys Games, this was done to ensure that the game would release sooner, as they would have had to delay the game by six-to-eight months if they tried to add an English dub. This lead to a fan petition to try and convince Aksys to either delay the game or add an English dub as DLC, which even included support from various actors involved with the BlazBlue series, such as Patrick Seitz (the English voice of series protagonist Ragna the Bloodedge).
In the Hall of Justice Area, two tribute plaques can be found for Kevin Conroy and Arleen Sorkin, the respective voices of Batman and Harley Quinn in "Batman: The Animated Series" who passed away during the game's development.
Both Dance Dance Revolution Solo Bass Mix and Solo 2000 are the only Arcade releases to feature a female announcer. The same announcer is also used in the console game Dance Dance Revolution Extra Mix.
Bubsy voice actress Lani Minella had concerns that Bubsy was too annoying during recording, but her voice directors simply told her that this was by intent.
A common theory is that the character Hanawa, Kiryu’s handler from Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, is actually Yu Morinaga from Yakuza 5. This is because Spoiler:Morinaga was killed off-screen and his body was never shown, the character has the same voice actor as Hanawa, and he calls Kiryu "Taichi Suzuki", which is the codename he goes by in Yakuza 5.
Originally, the development team behind Star Fox 64 themselves actually tried to provide the voice lines for the characters:
—Back in the day, a lot of Nintendo’s games used voices provided by the staff.
Imamura: We dubbed Star Fox 64 ourselves at first, too. We were all like, wow, this is gonna be so cool! But when we showed it to people outside the team, they responded with “laaaame” (laughs). We were told “this is unforgivably bad” (laughs), and so we switched to professional voice actors.
—Ahahaha! But, now I want to hear it for myself… (laughs)
Imamura: Rare did the same thing with their game, except they were really good at it (laughs)
The culture around voice acting isn’t cemented in the US to the extent that it is in Japan; in the US, voice acting is performed by regular actors, whereas in Japan, voice actors have a very specific and distinctive style of delivery, and it could be that it’s left such an impression on us that we’re not as capable of tolerating amateurish voice acting.
What’s funny is that some of the sales people who didn’t like our N64 dub told us that the Super Famicom “buh-buh-buh-buh” voices were cooler, so as a trial, we looked backwards and imported those SFC-style “buh-buh-buh”s, but the reaction was, “nah, that sucks” (laughs). We really did experiment with the animal language (laughs).
As mentioned by Takaya Imamura above, this was met with negative reception internally and thus they switched over to using professional voice actors. What remains of this lost developer dub was recently discovered within the Nintendo gigaleak from 2020.
The official Japanese Star Fox 64 guidebook reveals that it was programmer Nobuhiro Sumiyoshi who provided the original voice for Leon Powalski, who is voiced by Shinobu Satouchi (who also voices Fox McCloud) in the final Japanese version of Star Fox 64.
In the English dub of the Ace Attorney anime, the character Furio Tigre is voiced by Sam Riegel, the English voice of series protagonist Phoenix Wright starting with his appearance in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (with the exception of Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, where Phoenix was instead voiced by Trevor White). Based on a tweet from Kyle Phillips, the voice director for the dub, this appears to be intentional, as the case Tigre was involved in, "Recipe for Turnabout", involved him Spoiler:posing as Phoenix in a plot to frame Maggey Byrde for murder.
Planet Zoness was originally a beautiful water planet similar to its twin planet, Aquas. It was famous for its resorts and was where Peppy Hare had taken his wife, Vivian, for their honeymoon. However, Andross' forces would invade and pollute its waters with their bioweapons, mutating the local wildlife to become larger and violent.
Early footage of Star Fox 64 circa 1996 actually show Zoness in its pure, unpolluted state, which seems to indicate that making it polluted was decided on later in development. There's actually appears to be dialogue remnants of this cleaner version in the developer's dub:
Peppy: Be careful of the wildlife on this planet.
Falco: Huge, these guys!
Slippy: I want to live in a sea like this, ribbit.
When finishing the stage:
Peppy: I didn't know this planet was under Andorf's power too.
Slippy: I will come back when there is peace.
But in the final polluted version, this exchange in the JP version goes:
Peppy: 何て事だ・・・これがあのゾネスか？ (What the... is this Zoness?)
Slippy: 泳ぐ気にもならないよ (I don't even feel like swimming.)
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The end credits of Duckman: The Graphic Adventures of a Private Dick play a variety of outtakes from the game's voice recording sessions. In-game, these are all censored with bleeps and stored on a single audio file, but inside the files of the game you can find not only uncensored versions, but also lines that aren't used in the credits whatsoever.
The "Woohoo!" sound effect played when rescuing a Bikini Bottomite in Drawn to Life: SpongeBob SquarePants Edition appears to be a plagiarized, sped-up sound effect of Homer Simpson from The Simpsons.
In the Hall of Justice Area, two tribute plaques can be found for Kevin Conroy and Arleen Sorkin, the respective voices of Batman and Harley Quinn in "Batman: The Animated Series" who passed away during the game's development.
Originally, the development team behind Star Fox 64 themselves actually tried to provide the voice lines for the characters:
Planet Zoness was originally a beautiful water planet similar to its twin planet, Aquas. It was famous for its resorts and was where Peppy Hare had taken his wife, Vivian, for their honeymoon. However, Andross' forces would invade and pollute its waters with their bioweapons, mutating the local wildlife to become larger and violent.