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Moon: Remix RPG Adventure
Moon: Remix RPG Adventure (1997)
subdirectory_arrow_right Moon (Game)
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Artwork/Illustration, Backstory/Lore, Crunch/Overwork, Development, Downloadable Content (DLC), Early Idea, Ending, Inaccessible Area, Inspiration, Reference, Similarities, Suggested, Theory, Unused Character, Unused Content, Unused Cutscene, Unused Graphic, Unused Text
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month September 9, 2024
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Jak 3
Jak 3 (2004)
subdirectory_arrow_right Jak II (Game), Naughty Dog (Company)
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Attachment Naughty Dog's name was inspired by their first company mascot Morgan, a Labrador/Rhodesian Ridgeback mix born in 1989 who was the pet dog of co-founder Jason Rubin starting with the development of Rings of Power. During the development of Way of the Warrior, Morgan lived with both Rubin and co-founder Andy Gavin in poor living conditions and she was often fed some of their meals from the fast food chain McDonald's. While she first appeared in a game as a Special Thanks credit in Rings of Power, Morgan technically became part of the company when she was given her own photo ID card after Naughty Dog moved onto the Universal Interactive Studios premises for the development of Crash Bandicoot. She was credited as a member of Naughty Dog on their four Crash Bandicoot games and Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. She died in 2002 at the age of 13 during the development of Jak II, and several tributes to her were put into Jak II and Jak 3.

Jak II's manual and end credits feature a standard In Memoriam dedication for Morgan, but there are two more hidden tributes in the game. There is a green neon sign spelling Morgan's name written in the Precurian language inside the Hip Hog Saloon located to the left from the door. Additionally, in the Power Station in New Haven City, a set of random scrolling Precurian messages can be found on the large computer monitor. Translating these to English will reveal the following:

• "Morgan I miss you"
• "Morgan"
• "Thirteen years hard time"
• "There will never be another"
• "Good dog"
• "I will always love you"

Another message can be found on computer screens you can view at eye-level, which reads "Morgan is still missed even after a year has passed". These computer screen messages are re-used on the monitors in both the Power Station and the Freedom League buildings in Jak 3. Since Morgan's death, Naughty Dog have credited more pets as members of their team and/or company mascots, with the first successor being a Labrador puppy named Osiris who first appeared in the credits of the first Jak and Daxter game alongside Morgan.
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Corporate Affairs, Credits, Crunch/Overwork, Development, Easter Egg, General, Hidden Message, Inspiration, Manual, Mascot, Passed Away, Real Life, Title, Tribute
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month September 1, 2024
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Drill Dozer
Drill Dozer (2005)
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Drill Dozer marked the first time Ken Sugimori directed a game since Pulseman eleven years earlier in 1994. In a 2005 Nintendo Dream interview, he revealed that due to the increasing amount of content and collaboration required in making modern games and much of Game Freak's newer staff only having experience in the Pokémon series, he was prompted to place his full trust in the younger staff for most of the gameplay development as he realized he was not as young as he used to be. Sugimori scaled back his efforts to focus on drawing art for the game while character designs were done by Hironobu Yoshida. He also noted that Drill Dozer gave him an opportunity incorporate ten years worth of ideas from previous games that went unused due to memory constraints or deadlines, and felt they succeeded, which gave him a sense of relief.
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Artwork/Illustration, Asset Reuse, Character Design, Crunch/Overwork, Development, Early Build, Early Idea, Magazine, Real Life, Storage/Memory
person ProtoSnake calendar_month August 10, 2024
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Beyond Good & Evil 2
Beyond Good & Evil 2 (TBA)
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In September 2020, it was announced that the game's original director and series creator Michel Ancel would be retiring from the video game industry to focus on working for a wildlife sanctuary, but it was assured that development would continue without him. Later that month, the French newspaper "Libération" reported that several members of his team at Ubisoft Montpellier had accused him of acting abusive and unorganized, resulting in numerous delays and restarts since the game's announcement in 2008. This behavior was allegedly worsened by his simultaneous work on Wild (a big-budget game announced in 2014), preventing him from working on Beyond Good & Evil 2 with its team full-time. Although reports were submitted to company leadership as early as 2017, it was alleged that Ancel's relationship with Ubisoft co-founder Yves Guillemot prevented any major corrections from occurring until June and July 2020, when employees from all over the company came forward with sexual abuse and other misconduct allegations against high-ranking executives. Ubisoft would later comment that Ancel had not been directly involved in the game's development for "some time now" before his departure.

Ancel was interviewed as part of Libération's investigation. He claimed that Guillemot informed him that Ubisoft was investigating him in early August 2020, but claimed he was unaware that numerous team members blamed him for the game's development issues, and believed they were actually caused by long-term stress and burnout. He claimed to have resigned on his own accord and that his only regret was not finishing the game sooner. The newspaper claimed that the interview took place on September 18th, the same day that Ancel and Ubisoft's statements about the departure were released. One week later when the report and interview were published, Ancel denied all of the allegations in an Instagram post, calling the articles "fake news" and accusing the newspaper of publishing them as soon as possible to conflate them with the earlier Ubisoft allegations in June and July, over a month before Ubisoft's investigation into him allegedly began.
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Complaint, Corporate Affairs, Crunch/Overwork, Development, General, Real Life
person chocolatejr9 calendar_month July 9, 2024
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Marvel's Spider-Man 2
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (2023)
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Within the 2023 Insomniac Games ransomware leak, a PC developer build of the game was found to include several unused Symbiote bosses, including Riot, Lasher, Agony, and Phage. These characters were intended to appear as a team alongside the main antagonist, Venom. However, during development, the game’s story likely underwent changes and the focus shifted to other characters, such as Kraven and Venom. As a result, the Symbiotes besides Venom, Scream, and Anti-Venom were abandoned.
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Adaptation, Crunch/Overwork, Development, Early Build, Early Idea, General, Leak, Unused Character, Unused Content
person ProtoSnake calendar_month February 16, 2024
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Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Leak Reveals Cut Content, Including Riot And Other Symbiotes:
https://exputer.com/news/games/marvels-spider-man-2-leak-riot/

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Leaks Reveal Symbiote Bosses That Didn’t Make the Final Cut Along With Some Scrapped Story Elements:
https://in.ign.com/marvels-spider-man-2/200881/news/marvels-spider-man-2-leaks-reveal-symbiote-bosses-that-didnt-make-the-final-cut
Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening
Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening (2022)
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In an interview with the game's producer Michi Ryu published on Siliconera on July 25, 2023, he revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the game’s development, which started just before the pandemic. The team had to adjust to an unfamiliar work style and structure, which made it difficult to exchange information with team members. Chat tools and video calls became crucial for communication during this period, which they normally did not use before.

Ryu mentioned another significant challenge during development was the unification of daimyo and retainers. The team wanted to show the theme of "living officers who think and act on their own", but found it difficult to decide to what extent retainers should act on their own. Some would act too smart and expand their territory if the player left them alone which Ryu believed would make for boring gameplay, but he also did not want to put extra stress on the player by making the officers stupid. Their solution to this was "not to indicate what is right to do but to let the players decide."

Conversely, Ryu could not recall anything that came together easily during the development process.
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Balancing, Crunch/Overwork, Development, General, Real Life
person ProtoSnake calendar_month January 27, 2024
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The Getaway
The Getaway (2002)
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Complaint, Crunch/Overwork, Debug, Development, General, Hidden Message, Real Life, Storage/Memory, Unused Code
person ProtoSnake calendar_month January 24, 2024
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)
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Attachment 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".
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Cameo, Complaint, Crunch/Overwork, Real Life, Unused Character, Unused Content, Unused Graphic
person Rocko & Heffer calendar_month January 23, 2024
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The Callisto Protocol
The Callisto Protocol (2022)
subdirectory_arrow_right Striking Distance Studios (Company)
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On January 9, 2023, a report was released by GamesIndustry.biz revealing that over 20 developers who worked on The Callisto Protocol were not included in the game's end credits, including multiple full-time developers and other key contributors. The decision to leave out these developers was described as "egregious" by one unnamed employee, while another accused the game’s developer, Striking Distance, of "playing favorites" and only crediting those that "they liked or had some sort of relationship with". The report also highlighted the intense work culture at Striking Distance with a controversy involving the studio's director Glen Schofield in September 2022, where he made a tweet about his employees working "six-seven days a week" for "12-15 hour days". At the time before the report's release, this tweet about the crunch culture at the studio was roundly criticized; it was later deleted and Schofield issued an apology, stating that the studio valued "passion and creativity, not long hours." In June 2023, an update was released for the game that added the names of over 50 previously uncredited developers to the credits, a notably higher head count than the numbers in the original report. These credits were added to the "Miscellaneous" group, which originally had only 18 names, and was also now renamed to "Additional Development".
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Apology, Complaint, Credits, Crunch/Overwork, Development, Difficulty, General, Real Life, Social Media, Update Difference
person ProtoSnake calendar_month January 13, 2024
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Callisto Protocol developers left out of credits:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/callisto-protocol-developers-left-out-of-credits

Glen Schofield back pedals Callisto Protocol crunch comments:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/glen-schofield-back-pedals-callisto-protocol-crunch-comments

The Callisto Protocol Reportedly Left Around 20 Devs Out Of The Credits:
https://www.thegamer.com/the-callisto-protocol-left-20-devs-out-of-credits/

Developers left out of The Callisto Protocol credits accuse Striking Distance of "playing favourites":
https://www.eurogamer.net/developers-left-out-of-the-callisto-protocol-credits-accuse-striking-distance-of-playing-favourites

Callisto Protocol update restores omitted developers to credits:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/callisto-protocol-update-restores-omitted-developers-to-credits/
Freddi Fish and The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds
Freddi Fish and The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds (1994)
subdirectory_arrow_right Humongous Entertainment (Company)
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Attachment 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.
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Crunch/Overwork, Development, Sprite/Graphical Animation, Unused Content, Unused Graphic
person Rocko & Heffer calendar_month November 17, 2023
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Bomb Jack II
Bomb Jack II (1986)
subdirectory_arrow_right Beyond the Ice Palace (Game), ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera (Game), ThunderCats (Franchise), Ghosts 'n Goblins (Franchise), FTL Games (Company), Paradise Software (Company)
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Attachment When Elite Software obtained the license to make a video game based on the ThunderCats cartoon, they were unsure if they would be able to complete the game in time for Christmas, and as such outsourced a second ThunderCats game to Paradise Software. Neither game could be finished before the deadline, and as such Elite instead attained the rights to a near-finished game titled Samurai Dawn by FTL Games and released it as ThunderCats: The Lost Eye of Thundera.

Elite's in-house ThunderCats game got pitched to Capcom as a sequel to Ghosts 'n Goblins, but was not picked up due to Ghouls 'n Ghosts being in development at the time. It would be released as an original IP, simply titled Beyond the Ice Palace, featuring a character who in certain versions of the game resembles Lion-O.

Paradise Software's ThunderCats game remains shrouded in mystery, but it seems incredibly likely that the game was released as Bomb Jack II, owing to the C64 version of the game including a rendition of the ThunderCats theme song (stolen music being somewhat of a tradition for the Bomb Jack franchise), not featuring any bombs, and having a protagonist that more closely resembles Lion-O than Bomb Jack.
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Acquisition, Adaptation, Cancelled Release, Character Design, Crunch/Overwork, Plagiarism, Reskin, Theory, Unreleased Content, Unsolved Mystery, Unused Character
person Rocko & Heffer calendar_month November 16, 2023
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Star Fox Adventures
Star Fox Adventures (2002)
subdirectory_arrow_right Dinosaur Planet (Game)
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Attachment DarkIce Mines, the first SpellStone area in Star Fox Adventures, was another area that was more complex in design in earlier iterations of the game than in comparison to the final release. The leaked December 2000 build of Dinosaur Planet showed that the lower underground mines portion of DarkIce Mines was meant to have an extra set of puzzle rooms on the right side of the map that would wound up connecting back to the waterfall room. These extra areas were also present in the E3 2002 kiosk for Star Fox Adventures, suggesting that they were very late cuts, very likely as the development team was being crunched to get the game out in time of the Microsoft buyout in late 2002, similar to what happened with Dragon Rock.
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Acquisition, Corporate Affairs, Crunch/Overwork, Demo, Development, Early Idea, Unused Content
person Dinoman96 calendar_month November 2, 2023
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DarkIce Mines beta maps:
https://twitter.com/storyofsauria/status/1354955448630259717

Star Fox Adventures kiosk demo - DarkIce Mines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajFW8ikaoCk

Dinosaur Planet - DarkIce Mines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAP3HDW8Khc#t=1570s
Super Mario 64 DS
Super Mario 64 DS (2004)
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According to former Nintendo employee Motoi Okamoto, around the time of this game's development, Shigeru Miyamoto would begin 6-hour-long nighttime crunch sessions during the development of Super Mario 64 DS by exclaiming "It's Mario time.":

"In those days, Miyamoto would come to us at 11 PM, after he finished all of his board-member work, and say, "It's Mario time." At that point, we'd start a planning meeting that would run until 2 AM. At that point, Miyamoto would go home, leaving us with the words, "You should return home soon, for your health." Over the next two or three hours, we'd write the game design documents and summarize the instructions for our artists and programmers.
It was the craziest crunch time that I've ever experienced in my development career. But if the God of Games was working so much, could we give up? Miyamoto had incredible stamina."
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Crunch/Overwork, Development, Real Life
person Rocko & Heffer calendar_month September 21, 2023
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