In the castle courtyard in Super Mario 64, there is a plaque to a power star with an illegible name written below, often interpreted as either "Eternal Star" or "L is Real 2401" - with the latter being more popular for how it could be seen as a cryptic hint towards unlocking Luigi.
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.
Felix the Cat, the new playable character announced alongside the Kickstarter campaign for the game's story mode DLC RULE of Inverse Ninjas, was decided through a Twitter poll. The other three characters on the poll were The Continental Op (a private investigator character created by Dashiell Hammett in 1923 whose copyright expired in 2019), Gnorm Gnat (an insect character created by Jim Davis prior to Garfield who entered the public domain as a result of his original comics not having a copyright notice), and Tarcis the Lover (a joke slot seemingly originating from a dating simulator made by this game's co-developer Trainwreck Studios, and that voting for was actively discouraged by the developers).
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To save development time and resources, the splash screen artwork for each of the Sailor Senshi superimposes their heads and uniforms onto a nude base model. Despite the clothes obscuring most of the base's body, it is unusually detailed; according to Lynn Okamoto, who designed the game's graphics, this was because the game was planned to feature alternate costumes for the playable cast, such as their civilian clothes and swimsuits.
Because of time constraints, however, this feature was never implemented, with the only remnant being a cheat code that renders the player's character barefoot on the splash screen. The code requires the player to press Down, Down, Down, Right, Right, Right, Up, Up, Up, Left, Left, Left, Up, Down, Right, Left during the sequence when a spotlight moves around a screen and highlights Luna.
Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt / World Class Track Meet has unused graphics from Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, which can be activated by a Game Genie code, allowing one to play SMB1 levels with The Lost Levels graphics, albeit with some glitched tiles in different parts of the game.
Inside the code of Cheggers' Party Quiz and Alan Hansen's Sports Challenge, there are two unused test videos, unusually taken from the 2006 direct-to-DVD movie Bratz: Passion 4 Fashion Diamondz.
Game & Watch Gallery 3 has a crude unused placeholder title screen with Wiggler on it. This already unused piece of content itself has unused sprites of its own that don't show up when the screen is activated - including Fly Guys, flowers, a crocodile, sleeping men, and - very morbidly - Mario and Luigi roasting a whole rotisserie Pikachu.
subdirectory_arrow_rightHead On (Game), Arcade (Platform)
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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.
A prototype build for PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale shows an early character select screen with a set of unused characters:
•Chop Chop Master Onion from the PaRappa the Rapper series •Captain Blasto from Blasto •Buzz from the Buzz! series •A Big Kulche from the LocoRoco series •Dr. Nefarious from the Ratchet & Clank series •A Eucadian Soldier from Warhawk •A knight from Fat Princess •Um Jammer Lammy from the PaRappa the Rapper series
Notably, Dr. Nefarious is featured in the roster without Ratchet or Clank. PaRappa the Rapper is the most represented series in this roster, and has more characters than any one series would get in the final game including DLC. The knight would appear in Fat Princess' moveset, LocoRoco and Buzz! would be represented through stages, and Blasto would be absent completely.
Despite Floigan Bros. being initially developed prior to the Dreamcast's release in 1999 (of which the main characters Moigle and Hoigle made cameos in the Dreamcast advertising campaign "It's Thinking"), and then-President of SEGA's American division Bernie Stolar saying that "Floigan will do for SEGA what Mario did for Nintendo", the game would go through developmental setbacks until finally releasing on July 30, 2001, months after SEGA ceased production on SEGA Dreamcast.
Because of this late release window, several pieces of monthly on-disc DLC for the game, as well as the concept of exchanging Moigles through the Dreamcast VMU, were left on the cutting room floor.
In Super Fall Brawl, one of the many reskins of Jingle Brawl, the new character was intended to be Sheen Estevez from The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, 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.
Because the developers were still experimenting with Double Battles where the player teams up with an NPC ally to fight two NPC opponents, this lead to a glaring oversight during the battle where the player joins with Steven Stone to battle Maxi and Tabitha where, during the battle, Steven's Level 42 Metang can actually gain a substantial amount of EXP simultaneously with the player's own Pokémon. This essentially means that, with careful manipulation, the player can have the ally Metang get enough EXP to grow to Level 43. This so far is the only instance in the entire Pokémon main series where, in a non-scripted battle, an NPC's Pokémon can gain EXP and level up.
During the game's development, Lucas - the protagonist of Mother 3 - was briefly considered as a replacement for Ness by the development team. However, due to the delays surrounding Mother 3's original Nintendo 64 release (and that game's eventual cancellation), Ness returned instead as they originally planned.
Both Ness and Lucas would go on to be playable in this game's sequel, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, though Lucas' appearance would be based on Mother 3's eventual Game Boy Advance release as opposed to what is now commonly referred to in the fan community as "EarthBound 64".
In the release version of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, the stage Royal Woods Cemetery from The Loud House contained a hazard where tombstones would pop out of the ground, sending any character beneath them flying and remaining as a wall for a short while afterwards. In version 1.5.0, the update that added Rocko as a playable character, this hazard was removed from the game completely, making the stage into a flat floor, similar to Final Destination from the Super Smash Bros. series. The reasoning for this change is because the stage that was intended to serve as a Final Destination parallel, Harmonic Convergence from The Legend of Korra, was considered too long for use in competitive play, and was removed from this distinction in the same update.
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.
18 years after the game's release, on September 16th 2017, a Silent Hill fan community member by the name of roocker666 posted images of never before seen enemies hidden in the game's files online. These formerly unseen creatures include a giant headless frog (FRG), a possibly monkey based creature (MKY), an ostrich like creature (OST), a purple moth (BTFY), a manta ray (El), and a faceless snake (SNK).
Three additional models were discovered at a later date, including beta versions of the Larval Stalker and the Grey Children, and most notably a giant chicken (CKN) that was bigger than the others and is thought to have been intended to be a boss character.
Masahiro Ito, the game's background and creature designer, acknowledged the discovery on Twitter, but had no comment regarding the original purpose of the models.
In an interview with Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto, it was revealed that an early, experimental build of the game had split-screen multiplayer, with Mario and Luigi as playable characters.
The game's planned multiplayer mode ended up being reworked into a Mario Bros.-style minigame thanks to the Nintendo 64's technical limitations making the split-screen concept unfeasible. However, in February of 1996 (just a month before E3 of that year), both multiplayer mode and Luigi were removed, in part because the Nintendo 64 was bundled with only one controller. These statements are corroborated by findings from the Gigaleak, a massive content leak of internal data from Nintendo in 2020 that included early assets from Super Mario 64. Among the leaked material was a model and textures for Luigi and sprites for "1P" and "2P" icons. Luigi's model is dated June 20, 1995, while the icons use the same generic font seen in the Shoshinkai demo from November of that year, rather than the custom font seen in both the E3 1996 demo and the final release.
The first 100,000 copies of the game to be printed for the Playstation contained a hidden video file that couldn't be accessed in-game. The video was the South Park pilot "Jesus vs. Santa".
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.