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.
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).
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.
In Super Fall Brawl, one of the many reskins of Jingle Brawl, the new character was intended to be Sheen Estevez from Jimmy Neutron, 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.
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 was originally planned.
Both Ness and Lucas would go on to be playable in this game's sequel, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, though Lucas's 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".
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.
In the GameCube and Xbox versions of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, it was intended for there to be portraits littered throughout Hogwarts of various real world people, specifically developers, their families, and some people the developers forgot about years after the fact (but believed they were involved in some kind of contest). The portraits of family members in particular were included as a coping mechanism, as they were suffering during development.
"We were doing very long hours, and it wasn’t just us suffering – our families were, too. They were supporting us – often suffering in silence. Marriages were strained, children were missing a parent. It seemed only right to put their pictures into Hogwarts; our odd way of showing our love and gratitude. And possibly to remind us what they looked like."
The development team considered these portraits some of the very few elements of the game they were truly proud of. Eurocom requested the portraits be removed without explaining why, something the developers were "too tired to fight".
According to leaked development files from The Simpsons: Hit & Run, Sideshow Bob and Poochie were originally planned to appear in the game. There is an unused low-polygon model for Poochie that is pre-posed, meaning that it was likely supposed to appear as merchandise of the character (most likely alongside Itchy and Scratchy's balloons in Level 2), rather than appearing in an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon cutscene. No models for Sideshow Bob are known to exist.
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.
According to the British magazine Nintendo Magazine System, before settling on Yoshi's Island characters for Tetris Attack, Nintendo reportedly asked Rare to replace Panel de Pon's fairies with characters from the Killer Instinct series.
Slap City was originally envisioned as a mini-game in Ittle Dew 2 before being reworked into a full title. The scrapped mini-game had intentionally poor presentation, being locked to 30FPS with interlacing, something that was not retained in Slap City given it's focus on competitive play, and a low-poly style inspired by the original Super Smash Bros. The polygonal alternate form of Fluffy Fields, where the Clone Team is fought in arcade mode, is based on this version of the game.
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Power Punch II was originally intended to be a licensed game starring Mike Tyson titled Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch, but, following accusations and an eventual (albeit dubious) conviction of rape against Tyson, was reworked to star an original boxing character named "Mark Tyler", with the title gaining a "2" at the end despite the non-existance of a Power Punch 1, possibly to fool customers who previously bought Punch-Out!!, but did not remember the game's name. It was at one point misreported that Nintendo were backing the game as a Punch-Out!! sequel, but this is untrue.
Swampy, the protagonist of the Disney mobile game Where's My Water?, was added to the game data for Disney Emoji Blitz as part of the 1.11.5 update, released on May 10, 2017. Despite this, however, he has not been added to the game as an obtainable emoji and no design for him exists in the game's data, with the inactive code still being present in later versions.
Kabuto, the first boss of Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, is a parody of Ken-O, a recurring first boss in the Shinobi series - in prerelease screenshots, he is shown to be a composite parody of both Ken-O and Nintendo's Mario, known as Mari-Oh. While his appearance would lose its Mario-esque qualities in the final game, two elements of this parody would remain: Kabuto shooting fireballs, and Kabuto becoming small on his final hit point.
Inside the files of Game & Watch Gallery 2, there are graphics for an unused Peach version of Modern Ball to go alongside the light blue Yoshi, Mario, Wario, and Bowser versions.
On August 16th, 2023, Cruise Elroy revealed that he usually sketches out concepts for Annalynn before implementing them in game. While many of the sketches shown are present in the final release, some unused concepts are also shown, such as an orange character named Annabelle (presumably a second player character) and Mappy-style trampolines.
Among these sketches is also Mike drawn with an expression mirroring that seen in the Today I Will meme.
When the Street Fighter skin set was released for Fortnite, a back bling of an arcade machine was released that would show attract mode footage from Street Fighter II. Coinciding with this, a texture was found in the data, under the name "FrenchFry" showing animation from Family Guy in a similar format. While many believed this confirmed that Peter Griffin was planned to be featured in the game alongside a back bling that would show Family Guy clips, it was later stated by a reputable Fortnite leaker named FNBRUnreleased that the Family Guy content could've only been added for one of two reasons: to annoy dataminers, or to internally test the Street Fighter graphics in a humorous way.
Griffin would eventually be added to Fortnite in Chapter 5. To coincide with his addition, a video titled "Peter Griffin Seeks Fitness Advice From Meowscles" was released: animated in the same style as "Family Guy", it features Griffin getting a fitness exam from Fortnite character Meowscles, ending with him drinking an expired bottle of Slurp Juice in order to become "swole", explaining his design in the game. The expiration date on the Slurp Juice is a reference to the date when the leak originally happened, and the trailer also used the leaked back bling. Despite appearing to be animated by Family Guy's animation department, the video noticeably does not feature any spoken dialogue, or voice acting by Family Guy creator and Griffin's voice actor Seth MacFarlane.
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.
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.
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).
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.
In the GameCube and Xbox versions of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, it was intended for there to be portraits littered throughout Hogwarts of various real world people, specifically developers, their families, and some people the developers forgot about years after the fact (but believed they were involved in some kind of contest). The portraits of family members in particular were included as a coping mechanism, as they were suffering during development.
According to leaked development files from The Simpsons: Hit & Run, Sideshow Bob and Poochie were originally planned to appear in the game. There is an unused low-polygon model for Poochie that is pre-posed, meaning that it was likely supposed to appear as merchandise of the character (most likely alongside Itchy and Scratchy's balloons in Level 2), rather than appearing in an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon cutscene. No models for Sideshow Bob are known to exist.
Kabuto, the first boss of Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, is a parody of Ken-O, a recurring first boss in the Shinobi series - in prerelease screenshots, he is shown to be a composite parody of both Ken-O and Nintendo's Mario, known as Mari-Oh. While his appearance would lose its Mario-esque qualities in the final game, two elements of this parody would remain: Kabuto shooting fireballs, and Kabuto becoming small on his final hit point.
The Game Boy version of Yoshi has an unused Bullet Bill piece. It is not present in the NES version.
Inside the files of Game & Watch Gallery 2, there are graphics for an unused Peach version of Modern Ball to go alongside the light blue Yoshi, Mario, Wario, and Bowser versions.
On August 16th, 2023, Cruise Elroy revealed that he usually sketches out concepts for Annalynn before implementing them in game. While many of the sketches shown are present in the final release, some unused concepts are also shown, such as an orange character named Annabelle (presumably a second player character) and Mappy-style trampolines.
When the Street Fighter skin set was released for Fortnite, a back bling of an arcade machine was released that would show attract mode footage from Street Fighter II. Coinciding with this, a texture was found in the data, under the name "FrenchFry" showing animation from Family Guy in a similar format. While many believed this confirmed that Peter Griffin was planned to be featured in the game alongside a back bling that would show Family Guy clips, it was later stated by a reputable Fortnite leaker named FNBRUnreleased that the Family Guy content could've only been added for one of two reasons: to annoy dataminers, or to internally test the Street Fighter graphics in a humorous way.