There's a pretty mean-spirited item in the game simply called "ALF book", which is sold for $100 in one of the game's shops. The book displays a block of text explaining the game's plot, as well as some strange fourth-wall-breaking story about the making of the game. Although this item might seem harmless, it also boots the player back to the title screen without warning and effectively restarts the game.
While Nintendo's name is often translated as "leave luck to heaven," the veracity of this is dubious at best, owed in part to a lack of historical documentation and the wide range of possible readings for the name as written in Kanji. Among other things, "Nintendo" can also be interpreted as the more mundane "the temple of free hanafuda," referring to the company's initial purpose as a playing card manufacturer. Late president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who was descended from company founder Fusajiro Yamauchi, admitted that he didn't know what "Nintendo" actually meant, and that "leave luck to heaven" was only accepted by the company because it seemed plausible.
Although announced, the game was never released in Europe. The release date had been constantly pushed back from its original June 24th, 2005 date before being cancelled altogether with no official explanation.
One rumor that circulated about why the European release was cancelled were false claims that the game's unique gyroscope cartridge required mercury, which the European Union had banned from use in certain electrical and electronic products, to help the gyroscope function.
In a November 2020 Medium article, Maddy Thorson, who served as the game's writer and director, confirmed longstanding rumors that Madeline, the protagonist of Celeste, is a transgender woman. Thorson described the game's story as allegorical for her own process of coming to terms with her gender identity, and stated that while the idea didn't initially come to her during development, she "began to form a hunch" while working on the DLC chapter "Farewell", becoming certain of Madeline's transgender status after the chapter's release. Thorson came out as transgender herself in the same article.
Thorson additionally stated that although the possibility of Madeline being trans was discussed with the rest of the development team when making "Farewell", they ultimately decided not to include any overt statements past visual allusions in the chapter's ending, stating that it would be more in-character for Madeline to keep such information private. At the same time, however, Thorson stated that had she started development of Celeste already knowing that she was trans, she would've depicted Madeline differently.
According to composer Grant Kirkhope, the DK Rap was written as a joke song that ended up being interpreted by audiences as a serious attempt at writing hip-hop. Consequently, he expressed confusion at the tongue-in-cheek cult following the song picked up decades later, noting that "bizarrely, this became its own thing now."
The Genesis version of the game was originally planned to use a rendition of Richard A. Whiting's "Hooray for Hollywood" arranged by the game's composer Matt Furniss instead of the story theme found in the final game. The song was most likely cut due to licensing issues.
Alien Resurrection was the first First-Person Shooter to use the now common two analog stick control scheme, where the left stick moves you up and down and strafes you left and right, while the right stick turns you left and right and aims your gun up and down. However, it wasn't well received by some critics. Steven Garrett from GameSpot gave the game a 4.71/10 calling the control scheme "It's most terrifying element." He went on to say; "Too often, you'll turn to face a foe and find that your weapon is aimed at the floor or ceiling while the alien gleefully hacks away at your midsection."
The Japanese version of WarioWare: Twisted! features an exclusive start-up screen for the console where the Game Boy logo bounces up off-screen before landing again. Once the logo resumes as normal, a motorcycle heard in the background will stop, causing Wario to shout "Yeah!"
Series producer Kensuke Tanabe stated, in an interview with The Verge, that Zip Lash would be the final game in the franchise if it wasn’t well-recognized or didn’t sell well. This became the case as the game was a critical and commercial failure, resulting in the series’ dormancy. Chibi-Robo!’s developer Skip Ltd. has also not released any new games since.
"Hatman" is a recurring crude caricature of a Viacom New Media higher-up that the developers hated. Originating as paint graffiti of the person on a wall whose identity was disguised by putting a top hat on it, it soon made hidden appearances in the rest of the developer's output as an obligatory Easter egg. The earliest known Hatman Easter egg made for a game was a short CG animation for the game Beavis and Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity.
In the GameCube 20th anniversary VGC interview, it was revealed that former Nintendo of America VP of marketing Perrin Kaplan thought that there was one aspect of the GameCube that he and NoA were not fond of and made them extremely nervous about the console's perception:
"We actually suggested that the purple was not the best [console color] to start with and [Japan] said, ‘no, we’re going to use that [...] Then we pushed for black and silver, because I think in the US nobody had ever really done the purple colour before. [...] It wasn’t that you couldn’t bring out hardware that was a different colour, it was just a very… ‘female’ looking colour. It just didn’t feel masculine, I think. I remember us being very nervous at E3 that we were going to get bad press purely based on the colour.”
Nintendo of Europe was not to easy on the color either with the company's veteran Shelly Peirce revealing that one person referred to it as a "Fischer-Price record player". However Pierce remained optimistic because he felt that what Nintendo was doing was uniquely different than the competition.
For the game's fictional hard rock band Star-Lord, Eidos Montreal's Senior Audio Director Steve Szczepkowski ended up singing the band's songs himself until a proper singer could be found. However, the game's creative director, after hearing the temp tracks and asking who sang them, was shocked and pleasantly surprised to learn it was Szczepkowski himself and the dev team ended up using the Szczepkowski vocals in the final release, much to his delight.
One of the news articles and forum posts that appear in the game talk about the announcement of a new nonexistent handheld device from Bandai called the "WonderHawk", touted as the successor to the also nonexistent device the "WonderSwan Revolution". In reality, the only new models Bandai made after the original WonderSwan were the WonderSwan Color and the SwanCrystal. All three were originally meant to be competitors to the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance and all three were outsold by them, leading to the WonderSwan's discontinuation in 2003, the year after this game's release in Japan.
One of the enemies in the "Secret of the Oracle" episode, Dopefish, was a "stupid little fish" created by the game's designer Tom Hall and described in-game as "the second-dumbest creature in the universe" (in reference to the dumbest creature in the universe, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal from Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" franchise), and has since gone on to develop a cult following and become one of the biggest recurring in-jokes in the video game industry due to the sheer amount of games it has made appearances in (a large chunk of which having Tom Hall's involvement).
As of October 2021, Dopefish has made known appearances in Wacky Wheels, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Quake, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, SiN, Descent 3, Battlezone, Kingpin, Daikatana, Anachonox, Max Payne, Hyperspace Delivery Boy, Commander Keen (2001), Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Eternal Daughter, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, Red Faction, Congo Cube, The Frozen Throne expansion to Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, SiN Episodes: Emergence, Chili Con Carnage, TAGAP: The Apocalyptic Game About Penguins, Fortress Forever, OFF, Dystopia, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Pettington Park, Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken, Warsow, Bombshell, Doom (2016), Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Ion Fury, and Doom Eternal.
Beyond video games, Dopefish notably made a cameo appearance in the animated series "Tiny Toon Adventures" in the 1992 episode "Toon TV" during the song "Toon In, Toon Out", which aired less than a year after the release of Commander Keen in "Goodbye, Galaxy!". Dopefish also cameoed in "Lakewood Plaza Turbo", the pilot episode to the 2017 animated series "OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes".
According to a 1994 BEEP! Megadrive magazine interview with the game's producer/designer Koichi Kimura, he was asked if he was influenced by his love for Western animation for the game. He responded:
"Yeah. Actually western animation was one of the things that influenced me to get into the game industry in the first place. I really admire the sensibility of Looney Toons, where you never know what’s going to happen next. Watching them inspires me to hone my own skills. The difference between games and animation, though, is that in animation the artist directs how the scene moves and unfolds, whereas in games, that control is given over to the players. But I think that’s actually a strength for gaming and could lead to even more interesting scenes, which is something I want to explore more."
In the opening title card to the game's penultimate level "Escape from WooL.A.", Bubsy appears dressed as Snake Plissken, the protagonist of the action movies "Escape from New York" and "Escape from L.A.", the latter film of which the level is named after. Beyond that, inputting the password "XURASNAKER" on the Load/Save menu will allow you to play as Bubsy while wearing the costume in any level.
Likely a leftover feature from debug testing, a code could be activated in earlier versions of the game that can instantly kill the characters by holding ZL/ZR/L/R/X/D-Pad Down for around 5 seconds. It could also be activated in the middle of cutscenes or while talking to NPCs. This code was removed in version 2.1.0 of the game.
One of Elena's rotoscoped animations in 3rd Strike was modeled after an actress in the music video to David Lee Roth's cover of "Just a Gigolo / I Ain't Got Nobody".
According to a 1998 interview with Sega R&D head Hideki Sato published in The History of SEGA Console Hardware, the Mega Drive's design from Japan was based on the audio player's appearance, and presented the "16-bit" label embossed with a golden metallic veneer to give it an impact of power:
"We had a feeling that before long, consumers would be appreciating video games with the same sense with which they enjoyed music; moreover, since the Megadrive was a machine that you put in front of your TV, our concept was to make it look like an audio player. So we painted the body black and put the “16BIT” lettering in a gold print. That gold printing, by the way, was very expensive. (laughs) But we really wanted to play up the fact that this was the very first 16-bit home console."
There's a pretty mean-spirited item in the game simply called "ALF book", which is sold for $100 in one of the game's shops. The book displays a block of text explaining the game's plot, as well as some strange fourth-wall-breaking story about the making of the game. Although this item might seem harmless, it also boots the player back to the title screen without warning and effectively restarts the game.
While Nintendo's name is often translated as "leave luck to heaven," the veracity of this is dubious at best, owed in part to a lack of historical documentation and the wide range of possible readings for the name as written in Kanji. Among other things, "Nintendo" can also be interpreted as the more mundane "the temple of free hanafuda," referring to the company's initial purpose as a playing card manufacturer. Late president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who was descended from company founder Fusajiro Yamauchi, admitted that he didn't know what "Nintendo" actually meant, and that "leave luck to heaven" was only accepted by the company because it seemed plausible.
In the Genesis version, during the game "Sunday Drive", the single repeating road sign in the game claims that "Segaville" is at the next exit.
In a November 2020 Medium article, Maddy Thorson, who served as the game's writer and director, confirmed longstanding rumors that Madeline, the protagonist of Celeste, is a transgender woman. Thorson described the game's story as allegorical for her own process of coming to terms with her gender identity, and stated that while the idea didn't initially come to her during development, she "began to form a hunch" while working on the DLC chapter "Farewell", becoming certain of Madeline's transgender status after the chapter's release. Thorson came out as transgender herself in the same article.
"Hatman" is a recurring crude caricature of a Viacom New Media higher-up that the developers hated. Originating as paint graffiti of the person on a wall whose identity was disguised by putting a top hat on it, it soon made hidden appearances in the rest of the developer's output as an obligatory Easter egg. The earliest known Hatman Easter egg made for a game was a short CG animation for the game Beavis and Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity.
One of the news articles and forum posts that appear in the game talk about the announcement of a new nonexistent handheld device from Bandai called the "WonderHawk", touted as the successor to the also nonexistent device the "WonderSwan Revolution". In reality, the only new models Bandai made after the original WonderSwan were the WonderSwan Color and the SwanCrystal. All three were originally meant to be competitors to the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance and all three were outsold by them, leading to the WonderSwan's discontinuation in 2003, the year after this game's release in Japan.
One of the enemies in the "Secret of the Oracle" episode, Dopefish, was a "stupid little fish" created by the game's designer Tom Hall and described in-game as "the second-dumbest creature in the universe" (in reference to the dumbest creature in the universe, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal from Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" franchise), and has since gone on to develop a cult following and become one of the biggest recurring in-jokes in the video game industry due to the sheer amount of games it has made appearances in (a large chunk of which having Tom Hall's involvement).
In the opening title card to the game's penultimate level "Escape from WooL.A.", Bubsy appears dressed as Snake Plissken, the protagonist of the action movies "Escape from New York" and "Escape from L.A.", the latter film of which the level is named after. Beyond that, inputting the password "XURASNAKER" on the Load/Save menu will allow you to play as Bubsy while wearing the costume in any level.
One of Elena's rotoscoped animations in 3rd Strike was modeled after an actress in the music video to David Lee Roth's cover of "Just a Gigolo / I Ain't Got Nobody".