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."
In a 1994 Hippon Super and Game-on magazines interview, the game's field graphics designer Tomoe Inazawa wanted the Serpent Trench's ocean floor less shallow-looking by making it darker and more impenetrable, realistic and alluring than how the ocean appeared in previous Final Fantasy games:
"Well, in reality, that’s how the ocean floor is: dark and impenetrable. What has been depicted in earlier games is really a shallower image of the ocean. So I was thinking about how to convey something more realistic, so I made it dark. Dark and alluring."
If the game detects that its cartridge is a pirated copy, Zelda's hair will turn into a giant pentagon in cutscenes, fishing will always result in a hooked fish escaping after 51 frames of animation, and Spoiler:the exit to Ganon's Castle during the escape sequence will be blocked off to Link, as Zelda will run right through the bars, leaving Link behind and making the game impossible to finish.
Before the singular story concept of Sonic fighting against Dr. Robotnik, Sonic's character development was very different. During the 2018 Game Developers Conference, game designer Hirokazu Yasuhara and character designer Naoto Ohshima revealed that the series almost had connections to World War II.
"Sonic" was originally going to be a fighter pilot who earned the nickname "hedgehog" because of how his hair stood up while flying his plane at high speeds, while the Sonic the Hedgehog design known today was merely a nose decal on the front of his plane. The details of his time in the war were then re-imagined as a children's picture book by the pilot's wife. She took the Sonic the Hedgehog design and based it on her war veteran husband, making the game a story within a story. American pilot Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the speed of sound, was also mentioned in Yasuhara and Ohshima's pitch summary.
Additionally, they showed off line art for a proposed dance sequence during the game, originally intending for Sonic to be a trendy dancer, but this along with the meta-story elements were scrapped during development.
In the third installment of the Untold History of Japanese Game Developers book series released in 2018, Ohshima reiterated that Sonic was going to be a human boy, but SEGA rejected the design, not wanting their mascot to be a human, and Ohshima admitted that he does not have any concept art of Sonic as a human due to his proposal just being a basic outline. Despite this rejection, the core layout of Sonic the Hedgehog's speed-based gameplay and map design was set in stone by this time.
The game started development at the Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands as a way to predict how the railroad station in Utrecht, the location of where it was being developed, would look in 10 years as a result of the then-recent reconstruction of the town. THQ was impressed with their work and bought the rights to it, eventually making it a fully-fledged video game that would become de Blob.
Raoh and Heart are the only characters in the game who cannot crouch and subsequently cannot block low. The game's manual explains that the reason why Raoh does not crouch is because "it's not like a king to kneel."
"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".
In a 1994 Hippon Super and Game-on magazines interview, the game's field graphics designer Tomoe Inazawa wanted the Serpent Trench's ocean floor less shallow-looking by making it darker and more impenetrable, realistic and alluring than how the ocean appeared in previous Final Fantasy games:
If the game detects that its cartridge is a pirated copy, Zelda's hair will turn into a giant pentagon in cutscenes, fishing will always result in a hooked fish escaping after 51 frames of animation, and Spoiler:the exit to Ganon's Castle during the escape sequence will be blocked off to Link, as Zelda will run right through the bars, leaving Link behind and making the game impossible to finish.
Before the singular story concept of Sonic fighting against Dr. Robotnik, Sonic's character development was very different. During the 2018 Game Developers Conference, game designer Hirokazu Yasuhara and character designer Naoto Ohshima revealed that the series almost had connections to World War II.
