The game was originally announced at E3 2014 under the name "Mario Maker", with a demo and trailer featuring several differences from the final version of the game. These include a much different course editor HUD, different icons for the undo/reset buttons, and 8-bit text for the Play clapper. Other differences seen throughout the trailer include a vastly different look for the Super Mario Bros. theme, and slight alterations to the HUD of New Super Mario Bros. U.
During the development of Super Mario Bros., a 16x32 pixel square represented the player character. After asking to see sales figures from the head of Nintendo's Sales and Marketing Division, Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto decided to make Mario the game's protagonist due to the success of the Famicom port of Mario Bros.
Deer Avenger 3D was planned to be ported to the Sega Dreamcast, but the port was cancelled without ever being announced or previewed by gaming press. The Dreamcast version's development did not become known until 2017, when a prototype disc was discovered in New Jersey at a garage sale held in the basement of a women's club that was raising funds for high school seniors' scholarships.
The E3 2007 build of the Xbox 360 release revealed that the home console versions were originally meant to have cutscenes fully animated in 3D. A workprint containing these cutscenes shows a mix of finished and unfinished 3D renders and storyboards with placeholder voice acting, with the final game having cutscenes primarily animated in the same 2D digital animation as the show. The Nintendo DS version of the game is the only version that exclusively uses 3D cutscenes.
This build also reveals that the identity of the "sleazy video game producer" featured in Level 5: Mob Rules is Larry Probst, the former CEO of Electronic Arts from 1991-2007 whose name was censored from the script in the final game.
According to director Seiichi Ishii, the game was originally planned to feature a roster of characters from Chrono Trigger after he requested to work with that game's lead artist Akira Toriyama. Ishii wanted to work with him because around that time, Trunks from Toriyama's manga series "Dragon Ball Z" had recently been introduced, and he wanted a character like him in the game. As work on the game's prototype progressed, Toriyama was brought on and offered to design a full cast of new characters for the game instead of using Chrono Trigger characters.
Kien was originally developed between 2002 and 2004 by AgeOfGames, a group of five Italian developers who had no prior experience making video games, aiming to be the first company in their country to develop a game for the Game Boy Advance. The game's release would end up being cancelled three separate times when multiple publishers picked up the game and then decided that releasing it would be too risky for sales. At the time, the game was completed and sent to gaming publications, with one known review appearing in the American magazine Nintendo Power in 2003. The game remained unreleased for over 20 years, but a prototype ROM of it did leak online at one point. Game designer Fabio Belsanti would be the only member of the game's original development team to remain at AgeOfGames, who had shifted to developing educational games to stay afloat. Eventually, with the rising popularity in retro games and lowered cost to produce GBA cartridges, AgeOfGames was able to release Kien in 2024 both digitally and on physical cartridges through retro game publisher Incube8 Games. The game's release garnered attention for it possibly having taken the record for the longest delayed video game release in history, surpassing Duke Nukem Forever and Beyond Good & Evil 2 by taking 22 years to release.
Although it was only released in Japan, there were plans for an international version of Mario Party: Challenge World slated for release in Spring 2018. A demo for an English-translated version was shown off at the 2017 Attractions Expo for the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) using the Japanese version's six-player roulette design. However, this release date came and went with no further announcements. On May 30, 2018, the game's manufacturer Raw Thrills accidentally uploaded and quickly delisted a video on their YouTube channel showing the international version's boot-up process (using a Windows OS) with the game's title screen fully translated into English, before crashing. In October, photos were leaked to the arcade news blog Arcade Heroes revealing that the international version was still being tested, but sported a heavily revamped cabinet design that ditched the roulette and redesigned the game for only three players. This was most likely due to its original design as a roulette gambling game keeping it from being sold to most American arcades. After more radio silence and it missing IAAPA's 2018 Expo, Raw Thrills confirmed to Arcade Heroes in April 2019 that the game was cancelled, and its few prototype cabinets were sold off to select luxury entertainment centers. One confirmed location housing it as of April 2019 was the Tulsa, Oklahoma branch of Cinergy Entertainment.
In the prototype of Hotel Mario, walking Toads are used as Super Mushrooms and 1-Up collectables. The final game changes these Toad sprites to bouncing mushrooms, but the manual still refers to them as Toads.
Galaga was originally conceived as a way to utilize Galaxian's PCB boards after they were overmanufactured, but while creating a partially-complete prototype, R&D engineer (and future Namco president) Shigeichi Ishimura decided that Galaga should use its own unique PCB hardware.
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Explosive Fighter Patton from 1988 is believed to be the first video game to use the swear word "fuck", referring to the Famicom Disk System as the "fucking box". It is not known if this is an in-joke or a translation error.
This is followed by Skweek for Amstrad CPC in 1989, whose development builds leaked to the UK market, featuring a variety of vulgar in-joke placeholder phrases. The swearing version of the game has not known to be preserved, but it is alleged that one of these quotes was "fuck your mother!". This would make it the first use of "fuck" to be known for a fact to have been intentional, even if its distribution wasn't.
1990's Paranoia, the Japanese version of Psychosis features an 8-bit sound effect upon stage clear that appears to be made to evoke the phrase "fuck you!", which is played in accompaniment with an alien flipping the bird. This is technically the first vocalized use of "fuck", but is not a recording of a human voice, and is the first for-a-fact intentionally included use of "fuck".
1991's Llamatron contained a voice sample of the word "oh, fuck!" which was cut off. A glitch made it so that if you paused the game upon dying, it would play uncensored, making it the first clear vocalised use of "fuck", even if still not intentionally added.
1995's The Orion Conspiracy contains one of the earliest known uses of "fuck" that was clearly spoken, uncensored, and known for a fact to not be an oversight. Also of note is Discworld, released in the same year, having an Easter egg referencing John Cleese's 1989 eulogy to the late Monty Python member Graham Chapman. While both games released in the same year, it is unknown which game came out first as Discworld is the only one of the two to have a known release date, coming out on March 17, 1995.
"Reverence" was one of the last announced projects by Cyberdreams, but never made it past the Alpha phase before the company's closure. The game saw the player being chosen by the gods themselves to help determine the future of the human race, whom the gods believed to have grown too apathetic and unjust to live. It was intended to be a first-person shooter game, with the player wielding a variety of guns and spells as they traveled through four different realms to decide the fate of humanity. Each realm was modelled after a real life mythological god, those being Osiris (Egyptian god of the underworld), Kokyangwuti (Hopi goddess of life), Freyja (Norse goddess of love), and Manjursi (Tibetan god of wisdom). While the game itself was cancelled, a playable prototype was leaked in 2015.
In August 2015, location tests for DanceDanceRevolution (2014) were held in North America. This marked both the first time the series was location tested in North America since Dance Dance Revolution X2 and the first time eAMUSEMENT was officially supported in the region. The English translation was a more completed version of the one present in the Korean version. Furthermore, 47 songs were removed from this version due to copyright restrictions, mostly being licensed songs from previous entries and all the "U.M.UXBEMANI" songs.
In the end, DanceDanceRevolution (2014) was not released in North America, with the following game Dance Dance Revolution A becoming the first Arcade release in North America since Dance Dance Revolution X2.
A prototype for Barkley: Shut Up & Jam 2 shows that, instead of the photo used in the final game, the title screen was going to show a cartoon illustration of Charles Barkley.
During the 2006 Game Developers Conference (GDC) where Sony Computer Entertainment showcased a new demo for Resistance, the game previously known as "I-8". The demo showed the game in a much more complete form than the simple FPS that was shown at E3 2005. The gameplay was shown with new weapons very much like the Ratchet & Clank series, only now with a more realistic slant. The demo also showed off effects such as smoke trails on grenades, tactical troop movements, and enemies that came from the ceilings as the lead character ran down a devastated corridor.
Argonaut Software's Starglider games released in the 1980s, which were first-person combat flight simulators rendered with wireframe vector graphics, inspired them to come up with a prototype that would eventually lead to the creation of the first Star Fox. They created a prototype for the Nintendo Entertainment System codenamed as "NESGlider" that was based on the original game, utilizing a similar method to accelerate graphics to how the Super FX chip for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System later would. When they showed this prototype to Nintendo in 1990, they were instead advised to port and develop the game for the then-upcoming SNES. After Argonauts did that, Nintendo declared that this was the best 3D graphics the console could produce and that they hadn't designed the SNES with 3D games in mind. Argonaut staff suggested that if they wanted better, then they should let them design a 3D chip for them, and thus the Super FX chip was born.
Star Fox 64's development began with a series of experiments by character designer Takaya Imamura and programmer Kazuaki Morita. As Morita was new to 3D programming, creating something entirely new was difficult, and to make matters worse, they didn't have the final N64 hardware itself to work with, instead having to utilize a bulky dev computer and a modified SNES controller. The pair decided to begin development by porting the original Star Fox, which they thought would be better for easing into 3D. As this was Morita's first attempt at learning 3D, he began with inputting his own data and placing objects like cubes on a course, and then launched basic-looking Arwings. This prototype was affectionately named "Star Box".
A prototype for Color a Dinosaur shows that the game was originally called Paint Me! and used black backgrounds instead of white. Despite the title not signifying that the game features dinosaurs, there is nothing to suggest that the game was ever going to feature any pages other than dinosaurs, as all the pages on the prototype are also dinosaurs.
A prototype exists for a US version of the original Japan-exclusive Puzzle Bobble known as Bubble Buster which removes the Bubble Bobble elements outright, as it was a very common practice for puzzle games at the time. This is somewhat unusual, because no replacement characters were provided, unlike localisations such as Tetris Attack, and Bubble Bobble had already proven itself to be a popular brand in the American market at the time. The logo for Bubble Buster would serve as the basis for the logo of the Neo Geo arcade remake's US release, Bust-A-Move, though that did not remove the Bubble Bobble characters.
The prototype for Virtual Bart shows an ending screen at the end of the credits instead of just the player's score. It is a crudely written "THE END" in cursive with the nonsensical text "You are a true Bart Simpson" alongside the score. The "You are a true Bart Simpson" text is in the final game's code.
In a prototype for Virtual Bart, an early version of the cutscene that plays before the tomato-throwing minigame can be seen. This cutscene shows Bart with a devious smirk, which was likely redrawn for going against Simpsons style guide rules against "demonic expressions"
In the prototype of Hotel Mario, walking Toads are used as Super Mushrooms and 1-Up collectables. The final game changes these Toad sprites to bouncing mushrooms, but the manual still refers to them as Toads.
A prototype for Barkley: Shut Up & Jam 2 shows that, instead of the photo used in the final game, the title screen was going to show a cartoon illustration of Charles Barkley.
A prototype for Color a Dinosaur shows that the game was originally called Paint Me! and used black backgrounds instead of white. Despite the title not signifying that the game features dinosaurs, there is nothing to suggest that the game was ever going to feature any pages other than dinosaurs, as all the pages on the prototype are also dinosaurs.
A prototype exists for a US version of the original Japan-exclusive Puzzle Bobble known as Bubble Buster which removes the Bubble Bobble elements outright, as it was a very common practice for puzzle games at the time. This is somewhat unusual, because no replacement characters were provided, unlike localisations such as Tetris Attack, and Bubble Bobble had already proven itself to be a popular brand in the American market at the time. The logo for Bubble Buster would serve as the basis for the logo of the Neo Geo arcade remake's US release, Bust-A-Move, though that did not remove the Bubble Bobble characters.
The prototype for Virtual Bart shows an ending screen at the end of the credits instead of just the player's score. It is a crudely written "THE END" in cursive with the nonsensical text "You are a true Bart Simpson" alongside the score. The "You are a true Bart Simpson" text is in the final game's code.
In a prototype for Virtual Bart, an early version of the cutscene that plays before the tomato-throwing minigame can be seen. This cutscene shows Bart with a devious smirk, which was likely redrawn for going against Simpsons style guide rules against "demonic expressions"