Trivia Browser
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The geometric limb assets introduced in the episode "Insectophobe's Nightmare" from the webseries "Battle for Dream Island" were originally created for the cover art of this game.
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Inside the files of the 1998 version of JumpStart Baby is a military-themed mission select graphic titled "DEFCON 4: THE ALISA FILES". The origin of this file and how it ended up in a game like JumpStart Baby is unknown.
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The Japanese version of Sonic the Hedgehog's Gameworld contains a "casino" page on the Storyware book containing slots, roulette, and poker - this was removed for the English release.
Franchise: Street Fighter
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In the 1993 movie City Hunter, there's a scene where Kim, who is Colonel MacDonald's main henchman, throws Ryo Saeba into a Street Fighter World Warrior arcade machine, where he suffers an electric shock and hallucinates Kim into Ken from the game. Ryo turns into E.Honda (renamed as E.Honde due to Jackie Chan's contract with Mitsubishi preventing any legal issues with the Honda brand) and Chun-Li, while his friends turn into both Guile and Dhalsim, who successfully defeat Kim/Ken. The music and sound effects are used exactly from the SNES version of World Warrior, and the artwork on the walls were drawn by Shoei Okano.
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
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The DSP-1, DSP-2, DSP-3, and DSP-4 enhancement chips were the same kinds of 8MHz NEC µPD77C25 math co-processors used by English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking's speech synthesizer, which was developed in 1986 after complications of ALS forced him to undergo a tracheotomy, rendering him mute. Because of this shared technology, when the hardware for Hawking's synthesizer started failing in 2017, the original developers were able to create a software version of it by borrowing code from the SNES emulator higan.
Technical specs about DSP chips: https://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=66603
Articles that cover the use of higan to emulate Hawking's speech synthesizer:
- https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Valley-quest-to-preserve-Stephen-12759775.php
- http://pawozniak.com
- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/06/how-snes-emulators-got-a-few-pixels-from-complete-perfection/
Articles that cover the use of higan to emulate Hawking's speech synthesizer:
- https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Valley-quest-to-preserve-Stephen-12759775.php
- http://pawozniak.com
- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/06/how-snes-emulators-got-a-few-pixels-from-complete-perfection/
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The musician Raeb is voiced by the game's composer Bear McCreary. Not only is he voiced by Bear, but his face is similar and his name is an anagram for Bear.
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In one of Mimir's many dialogues, he mentions a story about Kratos once entering into a tournament and lists off a few character descriptions that match up with those who would be seen in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Sony's attempt at making a Super Smash Bros.-style clone. Kratos even seems ashamed saying, "I would not speak of this", possibly referencing the poor reception it garnered from critics and fans.
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The title, cover, and content of each of Kvasirs poems is a reference to other PlayStation IPs including:
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• MLB The Show
• The Last of Us Part II
• Ratchet & Clank
• Death Stranding
• Dreams
• Concrete Genie
• Astro's Playroom
• Uncharted
• Journey
• Ghost of Tsushima
• The Order: 1886
• Bloodborne
• Days Gone
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• MLB The Show
• The Last of Us Part II
• Ratchet & Clank
• Death Stranding
• Dreams
• Concrete Genie
• Astro's Playroom
• Uncharted
• Journey
• Ghost of Tsushima
• The Order: 1886
• Bloodborne
• Days Gone
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
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The GameCube is unusual for its era in that early models carried an output socket for digital audio and video at a time when competing consoles exclusively outputted analog signals. The digital out port was used by the GameCube's component and D-Terminal cables to support both higher audiovisual fidelity and the ability to play games using progressive scan rather than traditional interlaced video. Because the format used, component video, is still analog, the cables required a proprietary digital-to-analog converter chip, meaning that third parties were unable to manufacture their own versions.The component and D-Terminal cables were sold exclusively through Nintendo's website before being quickly discontinued due to a lack of demand, as few commercial televisions at the time supported component video; additionally, later models of the GameCube remove the digital out port entirely. However, the cables' high demand on secondhand markets resulted in fans creating adapters for the digital out port, using the raw signal to make the console compatible with digital HDMI cables.
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According to one of the game's tech leads Jack Mathews, shortly after Metroid Prime shipped, Nintendo told Retro Studios that a "bad batch" of GameCube CPUs shipped, and apparently this game was the only game that misbehaved on them. Upon seeing videos of the issue, it became clear to them what was going on:
In retrospect, he wondered if it was possible to instead rig up the GameCube so it stayed in the freezer and let the wires run out to connect to the TV to save time running back and forth.
On the more technical side, Mathews explained:
When a player called Nintendo of America's support hotline about this animation problem, they would send them a new copy of the game disc with this updated code.
When this story was posted to Twitter in 2022, one user posted an older video of a graphics glitch positing that the issue is "caused by the ANCS file using the wrong CSKR for the suit model", and that it might be possible to simulate the issue outside of the hardware and software conditions it originally happened in. Mathews replied:
Mathews also talked about how it would have been a bigger hassle to rewrite the skinning pipeline to use the locked cache, because it would have been a rewrite by taking the risk of adding new code and may have net slowed things down. Adding the NOPs wouldn't break anything and just moved the stalls from the memory controller to the PPC chip.
"All animated objects were freaking out... we needed to actually slow down some of our code, because it was running too fast for these CPUs to handle! We needed to be able to test this, but Nintendo only had one dev kit with this CPU. We couldn't detect the CPU, and if we slowed it down too much, the game's framerate would tank. If we didn't slow it down enough, it would glitch. Even worse, we had to burn disks for this kit. So each test was hours. Even weirder was to see the problem, the kit had to be cold. Like, freezer cold. So we literally had to put the kit in the freezer, test the game for 15 minutes tops, then start all over. It was crazy. We literally were running the kit from the break room freezer to the TV, and loading save games as fast as possible to as many places as possible in 15 minutes, then trying new code, re-freezing, and back. I'll never forget it."
In retrospect, he wondered if it was possible to instead rig up the GameCube so it stayed in the freezer and let the wires run out to connect to the TV to save time running back and forth.
On the more technical side, Mathews explained:
"Our skinning used the locked cache DMA to read in data and the write gather pipeline to write it out. Most of the Nintendo samples used the locked cache for both read and write, so my method was a bit faster. But it also hit memory bandwidth limits. As I recall, the issue was that the write gather pipe on these broken CPU's wouldn't stall when it was full or properly report its status, so we had to keep inserting NOPs in the code to slow it down just enough to stop stalls from happening, but not so much to slow down the game."
When a player called Nintendo of America's support hotline about this animation problem, they would send them a new copy of the game disc with this updated code.
When this story was posted to Twitter in 2022, one user posted an older video of a graphics glitch positing that the issue is "caused by the ANCS file using the wrong CSKR for the suit model", and that it might be possible to simulate the issue outside of the hardware and software conditions it originally happened in. Mathews replied:
"I don't know if it was writing out less than we were putting in the write-gather, or throwing away and reusing from the buffer, but sort of along these lines, with more jittering and triangles all over the place. This example has coherent skinning, just a bad mapping... I think the WG pipe was a 96 byte circular buffer. So when it wouldn't stall, it would write bytes over earlier entries in the buffer before they could flush to main memory. These would still be four-byte aligned writes, so I think the way to emulate it would be to take blocks of anywhere from 4-32 bytes (a multiple of four) and move them back by 96 bytes in the skinning buffer."
Mathews also talked about how it would have been a bigger hassle to rewrite the skinning pipeline to use the locked cache, because it would have been a rewrite by taking the risk of adding new code and may have net slowed things down. Adding the NOPs wouldn't break anything and just moved the stalls from the memory controller to the PPC chip.
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The size of Metroid Prime's save data is under ~60 bytes in size. According to programmer Zoid Kirsch, the reason why the save data is so tiny is because each room in the game has a set of "world layers" that define which objects spawn when the room is loaded (e.g. world layers change Flaahgra's room from having a boss to Chozo Ghosts and an Artifact when returning later). World layers are also used for items like Energy Tanks or Missile Expansions; when they are picked up, they are on a separate world layer that is disabled once the item is acquired. If that layer wasn't disabled, the item would be there the next time the room is loaded.
A world layer state is represented by a single bit in the save data, and since there are only a few hundred world layers in the whole game, it ends up requiring just under ~50 bytes to represent them all, with the remaining bytes in the save data representing health, missile count, etc. When Nintendo asked Retro Studios how many memory card blocks Metroid Prime was expected to take up, Kirsch said: "One!" A GameCube memory card block is 8 KB, which was much more space than needed to save the game.
A world layer state is represented by a single bit in the save data, and since there are only a few hundred world layers in the whole game, it ends up requiring just under ~50 bytes to represent them all, with the remaining bytes in the save data representing health, missile count, etc. When Nintendo asked Retro Studios how many memory card blocks Metroid Prime was expected to take up, Kirsch said: "One!" A GameCube memory card block is 8 KB, which was much more space than needed to save the game.
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Within the game's code is a commented-out test string transcribing the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise, a monologue by Chancellor Sheev Palpatine from the 2005 film Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith; the monologue previously became a popular copypasta in the late 2010s, midway through the game's development. By nature, this text cannot be seen in the normal course of play and is only visible through observing the game's data.
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Oddity started life as Mother 4, a fanmade sequel to the EarthBound trilogy, and was advertised as such in initial marketing. However, in 2017, the development team decided to rebrand the game following a wave of cease-and-desist notices against other high-profile Nintendo fangames.
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To help development reach its finish, Retro Studios licensed out a PHP-based bug tracker called Mantis, working with Nintendo of America's product testing division to find bugs and the team's producers would enter bug reports.Eventually, Metroid Prime went gold on October 29, 2002 at 2:21 AM, less than a month before the release date to give time to manufacture game discs. Programmer Zoid Kirsch described it as one of the most memorable days of his life, commemorating it by getting the development team's signatures on a magazine poster. Notably, none of the developers signed on Samus because they had a large amount of respect for the character.
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On the game's box cover, Kobe Bryant is seen wearing his Lakers jersey with the patch that was used during the 2000-2001 NBA Finals. However, Kobe is also seen wearing Nike shoes, most notably the Nike Air Zoom Huarache 2K4, which appears to be a mistake as Kobe Bryant didn't sign with Nike until 2003. The reason for the error is thought to be due to 2K Sports having a contractual obligation between the Bryant estate and the Nike brand.
Franchise: Sonic The Hedgehog
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Ryan Drummond (voice of Sonic the Hedgehog from 1999 to 2004) revealed that during SEGA's recasting of the Sonic the Hedgehog cast in 2010, he had auditioned for the role and had actually won. However, SEGA requested Drummond to leave his union; so Drummond ultimately declined the offer.
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Nat Loh's biggest challenge when designing Grave Clobber was turning the original version from Trap Team (an Earth elemental villain with "undead mummy vibes") into a Water elemental Skylander, which had an open slot. After pulling some desperate parts, Nat revamped the Mayan mummy influence into a different Luchador direction, researching various lucha libre moves as a result. Notably, Grave Clobber's Gator Geysers was originally named "Sar-croc-phagus", but was changed due to it being too hard to say.
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The game is designed for a 4:3 display, with 16:9 support being limited to the title screen, menus, and credits. Because of this, the original North American and European releases feature colorful custom borders which occupy the unused screen space during 4:3 segments when playing on a 16:9 display. However, this attracted complaints from players, as the static nature of the borders risked causing screen burn-in after prolonged periods of play. Consequently, later revisions remove the borders, instead using standard black bars.
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James Pond creator Chris Sorrel has expressed disdain at the steady stream of ports that Codename: RoboCod has received in 21st century, citing changes in level design and graphics, a lack of consent or payment, and the Switch port in particular's timing aligning with his Kickstarter for a James Pond reboot.
When asked about the matter by Time Extension, he claimed:
When asked about the matter by Time Extension, he claimed:
"There are clearly businessmen who see no shame in porting an old game to a modern platform and pretending it has some timeless magic making it worth a modern gamer's time and money, but it sure embarrasses the hell out of me even when I have no part in it."
Franchise: Angry Birds
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As of 2011, Matilda the White Bird was the most popular Angry Bird within Rovio headquarters.