In Gimmick: Exact Mix, a black bird ally from the original game was recolored to resemble Kyorochan, the mascot of ChocoBall, a Japanese malt chocolate ball brand similar to Maltesers or Whoppers.
Every version of The Three Stooges opens with a bait-and-switch title screen for another game. The NES version opens with Ghostbusters II, also published by Acclaim and licensed from Columbia Pictures. All other versions of the game, including the cancelled Game Boy Color release, open with Defender of the Crown, another Cinemaware game.
Alongside all of the cinema and television references that fans of the cartoon would expect, Animaniacs for Genesis also contains a small handful of references to other Konami games. Vic Viper from Gradius appears as a platform in the space level, and the Dracula boss uses Dracula's flame attack from the Castlevania games.
This was changed in the arcade release of X, reducing the quantity of Shock Arrows in the beginning and end and spacing them out further. This modified chart is also used in the Japanese console release of the game.
The idea of having a game told from the perspective of an immigrant mother came about because, as noted by lead developer Abhi, most media related to immigrant stories focused on second-generation children, rather than their parents. Abhi felt that it was the parents who had "a cooler story to tell, because they up and leave their country at the age of 40 or 50, and they move to a brand new place."
On the character designer for Nitros Oxide in Crash Team Racing, Bob Rafei's website, he has a portfolio containing various works sorted by game. In the Crash Team Racing folder of the site, there is an image of a blue hippo in an aviator suit named "trippo.jpg". According to Rafei in 2017, this character was designed as a mascot for an airline search engine during the dot-com boom, but was placed in the CTR folder of the site by mistake. However, in the time between the image's discovery and the clarification, the image was spread online as if it was a lost Crash Bandicoot character, gaining the accepted name of "Fasty" through unknown means.
In Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled, the character Hasty the Moose, one of two completely original characters alongside King Chicken, was inspired by the myth of "Fasty", with a similar body build; face; outfit; and name in both meaning and spelling.
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 a rare instance of Kingdom Hearts being referenced outside of KH-related Disney media, the Kingdom Key and Sora's hair can be seen within Sweet Pete’s assortment of cartoon props in the 2022 film "Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers". An interesting detail about this cameo is that Sora's hair appears to have been traced or taken from DeviantArt user kimbolie12's fan art of Sora from Kingdom Hearts III.
The September 2000 issue of Nintendo Power contains a "Nintendo Power Online" section on page 12, featuring an article titled "Mamma Mia! It's Waluigi!" The accompanying text introduces Waluigi to readers, reveals that he has his own website: www.waluigi.com, and claims to have an upcoming online game called "Waluigi's Toenail Clipping Party".
At the time of the Nintendo Power issue's release, www.waluigi.com was identical to the official website for Mario Tennis, www.mariotennis.com. One of the files hosted on the Mario Tennis website was the Adobe Flash file "toenails_coming.swf", which is an advertisement for the game instead titled "Waluigi's Foot Fault" depicting him showing his bare feet and unkempt toenails (he also occasionally blinks). Another file hosted on the website was "toenails.swf", which was supposedly the game itself. Catalogued alongside this file are two additional .swf files named "paint_the_lines" and "deface_painting", which could be evidence of other Flash games hosted on the Mario Tennis website.
However, the waluigi.com domain has since been turned into a redirect to the official Nintendo website. The toenails.swf file was not preserved, and as of 2023 has not resurfaced.
The October 2001 issue of Nintendo Power included a page with preview screenshots of Luigi's Mansion, including a screenshot of an earlier build of the Safari Room with the caption: "When your ghoul-busting mission takes you to the trophy room, proceed with caution. If you meet up with the ghost of a hunter, he'll want to add Luigi to his collection." This sparked rumors among players that the Safari Room originally featured a hunter boss who wanted Luigi's head as one of his trophies, and that it was removed from the game for being too frightening to the target audience of children.
However, no evidence of a hunter ghost is present in the game's data despite the presence of other unused ghosts, and no direct mentions of the boss exist in previews prior to the game's release in Japan in September 2001. The caption was likely an attempt at hyperbole rather than a serious indication that a hunter-themed ghost was in the game, as the article was written after Luigi's Mansion was released in Japan, meaning all characters would have been finalized long before the article was published.
If you go east in the Delta Rio Wanay region which is in the northeast area of Solis Island, you'll find a derelict structure that resembles the velociraptor enclosure in the film "Jurassic Park". You can even find a cow in the enclosure on occasion which is a reference to what they were fed. If you turn the power on and interact with the control console, you'll hear someone say "Ah, ah, ah. That's not the magic word." This is a reference to Dennis Nedry's virus 'Whte_rbt.obj' which locked his computer when Ray Arnold tried to access it.
Metal Tails and Metal Amy, two characters playable in the game's Battle Mode, were created by Kazuyuki Hoshino, the original creator of Metal Sonic. Also playable in the Battle Mode is Metal Knuckles, who makes his first appearance in a Sonic game since Sonic R.
Early concept art (released by Hideo Yoshizawa) depicts Huepow as a flame monster eating an enemy alive and throwing out its lifeless corpse and the Moos as werewolf-like creatures. This art suggested that the game was originally going to be somewhat darker and more action-oriented than the final game turned out to be.
The game's instruction manual features an extensive backstory for Gex, who lived in Maui with his mother and siblings, whilst his father was working at NASA. Due to an incident involving a band-aid floating in a fuel tank, Gex's father was killed, causing Gex to become a shut-in, sitting and watching TV all day.
After moving to California and his mother selling the TV away, Gex runs away from home and sleeps in the garage of a local punk he befriends. At his deteriorated state, Gex imagines an invisible friend known as "The Mayor." With another death in the family, this time being Gex's Uncle Charlie who was the original model for the Izod shirt logo, this leaves Gex's family with an inherited fortune of 20 billion dollars.
With his share of the money, Gex leaves his family behind, returns to Maui, and purchases a mansion with the largest TV set in the world and enough food to last him for decades, so that he'll never have to leave the television again.
An early concept for Crash Bandicoot, back when he was originally known as Willy the Wombat, was to have the Cortex Vortex be a surplus of television sets used to brainwash the evolved animals into doing the bidding of Dr. Cortex. After being subjected to the Vortex's media barrage for 7 days and nights, Willy would've been given a tendency to speak and act in a series of bizarre nonsequiters that referenced classic literature, pop culture, or from radio, TV or movies. Some examples would've included "Loose lips, sink ships!", "But brushing with Best Toothpaste gives white, white, white teeth!", and "Don't fire boys, until you see the whites of their eyes!" His demeanor was similar to other hyperactive pop-culture referencing comedy characters from the late 80s and 90s, where he could be quoting from Rambo one moment before switching to Fred Astaire, to John Wayne, and then to Fred Flintstone.
In the Tengen NES version of Ms. Pac-Man, if both players (one being Pac-Man and the other being Ms. Pac-Man) bump into one another through the warp corridors, baby Pac-Men will spawn.
Although the Headless Snowman is a minor character in his few appearances, he received some publicity in the form of a Nintendo Power joke published around the time of the main circulation of the "L is Real 2401" Super Mario 64 rumors.
In Volume 107 of Nintendo Power, in the April Fool's-themed "April News Briefs" segment, a "Luigi 64" article is present, where Nintendo states that Luigi fans had been campaigning to have the character in his very own game, and the company's response was to create a hoax upcoming game known as "Headless Snowman 64". This game was apparently intended to satisfy fans of the "second bananas" by featuring a cast of both well-known and obscure Nintendo characters, with the obscure characters including the Wave Race 64 announcer, "random audience members from Super Punch-Out!!", "the frogs in the meadow" from Diddy Kong Racing, and the Headless Snowman himself. Additionally, the game would supposedly contain some non-Nintendo characters such as "that bald guy from Blast Corps," and "the bikini woman in Cruis'n USA." Humorously, this never-made game was not going to feature Luigi, with a developer comment at the end of the article confusing him for "one of the civilian women in GoldenEye 007".
A promotional e-mail from Conker the Squirrel in 2004 to promote the release of Conker: Live & Reloaded has him talking about his career. When talking about his first appearance in 1997’s Diddy Kong Racing, he states:
"Things were different back then, you know, I was different - it goes without saying that you wouldn't catch me hanging out with any of those freaks these days. Last I heard at least one of 'em was in jail, anyway."
On May 18, 2012, a Q&A on the Rare Mini-Scribes answered a question about what their beloved characters do when their not in a new game, to which they responded "Where do the characters go between games? Well, they’re all off having crazy adventures too expensive and asset-heavy to adapt into game form … Except for Bumper the badger, who’s in jail."
On October 6, 2021, Rare’s official Twitter account provided another update in response to this piece of trivia being headlined on the Super Mario Wiki, stating that Bumper is currently on parole and is "superficially sorry for all those bad things he did."
In Gimmick: Exact Mix, a black bird ally from the original game was recolored to resemble Kyorochan, the mascot of ChocoBall, a Japanese malt chocolate ball brand similar to Maltesers or Whoppers.
Every version of The Three Stooges opens with a bait-and-switch title screen for another game. The NES version opens with Ghostbusters II, also published by Acclaim and licensed from Columbia Pictures. All other versions of the game, including the cancelled Game Boy Color release, open with Defender of the Crown, another Cinemaware game.
Alongside all of the cinema and television references that fans of the cartoon would expect, Animaniacs for Genesis also contains a small handful of references to other Konami games. Vic Viper from Gradius appears as a platform in the space level, and the Dracula boss uses Dracula's flame attack from the Castlevania games.
The character Mur is a fictionalized version of Mur Moruno, one of the main artists of the game.
On the character designer for Nitros Oxide in Crash Team Racing, Bob Rafei's website, he has a portfolio containing various works sorted by game. In the Crash Team Racing folder of the site, there is an image of a blue hippo in an aviator suit named "trippo.jpg". According to Rafei in 2017, this character was designed as a mascot for an airline search engine during the dot-com boom, but was placed in the CTR folder of the site by mistake. However, in the time between the image's discovery and the clarification, the image was spread online as if it was a lost Crash Bandicoot character, gaining the accepted name of "Fasty" through unknown means.
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 a rare instance of Kingdom Hearts being referenced outside of KH-related Disney media, the Kingdom Key and Sora's hair can be seen within Sweet Pete’s assortment of cartoon props in the 2022 film "Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers". An interesting detail about this cameo is that Sora's hair appears to have been traced or taken from DeviantArt user kimbolie12's fan art of Sora from Kingdom Hearts III.
The September 2000 issue of Nintendo Power contains a "Nintendo Power Online" section on page 12, featuring an article titled "Mamma Mia! It's Waluigi!" The accompanying text introduces Waluigi to readers, reveals that he has his own website: www.waluigi.com, and claims to have an upcoming online game called "Waluigi's Toenail Clipping Party".
The October 2001 issue of Nintendo Power included a page with preview screenshots of Luigi's Mansion, including a screenshot of an earlier build of the Safari Room with the caption: "When your ghoul-busting mission takes you to the trophy room, proceed with caution. If you meet up with the ghost of a hunter, he'll want to add Luigi to his collection." This sparked rumors among players that the Safari Room originally featured a hunter boss who wanted Luigi's head as one of his trophies, and that it was removed from the game for being too frightening to the target audience of children.
Early concept art (released by Hideo Yoshizawa) depicts Huepow as a flame monster eating an enemy alive and throwing out its lifeless corpse and the Moos as werewolf-like creatures. This art suggested that the game was originally going to be somewhat darker and more action-oriented than the final game turned out to be.
The game's instruction manual features an extensive backstory for Gex, who lived in Maui with his mother and siblings, whilst his father was working at NASA. Due to an incident involving a band-aid floating in a fuel tank, Gex's father was killed, causing Gex to become a shut-in, sitting and watching TV all day. 
An early concept for Crash Bandicoot, back when he was originally known as Willy the Wombat, was to have the Cortex Vortex be a surplus of television sets used to brainwash the evolved animals into doing the bidding of Dr. Cortex. After being subjected to the Vortex's media barrage for 7 days and nights, Willy would've been given a tendency to speak and act in a series of bizarre nonsequiters that referenced classic literature, pop culture, or from radio, TV or movies. Some examples would've included "Loose lips, sink ships!", "But brushing with Best Toothpaste gives white, white, white teeth!", and "Don't fire boys, until you see the whites of their eyes!" His demeanor was similar to other hyperactive pop-culture referencing comedy characters from the late 80s and 90s, where he could be quoting from Rambo one moment before switching to Fred Astaire, to John Wayne, and then to Fred Flintstone.
In the Tengen NES version of Ms. Pac-Man, if both players (one being Pac-Man and the other being Ms. Pac-Man) bump into one another through the warp corridors, baby Pac-Men will spawn.
A promotional e-mail from Conker the Squirrel in 2004 to promote the release of Conker: Live & Reloaded has him talking about his career. When talking about his first appearance in 1997’s Diddy Kong Racing, he states: