The arcade version contains an unused death animation for Sayo, depicting her falling to the ground before bleeding profusely. The animation was likely cut due to its uncharacteristic violence compared to the rest of the game.

One prisoner that players may encounter is Sean Cums, a parody of American rapper and business mogul Sean Combs (also known by the stage names Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, and variations thereof). In addition to resembling Combs in appearance and name, the character's role as a prisoner is a reference to Combs' highly publicized legal issues and sexual assault allegations starting in late 2023. These events culminated one week after the game's release in September 2024 with his arrest and indictment on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution.

Twin Breaker: A Sacred Symbols Adventure features characters based on Colin Moriarty and Chris "Ray Gun" Maldonado, the hosts of Sacred Symbols, a weekly podcast dedicated to discussing modern PlayStation consoles and games. Moriarty was credited as the game's writer, and would join developer Lillymo Games as its Chief Creative Officer three months after the game's release when he acquired a 49% minority stake in the company.

When Astro Bot released, many players noted how there was no reference to Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII despite how important that game was to the original PlayStation, or any sort of Square Enix content in the game for that matter. During an interview with Game File, Nicolas Doucet (studio head of Team Asobi) hinted that the team had considered adding a cameo from Cloud, but were unable to get permission from Square Enix, stating it was "difficult to comment on that".

When performing Homelander's "What Happens If?" Brutality on any other character, he will say a generic Brutality quote. But if performed on Kenshi, Homelander will say, "Another useless fucking blind guy." This is a reference to a quote from the TV series "The Boys" in a scene where Homelander abruptly kills Blindspot, a blind superhero. The name and animation of the Brutality also references how he killed Blindspot.

The Special Coins that appear throughout the game were directly inspired by the DK Coins in the Donkey Kong series. Lead developer Dopply revealed this while watching a livestream of Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore by Frich's voice actor, Vinny Vinesauce, posting a comment in his Twitch chat after he highlighted the similarities.

According to a 1995 Gamest Magazine interview with programmer Katsunori Itai, Virtua Cop's targeting reticle and zooming camera were inspired by a commercial for Kilimanjaro coffee that produced Yu Suzuki saw.

Among the files uncovered in the 2020 Gigaleak, a massive breach of internal server data from Nintendo, are early assets for characters who do not appear in the final game:

• Early textures for Wisp and Blathers. Given that both characters would later debut in Animal Crossing and Doubutsu no Mori e+, the presence of these assets reveals that they were originally planned for the N64 game before being held off and redesigned for the GameCube ports. Both early models feature different faces for the characters, with Blathers in particular resembling Celeste, who would debut in Animal Crossing: Wild World (implying that her design likely drew inspiration from Blathers' scrapped N64 model).
• Textures for a scrapped female cat villager with the internal ID CAT13. As villagers were not originally intended to change clothes, her default outfit, a Beatnik shirt, is included in her texture pack. However, no other data for her is present, leaving it unclear what her personality was going to be. The CAT13 ID (also written as CATD in hexadecimal) was ultimately given to Ankha in Animal Crossing; it is unknown if the original CAT13 evolved into Ankha during development or if she was simply assigned the ID for the sake of convenience. In Wild World onward, which uses a new ID system, the cat13 ID (spelled in lowercase this time) is instead given to Stinky (whose ID was CAT8 in the N64 and GameCube installments).
• An ID for a scrapped bear villager, BEA3. No additional data is present in the leaked files, with their associated folder being completely absent, and no villagers in Animal Crossing reuse their ID.

The choice to include a train as the primary mode of transportation was inspired by a book Eiji Aonuma read to his son, "The Tracks Go On" by Fumiko Takeshita and Mamoru Suzuki. In this book, children lay down tracks for a train as it progresses across the countryside. A year of the game's two-year development time was spent working on the ability to lay down tracks before the feature was ultimately cut.

Kaito, Sugiura, and Makoto from the Judgment sub-series make cameo appearances in the games Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Despite this, Judgment's main protagonist Takayuki Yagami has never made a cameo in the Yakuza series. This may be due to the fact that his face was modeled after his voice actor, Takuya Kimura, who is a popular celebrity in Japan and could be expensive to license out.

In certain scenes in Portal 2, the player is required to quickly place a portal to get out of a dangerous situation. According to developer Dave Saunders, during playtesting, it was noticed that lots of players were dying during these segments because they placed the wrong color portals, so the developers specifically changed it so that clicking any button will result in the correct colored portal.

In Episode 5, on the second floor of the bookstore, a poster can be found on a wall reading "How to catch the legendary Dopefish", featuring an image of the Dopefish from Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy!, who has made cameo appearances in many other games since his first appearance.

In the English release of Street Fighter II, one of Ryu's quotes to defeated opponents is "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance." "Sheng Long" is a mistranslation of Ryu's flying uppercut move Shōryūken (昇龍拳) stemming from the first two Japanese characters meaning "shēng lóng" in Chinese pinyin. As a result, players mistakenly thought that Ryu was referring to a person named Sheng Long instead of his Shōryūken, and that he was a secret playable character.

Amidst a swarm of fan mail to gaming publications asking how to unlock Sheng Long, the American magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly published a guide to fight him as a secret boss for their annual April Fools' prank in 1992. Photoshopped screenshots of Sheng Long fighting Ryu were created by editor Ken Williams, who also wrote "ridiculous requirements" to find him that were meant to imply he was not real, but were actually attempted by players. In response to complaints, they revealed at the end of the year that Sheng Long was a hoax, and expressed surprise over it gaining worldwide coverage as other publications in Eurasian countries reprinted the guide without their permission.

Sheng Long was brought back for a second April Fools' prank in 1997 in response to rumors that he could be in Street Fighter III, creating hand-drawn art of him and claiming he was the localized version of the real non-playable character Gouken. Despite adding more obvious clues to it being a prank, according to the magazine's June 1997 issue, this second prank was so convincing that Capcom of America allegedly fell for it and called their Japanese headquarters to ask why they were not told he was in the game.

Sheng Long left a continuing influence on video game hoaxes and the Street Fighter series, leading to a scrapped official appearance in the game adaptation of Street Fighter: The Movie, and Capcom pulling their own Sheng Long pranks in 2008 and 2017. In 2023, Sheng Long made his first canonical appearance in the series in Street Fighter 6 as a non-playable opponent using Ryu's fighting style, and can be fought in the World Tour mode after completing the game.

Shortly after its European release in 2013, Wii Karaoke U sparked controversy in the region due to the game allowing players to download and perform songs with explicit lyrics despite the game's family-friendly presentation and PEGI 3 rating. This is in stark contrast to similar karaoke games that include clean versions of explicit songs. The only indication of this leniency is on the loading screen, which includes the text "MUSIC DOWNLOADS NOT RATED BY PEGI." The fact that this occurred shortly after Nintendo removed online connectivity from Swapnote due to child predation concerns attracted further criticism.

Upon being contacted by multiple journalists about the game's content, Nintendo (who did not develop the game, but nonetheless authorized its publication) responded by stating that they would add a mature content warning to its Nintendo eShop page. They also stated that they chose not to restrict the kinds of songs available in order to "appeal to all music tastes," pointing out that enabling parental controls prevents child players from downloading tracks without a PIN code.

In 2021, the game's developer and publisher collaborated with the animation company Chromosphere Studio to create a 4-minute pitch pilot for a potential animated series based on the game called "Untitled Goose Programme". The show would have been presented as recorded TV feed flipping to different channels where the Goose bothers the host and/or villagers. It's not known which networks or streaming services it was pitched to, but due to a lack of interest, further plans for the show were shelved. The pitch pilot was later officially uploaded to YouTube in 2024.

The V.I.P. Bots "Dad of Boy" and "Boy" (based on Kratos and Atreus from God of War respectively) are named in reference to the "Dad of Boy" meme, where following the release of the 2018 God of War game, many players began making jokes about the amount of times Kratos referred to Atreus as "boy" in the game.

To promote the release of the game, the 400th issue of Edge magazine featured ten variant covers based on the game's V.I.P. Bots, with different covers available through different means:

• Subscribers of the magazine could receive variants based on Bloodborne or The Last Guardian.
• Purchasing from UK retail would grant access to variants based on Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, God of War, and Returnal.
• Purchasing from overseas retail would grant access to variants based on Horizon, Gran Turismo, Ghost of Tsushima, and Ratchet & Clank.

Sheik's Spoiler:true identity as Princess Zelda is hinted at during Sheik's Theme. If you listen closely, you'll hear the notes to Spoiler:Zelda's Lullaby, but played faster and on a harp instead of an ocarina.