Whether intentional or coincidental, Luigi’s updated sprites in the Super Mario All-Stars re-release of Super Mario World reference two common misconceptions about Mario’s sprites from the original Super Mario Bros.: spitting fireballs from his mouth and hitting blocks with his head.
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.
In a 2013 interview with Polygon, director Bryce Holliday revealed that Luigi's portrayal in the game was influenced by the 1990 British comedy series Mr. Bean. The show served as reference material for Luigi's animations and characterization, with Holliday noting parallels between Luigi and the show's title character as a "hapless fool and reluctant hero." Holliday also felt that these similarities would help audiences sympathize with Luigi, which in turn would supplement the comic relief that his reactions and mishaps provide.
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 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.
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.
While Super Donkey is thought to have ultimately evolved into Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, the project was likely tossed around as a Mario or Zelda game at various points in development.
Various development assets associated with Super Donkey, which were uncovered alongside the prototype in the 2020 Gigaleak, include sprites and animations for Link, Mario, and Donkey Kong; the animation files for Link are dated to fall 1990, while Mario's animation files are dated to winter of that year. Additional files for all three characters span overlapping periods in 1991. Link's sprites and animations indicate that Super Donkey was at one point planned to be a side-scrolling Zelda title similar to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, while Mario's animations imply that the iteration that starred him and Donkey Kong eventually morphed into the 1994 Game Boy title Donkey Kong.
Disney's Animated Storybook: Toy Story and Toy Story Activity Center were developed by a devision of Pixar known as the Interactive Products Group, which exclusively made video game content. The division was closed down when the Toy Story 2 movie entered production, and merged into Pixar's main movie animation staff, as the animators behind the first film were working on A Bug's Life and the IPG had already proved itself by making as many frames of animation for their games as there was in the first Toy Story, with a near-identical quality. Due to the shuttering of the IPG, later Pixar PC games using pre-rendered graphics, such as A Bug's Life Activity Center and Monsters, Inc. Scream Team Training, would have significantly lower quality animation than the movies, and Toy Story would be the only Pixar film to have an Animated Storybook based on it.
Flappy Bird was removed from app stores by creator Dong Nguyen on February 8th 2014, due to being overwhelmed by its success and feeling guilt over the addictive, frustrating nature of the game, which he had originally intended to be relaxing. Although many speculated that the game was taken down by Nintendo due to the game's pipes and their similarity to the pipes from the Mario series, both Nguyen and Nintendo denied this.
Nguyen claimed that his worries about the game had lost him sleep, and removing the game from sale managed to restore piece of mind - despite this, Nguyen did promise a Flappy Bird comeback, albeit in a less addictive form, which would eventually come in the form of an official sequel: Flappy Birds Family for Amazon Fire TV.
Some eBay users attempted to sell the iPhones with the original game installed for up to $99,900, but the listings were removed due to eBay's rules against selling technology that has not been factory reset.
The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds was the first Humongous Entertainment game to use cel animation instead of computer-designed sprites. This was a last second choice that required all existing visuals and much of the game's code to be thrown away, and was done without a delay nor much in the way of cel animation knowledge from the team, requiring unpaid overtime. Despite this story's surface-level similarities to crunch practices, the challenge of remaking the game on such short notice was chosen and consented to by the Freddi Fish team, and developers of the game have reminisced on this period fondly.
If an enemy attempts to rob Yagami while he has no money in his inventory, the enemy will pat him on the back to comfort him as Yagami collapses on the ground, presumably having a breakdown.
In a 1995 developer interview, Shigeru Miyamoto stated that the Super Star was originally going to briefly transform Baby Mario into his adult self. However, the idea was discarded after one of the developers pointed out that it would clash with the game's premise of being an origin story for the Mario brothers. Instead, Super Star Mario was redesigned to simply be Baby Mario in a yellow cape.
In 2020, sprites for Mario's adult form were uncovered as part of a massive leak of data from Nintendo's internal servers. These sprites indicate that Super Star Mario was not originally able to float in the air and that he was able to ride Yoshi to some extent (in the final game, Yoshi reverts to an egg until the Super Star wears off).
Unusually, the Noid's sprites in Stage 13 of Yo! Noid are marginally different from the sprites used in the rest of the game. The graphics of the Noid are stored multiple times in game's code, and the Stage 13 sprites are the first stored, meaning that this could be an early revision of the Noid's sprite that was not removed.
The game's data contains sprites depicting Kid Klown and Princess Honey from Kid Klown in Night Mayor World, with them filling the roles of the protagonist and damsel in distress, respectively. This indicates that the game was originally devised as a Kid Klown title before being retooled around the Mickey Mouse, Garfield, and Ghostbusters franchises (depending on the region) midway through development. Ironically, Kid Klown in Night Mayor World was itself a retooled English localization of a Mickey Mouse game.
In the Galbadia Missile Base control room, while in the "Equipment" section of the launch configuration panel, you can simultaneously press V/B/Up/Down (PC version) or Triangle/Square/Up/Down (PlayStation version) to view animations of an Elite Soldier and a G-Soldier dancing. Rinoa will laugh and comment on each animation.
Behind-the-scenes pictures from the game's development show that former wrestler Jeff Jarrett did green screen capture work for appearing in the game as a playable character. However, due to his departure from the WWF (now known as the WWE) in 1995 regarding a contractual dispute before the game's release, he was subsequently removed from the roster.
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).
Whether intentional or coincidental, Luigi’s updated sprites in the Super Mario All-Stars re-release of Super Mario World reference two common misconceptions about Mario’s sprites from the original Super Mario Bros.: spitting fireballs from his mouth and hitting blocks with his head.
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.
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 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:
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.
The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds was the first Humongous Entertainment game to use cel animation instead of computer-designed sprites. This was a last second choice that required all existing visuals and much of the game's code to be thrown away, and was done without a delay nor much in the way of cel animation knowledge from the team, requiring unpaid overtime. Despite this story's surface-level similarities to crunch practices, the challenge of remaking the game on such short notice was chosen and consented to by the Freddi Fish team, and developers of the game have reminisced on this period fondly.
In a 1995 developer interview, Shigeru Miyamoto stated that the Super Star was originally going to briefly transform Baby Mario into his adult self. However, the idea was discarded after one of the developers pointed out that it would clash with the game's premise of being an origin story for the Mario brothers. Instead, Super Star Mario was redesigned to simply be Baby Mario in a yellow cape.
Unusually, the Noid's sprites in Stage 13 of Yo! Noid are marginally different from the sprites used in the rest of the game. The graphics of the Noid are stored multiple times in game's code, and the Stage 13 sprites are the first stored, meaning that this could be an early revision of the Noid's sprite that was not removed.
The game's data contains sprites depicting Kid Klown and Princess Honey from Kid Klown in Night Mayor World, with them filling the roles of the protagonist and damsel in distress, respectively. This indicates that the game was originally devised as a Kid Klown title before being retooled around the Mickey Mouse, Garfield, and Ghostbusters franchises (depending on the region) midway through development. Ironically, Kid Klown in Night Mayor World was itself a retooled English localization of a Mickey Mouse game.
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).