Despite being positioned as the Xbox's mascot by the gaming press, Blinx the Time Sweeper was not created to fill that role or rival the likes of Mario and Sonic. Despite an internal push from the Blinx team for the character to become the platform's mascot in Japan (of which executive producer Ed Fries claims to be "not sure how seriously [the Blinx team] took it"), as well as the desire of Bill Gates for Microsoft's gaming department to have a mascot, the character was not officially used as an Xbox mascot, though the game did get a major marketing push in Japan thanks to convenient timing during a Christmas dry spell of game releases and being a Japanese game.
When asked about why Super Mario Maker would be releasing on September 11, Nintendo representative Julie Gagnon responded:
“Nintendo is really respectful of this date, but the thing is that when we launched Super Mario Bros back in 1985, it was September 13th. And, as we have worked with retailers on Friday as a launch day, the date worked out as Friday, September 11th for this year.”
Due to this awkward release timing, promotional materials for the game would word the release date as the "11th of September", even in countries that use an MM/DD format.
The original plan for the game was a PvP, online MMO game known as Fate/Apocrypha. However, these plans were cancelled early in development. The project was later revived as "Fate Online Project Reboot" on the behest of publisher Aniplex wanting to make a mobile game to promote the Fate IP. According to head writer Kinoko Nasu, he never owned a smartphone prior to the development of Fate/Grand Order, but got one and played various free-to-play mobile games for reference. Fate/Apocrypha itself would later be revived as a Light Novel series.
M&M's Minis Madness had a one-level demo for personal computers released on the M&M's official website which used a proprietary emulator. It does not feature the opening cutscene.
In 1993, Alfred Chicken publisher Mindscape attempted a publicity stunt by having Alfred Chicken run for a seat in the UK Parliament in the 1993 Christchurch, Dorset by-election, having an actor in an Alfred Chicken costume appear at the British House of Commons constituency of Christchurch as votes were read out. The Alfred Chicken Party received 18 votes, exceeding the Rainbow Alliance (a party intent on abolishing Parliament) by 2 votes. The Alfred Chicken Party was cited - alongside the "Buy the Daily Sport Party" - years later by the Liberal Democrats as a reason for increasing the number of signatures required for a party to get on a ballot.
The print advertisement for Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures features the typical 90s commercial trash-talking against other popular video game characters of the time, claiming that they are unable to do things that Pac-Man can do in the game, such as "Dirty worms can't whistle", referring to Earthworm Jim, or "Big hairy apes can't think for themselves", referring to Donkey Kong. However, one of these allegations is the claim that "Overgrown housecats can't hang glide", seemingly referring to Bubsy the Bobcat, who's signature power is the ability to glide, and therefore would not need a hang glider.
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The US television commercial for Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures portrays the game as equivalent to bullying a mentally disabled child - called a "special friend" by the narrator - by asking him to do humiliating and dangerous tasks, which he is too naive to call out. This is not only ableist, but also inaccurate to the game, as Pac-Man will eventually not obey you if you keep abusing him for long enough.
Despite being aimed at preschool-aged children and their parents, the Sega Pico was marketed in the US in a similar edgy fashion to Sega's products for older audiences, particularly with a commercial titled "Sponge", which opens with loud rock music and features intense camera cuts, mild slapstick, and most unexpectedly, a joke where the Sega Pico is shown as a heavenly device protecting a child from a drag pageant reality show titled "Middle-Aged Men Who Want to Be Teenage Girls".
Additionally, while much tamer and inoffensive, the animated commercials featuring the Pico's mascot, Smart Alex, featured the loud and in-your-face "Sega Scream".
In 2016, a post was uploaded to Tumblr responding to a post claiming that "there is nothing wrong with Yoshi" by jokingly accusing Yoshi of committing tax fraud, which would become a running gag within Nintendo fan circles, and eventually a meme in 2018 with the bait-and-switch YouTube account SiIvaGunner posting soundtracks from a fake Yoshi Commits Tax Fraud game.
It would be discovered after the meme's peak of popularity that in 2011's Fortune Street, Yoshi is the only character in the game who asks to be exempt from paying taxes when a tax office is built. This means that while Yoshi is not guilty of committing tax fraud, he does attempt to commit tax evasion.
In October 2019, the Nintendo Versus eSports account posted a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate highlight tournament featuring Yoshi, and titled it "This Yoshi is no fraud", seemingly in reference to the meme.
The meme of Yoshi evading his taxes would also inspire the Turnip Boy series of games.
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl contains multiple unused announcer lines - including multitudes of character names (including characters from Rocko's Modern Life and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, which were not represented in the base version of the game), item announcement calls which (despite the narrator having used voice clips relating to the items) did not end up being used, all of the stage names (notably including alternate names for the Slime Time stage in the form of "Double Dare", "Double Dare Stage", and "Double Dare Extreme") and, perhaps most interestingly, lines relating to a shop feature where the player could buy outfits, characters, moves, and stages. The reveal press release for All-Star Brawl references the ability to "unlock advanced moves", which may be referring to this scrapped feature.
In 2015, internet artists Chris O'Neil and Psychicpebbles were commissioned to make a trailer for a cancelled reboot of ClayFighter, and made a commercial actively mocking Interplay and the ClayFighter brand, showing quotes from negative reviews, referring to low-quality Interplay games, bait-and-switching an Earthworm Jim reboot, and having a narrator who has a disappointed tone of voice when he discovers that he is announcing ClayFighter.
According to Psychicpebbles, the CEO of Interplay was "braindead" and did not pick up on the self-deprecation.
Action Girlz Racing claims on its box to be made "for girls, by girls" - however, the credits of the game show that many of the developer names are simply female versions of the names of developers credited on other Data Design Interactive games, such as Karl White becoming "Karla White", Julien Alden-Salter becoming "Julia Alden-Salter", and Teoman Irmak becoming "Teowoman Hermark".
Many fans and critics have noted similarities between the aesthetic of Pizza Tower and "off-model" 1990s cartoons such as Ed, Edd, n' Eddy and The Ren & Stimpy Show. Game creator McPig has claimed not to be a fan of those series and to have not been influenced by them, although he did still take influence from the more cleanly-drawn SpongeBob SquarePants, and an unclear inspiration from 1990s cartoons would still be cited on the game's Steam store page description.
While the protagonist of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Ichiban Kasuga, is commonly stated to have debuted in the 2018 game Ryu Ga Gotoku Online, he actually was first revealed in a trailer for the game Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, which is considered a spin-off of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise. This trailer aired almost a year before Ryu Ga Gotoku Online and is notable as Ichiban does not appear in Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise.
In 2022, Pinbit LLC, the developer of Flying Gorilla, uploaded a pre-roll advertisement on YouTube using copyrighted footage from the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "I Had an Accident", presumably without permission, as well as the tagline "Gorilla's Bizarre Adventure", referencing Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. The advertisement for the game itself had been previously released on its own without the copyrighted content, alongside an advertisement for a related game they produced called Run! Gorilla that appears to have been removed from app stores for unknown reasons.
The Atari Jaguar, despite being marketed as a 64-bit platform, was only a 32-bit platform. Specifically, it used two 32-bit processors (named "Tom" and "Jerry") in parallel, with the marketing adding up those two processors as if they could be mathematically combined.
Pyoro, the star of the game-within-a-game series that rivals Wario's microgames in the WarioWare series, is a parody of the Japanese malt chocolate ball brand Chocoball's mascot, Kyoro-Chan.
Parroty Interactive had planned to preview Microshaft Winblows 98 at the COMDEX computer expo in 1997 with a Bill Gates look-a-like, but were stopped by security at the convention after 2 days.
In the 1999 Sega Dreamcast commercial for Crazy Taxi, the DMV features the address number 666 (the Number of the beast) in reference to common complaints about long wait times and poor service at DMVs.
In 1993, Alfred Chicken publisher Mindscape attempted a publicity stunt by having Alfred Chicken run for a seat in the UK Parliament in the 1993 Christchurch, Dorset by-election, having an actor in an Alfred Chicken costume appear at the British House of Commons constituency of Christchurch as votes were read out. The Alfred Chicken Party received 18 votes, exceeding the Rainbow Alliance (a party intent on abolishing Parliament) by 2 votes. The Alfred Chicken Party was cited - alongside the "Buy the Daily Sport Party" - years later by the Liberal Democrats as a reason for increasing the number of signatures required for a party to get on a ballot.
Superfrog was originally going to gain powers from drinking Newcastle Brown Ale, but this was changed to Lucozade in the final release.
The print advertisement for Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures features the typical 90s commercial trash-talking against other popular video game characters of the time, claiming that they are unable to do things that Pac-Man can do in the game, such as "Dirty worms can't whistle", referring to Earthworm Jim, or "Big hairy apes can't think for themselves", referring to Donkey Kong. However, one of these allegations is the claim that "Overgrown housecats can't hang glide", seemingly referring to Bubsy the Bobcat, who's signature power is the ability to glide, and therefore would not need a hang glider.
In 2016, a post was uploaded to Tumblr responding to a post claiming that "there is nothing wrong with Yoshi" by jokingly accusing Yoshi of committing tax fraud, which would become a running gag within Nintendo fan circles, and eventually a meme in 2018 with the bait-and-switch YouTube account SiIvaGunner posting soundtracks from a fake Yoshi Commits Tax Fraud game.
Pyoro, the star of the game-within-a-game series that rivals Wario's microgames in the WarioWare series, is a parody of the Japanese malt chocolate ball brand Chocoball's mascot, Kyoro-Chan.
In the 1999 Sega Dreamcast commercial for Crazy Taxi, the DMV features the address number 666 (the Number of the beast) in reference to common complaints about long wait times and poor service at DMVs.