During Act 2 Chapter 4: 'The Farmstead', when players are required to enter the old couple's farm house for supplies, inside they can find an old grandfather clock. Although no button prompt is displayed, the clock can be interacted with by both players at the same time. Interacting with the clock unlocks a door to a secret room up on the staircase where inside a toy treasure chest can be found. Opening the chest displays a cutscene where the player's character will retrieve a wooden sword and raise it above their head. This is a reference to The Legend of Zelda series where the main protagonist Link performs this exact action when acquiring a unique item. After the cutscene an achievement/trophy 'Timeless Treasure' is earned with the description, "You linked up to get past". Another reference to the Zelda series with the third entry, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to The Past.
In an interview with Polygon writer Chris Plante, series director Shinya Kumazaki stated that although Kirby appears to devour his enemies, the foes that he swallows are not killed; instead, they simply get "poofed" elsewhere in the world. According to Kumazaki, this concept is meant to make the series more approachable to lay audiences by presenting a comedic alternative to the "extreme or violent expression" of Kirby digesting his opponents.
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.
When you are locked onto a target in Metroid Prime, pressing the jump button does a sideways dash. This lets the player easily strafe around a target and dodge incoming fire. This sideways strafe jump sets a horizontal velocity on the player that continues to circle around the target while locked on, but if you unlock the target just as the strafe jump starts, Samus keeps the horizontal momentum without the lock-on pull. This trick, which the game's speedrunning community called the Scan Dash, allows for a larger horizontal distance traversal than a normal jump. Using this momentum can let Samus catch the edge of the cliff beside her ship in the Landing Site and get the Space Jump Boots early upon landing.
According to programmer Zoid Kirsch, creative use of the game physics and movement that results in acquiring items out of order allows for creative exploration of the game world. While sequence breaks like this are a crucial part of the Metroid series, this trick would actually be patched out in later releases of the game.
If Samus speeds through a Morph Ball puzzle or boosts through a Morph Ball tunnel, sometimes there's a little door blocking the way. According to programmer Zoid Kirsch, these doors were designed to resemble and serve the same purpose as the regular big doors that open once the force field over them is shot and the room behind them is fully loaded.
When they first started making the 2D-styled Morph Ball areas, they were connected to various rooms with tunnels. They worked well until testers started beating the load times of the next room and would fall out of the world. Kirsch had to go throughout the game and add the Morph Ball doors into every tunnel that crossed rooms to ensure that Samus won't roll out of the tunnel and fall into the void before the room is loaded. Because the testers were already conditioned to wait at the big doors after the force field was shot, no players ended up backtracking and waited for the small doors to open, rendering them a successful change. Ideally, players shouldn't see the small doors very often as the load system tries to get the next room loaded, but they might bump into them if they are quick enough.
In the last few months of the game's development, the team invited friends of family to do "white paper" playtests of the game where they would play without help and the developers would monitor their progress. According to programmer Zoid Kirsch, they learned a lot from these observations:
"We'd often see testers get stuck in rooms that had [Morph Ball] tunnel exits--they won't notice them. This resulted in putting big spotlights over those entrances to make them stand out as a path. Our testers often couldn't figure out how to get up to the bridge leading to the Arboretum. After they acquired the [Morph Ball] and returned to the Main Plaza in the Chozo Ruins they didn't notice the steps in the back to cross the bridge. Originally both back steps were nearly the same color. We changed them to different textures and improved lighting. Our next set of testers noticed it immediately."
These tests with new players helped improve the game greatly, because they provided clear feedback in how to communicate the game world to the player, resulting in a lot of simple design changes that were incorporated throughout the game.
After each level is cleared, the player will reach a results screen that tallies up every kill they got in the level. In the PC version of the game, the player is able to speed through this screen by mashing the swift attack button. This option is not available in any of the console versions.
Die Biene Maja: Klatschmohnwiese in Gefahr was released in the US under the title of The Bee Game, seemingly taking advantage of a convenient timing to the release of DreamWorks' Bee Movie by removing the association with the Maya the Bee brand, which has had a lesser cultural footprint in the US compared to other regions.
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.
According to programmer Zoid Kirsch, when the team first started working on Phendrana Drifts in Metroid Prime, they created a particle system that shows snow gently falling. When the snow effect was first implemented, they noticed large empty streaks in the falling snow, and quickly realized that the snow was basically a 3D plot of the deficiency of the default random number generator that came with their compiler.
They switched to a using a better random algorithm via a linear congruential generator that was still fast, but generates a far better distribution of numbers, allowing the snow to look much more evenly distributed. This moment was what helped the developers realize just how bad their default random number generator was and that they had to make use of a better one.
When this story was originally posted to Twitter in 2022, several other developers replied with similar shorter anecdotes about working with RNG, such as Robin Lavallée, a programmer on Surf's Up for the Nintendo DS, and Tom Leonard, the lead programmer on Thief: The Dark Project.
Despite the player destroying the barnhouse in the final mission of the game, the ending of Chungus Rampage in Big Forest shows the farmer crying outside of an undamaged barnhouse.
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.
Upon its initial release, Pooplers was, despite its young target audience, given an M rating by the ESRB for "blood", likely because one of the selectable poop colors in the game is red. Despite this M rating being featured in the game's trailer, the game would eventually be re-evaluated to an E10+ rating for merely "mild blood".
Space Jam's multiplayer mode is absurdly unbalanced, seeming to have a morality-based method of stat calculation, with the hero characters having very powerful stats (with Michael Jordan in particular being maxed out), while the Monstars and villainous Tune Squad members (such as Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck) generally have very poor stats (most egregiously in the case of Pound, the leader of the Nerdlucks, having merely 1 point speed and shooting, and 2 point rebounds). There is no way to have ditto matches between 2 Monstar teams or 2 Tune Squad teams.
According to programmer Zoid Kirsch, when he first started programming and learning BASIC, one of the first programs he wrote at the age of 13 was a maze generation algorithm that could generate a maze of any size with a single solution (a C code port of Kirsch's original BASIC implementation, posted by him on Usenet in 1989, can be found here). During the development of Metroid Prime, when designing Central Dynamo, the room in the Phazon Mines with the Power Bomb upgrade, he used the same algorithm to add a randomly generated maze for the Morph Ball that players would have to solve.
One of the game's tech leads Jack Mathews expressed concern that this algorithm would eventually generate an impassible maze, so to ensure that the maze was of sufficient length, he wrote a tool that would generate and then solve the maze, picking 300 random seeds that the solver indicated at least 75% of the maze was required to be traversed. This results in 300 different mazes that can be generated in Central Dynamo. The maze also features two obstacles along the route in the form of water puddles that must be bombed to short out the nearby nodes and open the path.
When this story was originally posted to Twitter in 2022, programmer Robin Lavallée commented that he wrote a similar algorithm for the Wii game Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, where all seeds were equally likely, and the solution would be stored as he built the maze.
In 2021, an auction was put up on eBay for an "Among Us-shaped chicken nugget", supposedly obtained from the McDonald's promotional tie-in meal with the K-Pop boy band BTS. This played off of a then-recent meme depicting Among Us players as suffering from pareidolia and mistaking simple everyday objects for impostors, the general cultural distaste for boy bands like BTS, and a viral 2017 eBay listing of a Cheeto supposedly shaped like the deceased gorilla Harambe. The nugget would come alongside a packet of Szechuan Sauce, a McDonald's condiment that had received a controversial limited release provoked by a joke in an episode of the animated series Rick & Morty. The auction sold to user polizna for $99,997.00 USD, outclassing the price of the Harambe Cheeto by $97.00.
According to programmer Zoid Kirsch, the reason why Metroid Prime had elevators were because, as a mainstay of the 2D Metroid series, they were used for three primary technical reasons that were also present in the series' first 3D game: world maps could only be up to a certain size, sound banks needed to be changed, and the transitions helped to clear up any memory fragmentation.
1. The world size limit was due to floating point precision. If Samus got too far from the origin, her movement would start stuttering since the values would get too large. When this story was originally posted to Twitter in 2022, Robin Lavallée, a former lead programmer at Ubisoft, suggested that Retro Studios could have shifted floating points where after a certain distance, everything would be shifted back closer to origin, citing this as something done during the development of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. However, Kirsch replied back that the team deliberately avoided doing this out of concern that it would cause bugs. Instead, Samus moves consistently through the world as it loads around her.
2. For the sound banks, the MusyX sound system can stream music but it couldn’t for sound effects. Each world had a different set of sounds that were loaded while the elevator cut scene is running.
3. The GameCube doesn't have any virtual memory and everything is allocated from the physical RAM. The elevator loads caused all memory to be freed between the worlds, cleaning up any fragmentation.
One of the game's tech leads Jack Mathews hardcoded the different elevator cutscenes into the game. It's not a "room" at all, nor is it a prerendered video file, but it's coded directly in C++ and does not run through the usual game systems for camera control, etc. They also feature crossfades since it had fixed rendering, one of the only places the developers could afford to render overlapped scenes.
Vector's artwork in this game is based on a fan render made by DeviantArt user Nibroc-Rock, who would later work with Sega and contribute official renders used for the Sonic the Hedgehog social media accounts and the mobile game Sonic Speed Simulator.
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.
The House of the Dead series, despite being featured quite prominently, has rarely been namedropped in SEGA crossover games.
In Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, Zobio and Zobiko's character bio shortens their debut as "HOTD EX" (despite games with longer titles such as Billy Hatcher & the Giant Egg and Alex Kidd in Miracle World not being shortened).
In Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, Sega Superstars Tennis, and Sega Superstars, all instances where a House of the Dead logo would be placed are instead swapped for a logo reading Curien Mansion in the same style as the series' logo.
Sega Heroes would be the game to finally break the trend, referring to the games by their title and with their original logo.
This may be due to the series being banned in Germany.
In 2021, an auction was put up on eBay for an "Among Us-shaped chicken nugget", supposedly obtained from the McDonald's promotional tie-in meal with the K-Pop boy band BTS. This played off of a then-recent meme depicting Among Us players as suffering from pareidolia and mistaking simple everyday objects for impostors, the general cultural distaste for boy bands like BTS, and a viral 2017 eBay listing of a Cheeto supposedly shaped like the deceased gorilla Harambe. The nugget would come alongside a packet of Szechuan Sauce, a McDonald's condiment that had received a controversial limited release provoked by a joke in an episode of the animated series Rick & Morty. The auction sold to user polizna for $99,997.00 USD, outclassing the price of the Harambe Cheeto by $97.00.
Vector's artwork in this game is based on a fan render made by DeviantArt user Nibroc-Rock, who would later work with Sega and contribute official renders used for the Sonic the Hedgehog social media accounts and the mobile game Sonic Speed Simulator.
The House of the Dead series, despite being featured quite prominently, has rarely been namedropped in SEGA crossover games.