During the 1995 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, Cyberdreams announced "Hunters of Ralk", a role-playing game designed by Gary Gygax, the co-creator of "Dungeons & Dragons". Not much is known about the game, other than that it was meant to be the start of a series and would have featured 3D combat in a first-person perspective and texture-mapped graphics. It was slated for Fall of that year for Windows platforms, but was never released.
In an interview with the game's director Takumi Isobe published in Famitsu on February 22, 2024, he mentioned that the Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy series significantly impacted his sense of values and influenced the development of Reynatis.
The game's main antagonist Garrett Bobby Ferguson Jr., and his father of the same name (both originally characters featured in the series' two-part episode "Exit 9B" which the game is based on), are based on Donkey Kong record-holder Billy Mitchell, who has notably gained controversy for cheating on the Donkey Kong arcade game. At one point in 2015, Mitchell sued Cartoon Network over the characters, claiming that the show infringed on his likeness. The case was later dismissed in court by New Jersey Federal District Judge Anne Thompson, who stated in her final ruling that:
"The television character does not match the plaintiff in appearance: GBF appears as a non-human creature, a giant floating head with no body from outer space, while Plaintiff is a human being, […] And when GBF loses his title, the character literally explodes, unlike Plaintiff."
The arcade game Dino Pop, manufactured by the South African company Amusement Warehouse, features an unlicensed rendition of the recurring Chocobo theme from the Final Fantasy series. Based on a demonstration video uploaded by the manufacturer, it's also believed that other renditions of the game use an unlicensed version of the Gold Saucer theme from Final Fantasy VII.
Tetsuya Nomura had requested for the character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to be used in Kingdom Hearts III, but Disney responded that he would be "too difficult" to use, though they never clarified why. While his plans for Oswald had he been added to the game are unknown, it's worth noting that Nomura has admitted that Oswald is one of his favorite Disney characters.
Despite popular belief, Epic Mickey is not the first video game to include the character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The actual first game to feature him was Férias Frustradas do Pica-Pau (also known as "Woody Woodpecker's Frustrated Vacations"), where Oswald (based on his "Oswald Rabbit" iteration owned by Universal at the time) was one of Woody's friends that had been kidnapped by Buzz Buzzard.
"The Incredible Shrinking Character" was a cancelled action adventure game to be developed by Go-Go Interactive Studios and published by Cyberdreams for the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and PC. Set in the year 1959, players would have assumed the role of a private investigator, hired to find Julie Caldwell (the daughter of a wealthy industrial family) after she had disappeared while visiting the castle of Dr. Warren Franklin. When the player arrives, however, the doctor springs a trap on them that causes them to start gradually shrinking. Thus, the player must not only save Julie (who is implied to be trapped in the castle's dungeon, due to the sound of a female screaming), but also find an antidote to their shrinking as they contend with otherwise harmless creatures (i.e. the doctor's house cat) that become more dangerous the smaller they get. The game would have included at least ten levels, with the player being smaller in each one, and would have included several size puzzles. The exact reason why the game was cancelled is unknown, though may have been in part due to Cyberdreams going defunct in 1997.
During 2004, Next Level Games was working on a game based on the WWE franchise called "WWE Titans: Parts Unknown". Planned to release on the Playstation 2 and Xbox as a 1-vs-1 fighter, the game was planned to have a radically different direction from past WWE titles, featuring a new art style that focused on exaggerated character designs and cinematic locales. Settings for the game included urban environments (i.e. rooftops in a city) and an old castle located in the snowy wilderness. Additionally, one stage concept was labelled "Cena Stage", likely in reference to wrestler John Cena. This suggests that some individual wrestlers would have received arena dedicated to them.
While the game would have featured several established wrestlers, Next Level also considered adding original cast members made specifically for the game. One piece of artwork for the game shows that there were plans for anthropomorphic characters (such as crocodiles and bears) and sorcerers. Not much is known about the gameplay, though art for the game suggests that destructible environments were intended to be a key focus. For unknown reasons, the pitch was rejected by the game's publisher, THQ.
On the 19th of February 2024, designer Kevin Baylis revealed a pitch he made for Killer Instinct 3 for the Nintendo 64. It was meant to be a prequel featuring younger versions of the characters, where players could hone the characters' moves, then gaining more before moving on to "the next chapters of their lives". The game didn't make past the concept phase because the people at Rare thought that "the fighting game ‘fad’ was over".
In early February 2024, one month prior to the game's release, multi-time WWE World Champion Brock Lesnar was removed from the cover of the "Forty Years of WrestleMania" showcase edition of the game in response to a sexual assault and sex trafficking lawsuit against Vince McMahon and WWE. Although Lesnar's name was not directly mentioned in the lawsuit, his reported connection to the case led to his removal as part of a wider effort by the WWE to disassociate from him. The cover was updated to feature a larger version of John Cena, where Lesnar used to be.
Content creators who got early access to the game on February 23 confirmed that both Lesnar and McMahon were no longer playable characters in WWE 2K24. While the extent of McMahon's removal is unknown, Brock Lesnar’s data remains locked away in the game due to his matches with The Undertaker at Wrestlemania 30 and Roman Reigns at Wrestlemania 31 being featured in the "Showcase of the Immortals" Showcase mode, and it being too far into development to remove them.
When "THE JOY OF CREATION" was still in development as "The Joy of Creation: Ignited Collection", the first game in the The Joy of Creation series was going to be remade as part of the collection, where it would have been known as "The Joy of Creation: Classic". However, on July 27, 2023, Nikson revealed that he had changed his mind about adding Classic to the collection, instead having it only include The Joy of Creation: Reborn and The Joy of Creation: Story Mode.
Banjo-Tooie has become somewhat infamous for its large-scaled and convoluted structure in comparison to its predecessor, Banjo-Kazooie, with far more larger interconnected worlds with longer, complex puzzles that typically require backtracking, in comparison to Banjo-Kazooie's more straightforward and compact, self-contained levels and objectives.
According to Steve Malpass, one of Banjo-Tooie's game designers, the game was designed more in the vein of an adventure game as opposed to a platformer, being heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in particular. The development team was aware of how overcomplicated the game's structure had become by its launch (the QA department was vocal about the backtracking and navigation issues), but it was ultimately too late for them to streamline it. The Warp Pads found throughout the worlds were actually included after the levels were designed, as an attempt to mitigate the aforementioned navigation issues.
Next Level Games once had a project pitch for an action game called "Catalyst" that would have been released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. As the game was never officially announced, not much is known about it other than what is seen in the pitch video, which involves an unidentified man attacking a group of soldiers using a device called the "Catalyst" after they had betrayed him and kidnapped his daughter. The game was never released, likely due to not being able to find a publisher.
This trivia has been marked as "Not Safe for Work". It may not be appropriate for all visitors and definitely isn't appropriate for work or school environments. Click here to unhide it.
▲
2
▼
Pierre originally wore a jacket that showed a nude woman on the back. This was changed in the remaster so that the woman now wears a red bikini. This change applies to both "Original Graphics" and "Modern Graphics" settings.
When he was first released as DLC, General Winter's All-Star move effects had communist motifs. However, following complaints from the Russian populace about the portrayal of the USSR military as under-equipped in his source game Company of Heroes 2, and a voluntary recall of said game from Sega in that region, an update in 2013 would replace the hammer & sickle with a generic red star in all regions.
The Brazilian release of the Nintendo GameCube has special code that patches a crash glitch that can only be found in NBA Courtside 2002. This patch does not exist in any other version of the hardware.
Sneakers' graphical style was originally going to look more like a picture book or two-dimensional cartoon, but after seeing a realistic fur CGI demonstration at SIGGRAPH, it was decided to use a more realistic style instead.
Frank Sahwit, the culprit of "The First Turnabout" (the first episode of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney), plays a major role in the second episode of Ace Attorney Investigations 2, "Gokuchū no Gyakuten" (roughly translated to "Reversal in Prison"). This is notable in that it suggests that not everybody convicted of homicide is given either a life sentence or the death penalty in the Ace Attorney series, as it's implied that he would have been eligible for parole after the events of the case had he not Spoiler:served as Marie Miwa's accomplice in the murder of Manosuke Naitou. This is consistent with real life, as Frank had committed a second-degree murder (a murder which occurs in the spur of the moment) rather than a first-degree murder (which are premediated). Additionally, given the short amount of time he had served prior to his near-parole (around two years and nine months), it's possible that Sahwit had been convicted of a lesser crime such as manslaughter since the first game did not indicate that he had actively intended to murder Cindy Stone.
When asked about Bubsy's height and weight for an episode of the Death Battle-esque YouTube series Limit Break featuring him fighting Gex, creator Michael Berlyn said that Bubsy is 3'6'' (42 inches) and 80 lbs, making his height closest to the length (or height if they were to be bipedal like Bubsy) of an Eastern or Mexican bobcat, but significantly heavier than any real-world species of bobcat.
When Stellar Blade was first announced as "Project Eve", it was stated to be coming to the PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One. However, during the September 2021 PlayStation Showcase, it was announced that the game would instead be exclusive to the PlayStation 5, after Sony Interactive Entertainment had agreed to publish the game.