In the original release of the game, the monster that the player could summon to attack the city was a thinly veiled parody of Godzilla, right down to using the character's iconic roar from the film series; the sound effect is even named "God" in the game's files, furthering the reference. The Godzilla parody is also depicted on the game's box art, gleefully waving at the viewer.
According to programmer Don Hopkins, who notably ported SimCity to numerous versions of Unix, Maxis ended up getting sued by Toho, the owners of the Godzilla franchise; additional details were recounted to him by Maxis CEO Jeff Braun:
"We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement."
As a result of this suit, the monster was redesigned in the v1.2 release to resemble a giant orange salamander. The creature's roar is also changed and the game's box art is redesigned to replace the Godzilla parody with a tornado. In the v1.3 release, the salamander is given a slightly larger and more detailed sprite to fit the revised art style, but its roar (now internally renamed "Monster") is corrupted.
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 now defunct Jurassic Park Institute website featured what appeared to be an unused 3D model of a Chasmosaurus for Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. This would line up with the developer's comments about wanting to include more dinosaur species outside of the 25 present in the final game, although curiously, this species is not mentioned within the game's "Constant.ini" file, which mentions dozens of other unused dinosaur species.
The development team for this game experimented with baby dinosaurs midway through the project, attempting to use schemes such as scaling the adult dinosaurs down to make them infants. The team realized that this didn't look right and that making proper infant dinosaurs would require new models and AI, which would be similar to the work required for adding more dinosaur species. As a result, baby dinosaurs were dropped, along with any ideas for a "Dino Petting Zoo".
Only the PlayStation 2 version of the game includes proper shadows for the dinosaurs and guests. In earlier versions, shadows were originally apart of all entities (which also includes buildings and foliage) in at least the PC version of the game.
A port of Bubsy 2 to the Sega Game Gear was planned and seemingly completed, but never released. In the surfaced screenshots of the game's prototype, it appears to be a fully colorized version of the Game Boy version (playing the Game Boy version of Bubsy 2 on a Super Game Boy will give the graphics a slight red tint).
The developers of Super Mario Strikers were concerned that one of Waluigi's goal celebration animations, referred to by fans as the "crotch chop", would not be approved. When developers from Nintendo saw the animation, they did not say anything about it at all, so the developers did not bring it up to Nintendo, fearing that drawing attention to it would result in their approval board changing its mind. The game's director, Mike Inglehart, described the reasoning behind Waluigi's crotch chopping:
"The inspiration for that came from quite frankly like the shape – even though it’s a ‘V’, we thought it was a representation of part of the ‘W’, so that’s sort of his way of connecting into his first initial. Waluigi, we kind of depicted him as being – yeah, he’s a bit, I don’t know, a bit edgier than Wario. Wario’s kind of on-the-nose in terms of a bad guy, and Waluigi, we just wanted to explore him a bit more. He’s actually kind of mean to his sidekicks too. They’re both mean to their sidekicks but Wario’s about self-loathing and Waluigi is about blame, and everybody else has done something wrong."
The animation was also used in the game's sequel Mario Strikers Charged.
In a 2020 interview, designer Koichi Ishii revealed that despite the NES hardware only being able to display three colors per sprite, he felt that he could not make a believable design for the game's jobs unless he "dug deep into the job's background story and what kind of character it will be." He was surprised when some of these design limitations stuck around for future games he did not work on like Final Fantasy Tactics, and elaborated on what he imagined the White Mage and Dark Knight jobs looked like as he originally designed them:
"The image I had is that the red part of a white mage's robe is embroidered from red threads imbued with magic when spun together, increasing the wearer's magical power. The reasoning for the red threads being on the sleeves is that magic leaves the body through the hands and wrists, so that area is most effective. I was very particular about the lore that equipment like wands and amulets are used as a catalyst to turn natural power into magic, stimulating the user's magic strength. That's why I was adamant about never giving magic users iron equipment; if they use normal metals, their magic power will disperse so at least go with mythril ore...stuff like that.
[...] when [the dark knight is] KO'd in battle only their armor is left, as if the body inside has disappeared. The reason for that, in my imagining, is that they have a dark pact where their body is engraved with dark magic runes, and when they're KO'd the dark magic runes take their soul and body so only the empty armor remains. I had that kind of unique image for each job as I was creating it."
After the three-year time skip in the game's story, Lucas and Fuel each receive a new set of sprites showing that they went through an obvious growth spurt in that time. This is most easily distinguished by the size of their bodies and heads, where young Lucas and Fuel are scrunched down compared to their older selves. Kumatora also receives a new set of sprites after the time skip, but her growth spurt is less obvious since she was already a teenager with a tall body and head before the time skip. Aside from some additional cyan streaks on her hoodie, the only detail indicating she physically aged after the time skip is that her legs are one pixel taller.
In the pre-day 1 patch version of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, Toph had a different taunt, where she raises her arms in the air. After the patch, this was changed to her waving her hand in front of one of her eyes.
Every song in the game has unique patterns playing on the step panels which, like the on-screen video, are synced to the music. Some notable examples include:
• Max428: The current BPM is displayed. • Robot World: Binary Code runs on the top and bottom of the pads, reading "Robots would tap stars!" • Xuxa: a duck is shown floating across the playfield. • Flight of the Bumblebee: bees are shown flying across the panels dodging a flyswatter.
Both Mach Rider's identity and gender are ambiguous. They are portrayed with a muscular build, and the NES and Famicom versions' manuals never use any gendered pronouns to refer to them. The arcade port Vs. Mach Rider's stage clear screens slowly introduce piece-by-piece an image of a skimpily-dressed woman (bearing similarities to Jane Fonda's appearance in the 1968 film Barbarella) holding a dagger, but it is never specified if this character is Mach Rider, or one of the other wasteland survivors. However, Mach Rider's trophy description in Super Smash Bros. Melee years later lists them as a male character with he/him pronouns. Even later on, Captain Rainbow, a game centered around obscure and neglected Nintendo heroes, has an unused model for Mach Rider that, while not having visible breasts due to wearing armor, portrays them with a feminine skinny waist.
Two of Peppino's sprite animations are references to non-verbal Italian gestures: • One of his idle animations has him bite his hands, a threatening (and sometimes sexually loaded) gesture known as "si t’ancagliu" or "when I catch you, I'll kill you". • The pose he does on the P-rank screen is "l'ombrello" or "the umbrella", an Italian equivalent to the middle finger.
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In the Japanese version of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Banjo & Kazooie's down special, Rear Egg, is called おケツタマゴ (Oketsu Tamago), which in English directly translates to "Ass Egg". This particular name was utilized for the Japanese localization of Banjo-Kazooie, at least its Japanese website.
It's worth pointing out that, in the English version of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, this move has no name, as it's rolled into Egg Firing as one ability. However, internally in both games, the animation is indeed named "egg ass", which the Japanese version literally translates for its name.
Sonic's graphic on the title screen of Sonic the Hedgehog has a belly that is obscured by the logo's ribbon. This is a leftover of the animatic of Sonic's appearance on the title screen. On earlier, less accurate emulators, including Sega's own emulator made for Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 on Dreamcast, a common error would involve Sonic's belly hanging over the ribbon.
In June of 2020, an uncredited animator who worked on the game named Dennis Opel posted various development clips on his Twitter page. These clips were for a pitch to rework the game's combat system, which he worked on in the sidelines while the game was still in development. Some of his ideas included incorporating dodging and counter attacks; certain moves the player could perform being affected by the enemy's actions, stats, and distance from the player; etc. In the end, this pitch was never submitted to Rockstar.
The game files contains data for a second normal throw where Demitri bites his opponent. Demitri would later gain a throw similar to this one in Darkstalkers 3.
When playing as Huitzil, it is possible to perform an unused Special Power Move where his arm turns into a laser cannon. In addition to having misaligned effects and incorrect colors, the move doesn't have a hurtbox, and once it is done Huitzil is frozen in place until he gets hit by the opponent.
Star Wars Chess is noted for having unexpectedly violent and cartoonish death animations, similar to the Battle Chess series, almost (but not) all of which actually show the characters dying as opposed to simply being incapacitated - there is an animation for every Rebel killing every Empire member and vice versa, which leads to somewhat humourous and non-canonically feasible situations such as R2D2 snatching Darth Vader's lightsaber and singlehandedly killing him with it.
In the original release of the game, the monster that the player could summon to attack the city was a thinly veiled parody of Godzilla, right down to using the character's iconic roar from the film series; the sound effect is even named "God" in the game's files, furthering the reference. The Godzilla parody is also depicted on the game's box art, gleefully waving at the viewer.
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.
The now defunct Jurassic Park Institute website featured what appeared to be an unused 3D model of a Chasmosaurus for Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. This would line up with the developer's comments about wanting to include more dinosaur species outside of the 25 present in the final game, although curiously, this species is not mentioned within the game's "Constant.ini" file, which mentions dozens of other unused dinosaur species.
Only the PlayStation 2 version of the game includes proper shadows for the dinosaurs and guests. In earlier versions, shadows were originally apart of all entities (which also includes buildings and foliage) in at least the PC version of the game.
A port of Bubsy 2 to the Sega Game Gear was planned and seemingly completed, but never released. In the surfaced screenshots of the game's prototype, it appears to be a fully colorized version of the Game Boy version (playing the Game Boy version of Bubsy 2 on a Super Game Boy will give the graphics a slight red tint).
The developers of Super Mario Strikers were concerned that one of Waluigi's goal celebration animations, referred to by fans as the "crotch chop", would not be approved. When developers from Nintendo saw the animation, they did not say anything about it at all, so the developers did not bring it up to Nintendo, fearing that drawing attention to it would result in their approval board changing its mind. The game's director, Mike Inglehart, described the reasoning behind Waluigi's crotch chopping:
In a 2020 interview, designer Koichi Ishii revealed that despite the NES hardware only being able to display three colors per sprite, he felt that he could not make a believable design for the game's jobs unless he "dug deep into the job's background story and what kind of character it will be." He was surprised when some of these design limitations stuck around for future games he did not work on like Final Fantasy Tactics, and elaborated on what he imagined the White Mage and Dark Knight jobs looked like as he originally designed them:
After the three-year time skip in the game's story, Lucas and Fuel each receive a new set of sprites showing that they went through an obvious growth spurt in that time. This is most easily distinguished by the size of their bodies and heads, where young Lucas and Fuel are scrunched down compared to their older selves. Kumatora also receives a new set of sprites after the time skip, but her growth spurt is less obvious since she was already a teenager with a tall body and head before the time skip. Aside from some additional cyan streaks on her hoodie, the only detail indicating she physically aged after the time skip is that her legs are one pixel taller.
In the pre-day 1 patch version of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, Toph had a different taunt, where she raises her arms in the air. After the patch, this was changed to her waving her hand in front of one of her eyes.
Both Mach Rider's identity and gender are ambiguous. They are portrayed with a muscular build, and the NES and Famicom versions' manuals never use any gendered pronouns to refer to them. The arcade port Vs. Mach Rider's stage clear screens slowly introduce piece-by-piece an image of a skimpily-dressed woman (bearing similarities to Jane Fonda's appearance in the 1968 film Barbarella) holding a dagger, but it is never specified if this character is Mach Rider, or one of the other wasteland survivors. However, Mach Rider's trophy description in Super Smash Bros. Melee years later lists them as a male character with he/him pronouns. Even later on, Captain Rainbow, a game centered around obscure and neglected Nintendo heroes, has an unused model for Mach Rider that, while not having visible breasts due to wearing armor, portrays them with a feminine skinny waist.
Two of Peppino's sprite animations are references to non-verbal Italian gestures:
Sonic's graphic on the title screen of Sonic the Hedgehog has a belly that is obscured by the logo's ribbon. This is a leftover of the animatic of Sonic's appearance on the title screen. On earlier, less accurate emulators, including Sega's own emulator made for Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 on Dreamcast, a common error would involve Sonic's belly hanging over the ribbon.
A giant Tutankhamun mask exists within Anakaris's sprites. What purpose this may have served remains unknown.
The game files contains data for a second normal throw where Demitri bites his opponent. Demitri would later gain a throw similar to this one in Darkstalkers 3.
When playing as Huitzil, it is possible to perform an unused Special Power Move where his arm turns into a laser cannon. In addition to having misaligned effects and incorrect colors, the move doesn't have a hurtbox, and once it is done Huitzil is frozen in place until he gets hit by the opponent.
Star Wars Chess is noted for having unexpectedly violent and cartoonish death animations, similar to the Battle Chess series, almost (but not) all of which actually show the characters dying as opposed to simply being incapacitated - there is an animation for every Rebel killing every Empire member and vice versa, which leads to somewhat humourous and non-canonically feasible situations such as R2D2 snatching Darth Vader's lightsaber and singlehandedly killing him with it.