Shrek: Ogres and Dronkeys was originally going to feature the offspring of Gingy and Puss in Boots as new characters, but these were rejected by DreamWorks, likely for not existing within the Shrek movies.
Falco Lombardi, Slippy Toad and Peppy Hare were at one point considered for Fox's alternate costumes, before being scrapped in favor of generic recolours. Falco would eventually appear as a unique character in Super Smash Bros. Melee, and while Slippy and Peppy to date still have not appeared, alternate costumes that change a character outright would become a Smash feature starting in the 3DS and Wii U games, with Alph for Olimar and the Koopalings for Bowser Jr.
In the GameCube and Xbox versions of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, it was intended for there to be portraits littered throughout Hogwarts of various real world people, specifically developers, their families, and some people the developers forgot about years after the fact (but believed they were involved in some kind of contest). The portraits of family members in particular were included as a coping mechanism, as they were suffering during development.
"We were doing very long hours, and it wasn’t just us suffering – our families were, too. They were supporting us – often suffering in silence. Marriages were strained, children were missing a parent. It seemed only right to put their pictures into Hogwarts; our odd way of showing our love and gratitude. And possibly to remind us what they looked like."
The development team considered these portraits some of the very few elements of the game they were truly proud of. Eurocom requested the portraits be removed without explaining why, something the developers were "too tired to fight".
The titular character in Bayonetta was at one point considered as a guest character for the game. According to Producer Hisaharu Tago, she was scrapped because her hair attacks were too elaborate to include.
According to Tropical Freeze's creative director Vince Joly, the development team had seriously considered including Enguarde the swordfish from prior Donkey Kong Country titles as a ridable animal buddy, but ultimately dropped him to focus more on the playable Kong characters.
"We were thinking that bringing back the familiarity that players experienced in Donkey Kong Country Returns would be a good way for us to further strengthen their love for these characters. We felt this was the right choice over adding different buddies in their stead, and we believed the introduction of the other Kongs filled the need for expanding the character lineup and adding new player mechanics. However, we would have loved to have introduced some new animal buddies. Like Enguarde, for instance, who did come close to being added."
According to leaked development files from The Simpsons: Hit & Run, Sideshow Bob and Poochie were originally planned to appear in the game. There is an unused low-polygon model for Poochie that is pre-posed, meaning that it was likely supposed to appear as merchandise of the character (most likely alongside Itchy and Scratchy's balloons in Level 2), rather than appearing in an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon cutscene. No models for Sideshow Bob are known to exist.
When looking for additional characters based on pre-existing fighters to include in the tail-end of Super Smash Bros.' development, Masahiro Sakurai had considered including Clefairy from the Pokémon series as a derivative of Kirby's skeleton. Ultimately, he chose Jigglypuff, as he felt its personality stood out more as a weaker character likely to be defeated.
While Super Donkey is thought to have ultimately evolved into Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, the project was likely tossed around as a Mario or Zelda game at various points in development.
Various development assets associated with Super Donkey, which were uncovered alongside the prototype in the 2020 Gigaleak, include sprites and animations for Link, Mario, and Donkey Kong; the animation files for Link are dated to fall 1990, while Mario's animation files are dated to winter of that year. Additional files for all three characters span overlapping periods in 1991. Link's sprites and animations indicate that Super Donkey was at one point planned to be a side-scrolling Zelda title similar to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, while Mario's animations imply that the iteration that starred him and Donkey Kong eventually morphed into the 1994 Game Boy title Donkey Kong.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure marks the first official appearance of Big Challenges, a Sanrio character who was created in 1978, but was never used in any merchandise, and had gained internet meme status thanks to his mysterious origins. Island Adventure plays into the cult nature of the character, referring to him as enigmatic and stating he was frozen in ice for many years.
The character of Penny Crygor was almost completely absent from pre-release material for WarioWare: Get It Together! - with the only instance of her that managed to slip through the cracks being a silhouetted version of her on the title for the Frenemy Frenzy mode - leading some Wario fans to believe she would be absent, much like Dribble & Spitz were in WarioWare: Touched!. When the game released, she would appear in a major role: as a deus-ex machina character in the penultimate level, complete with her own theme song.
In Speed Highway, several billboards can be found depicting an unknown female character. In 2020, Satoshi Okano, a former designer at Sega who worked on Sonic Adventure, revealed that this was a scrapped spider character he designed with the prototype name "Spider Girl", and posted an old sketch of the character alongside a sketch of another scrapped character, a bat named "Fly the Vampire". In 2023, Okano posted an inked version of the original Spider Girl sketch from the same time period alongside several inked sketches from the development of Samba de Amigo. Spider Girl's appearance on the billboards in Sonic Adventure suggests that the character lasted far enough into the game's development to receive a 3D model, but the character was ultimately scrapped for unknown reasons, and this 3D model has yet to surface on its own. It's unknown what role either Spider Girl or Fly were intended to have, though fans have noted that Spider Girl has some similarities to Rouge the Bat from Sonic Adventure 2, namely that both characters have large bosoms and prominent heart-based/romantic imagery.
The developers of PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale expressed that they wanted Mario as a playable character in the game as a nod to the Super Smash Bros. series.
Hard 'n' Heavy was originally conceived as a sequel to The Great Giana Sisters titled Giana 2 - Arthur and Martha in Future World, but was changed due to the threats the developers had received from Nintendo over the previous Giana game. Screenshots and a box art for Giana 2 exist, and show that seemingly only the character of Giana was removed in the transition to Hard 'n' Heavy, but the version of the game with Giana is not known to exist.
In early versions of Super Smash Bros. Crusade, one of the playable characters was "Weegee", a parodic version of Luigi originating from the DOS version of Mario is Missing! whose moveset was a composite of different memes from "YouTube Poop" videos. Weegee was removed in version 9.2 in 2018 as the development team did not want to "be the meme game". They believed the game's reputation was becoming overcentralized on the presence of Weegee, and that the character was not of a high enough quality standard to keep around. This decision sparked major backlash from Crusade fans, and ultimately Weegee was reinstated in 2021's version 9.4, with a new moveset comprising of more modern memes.
"I'm the lead Spriter of the project since about halfway through 0.9.1's development (Shantae and Pikachu being my first major projects).
The reasoning behind removing Weegee is because we don't want to be the meme game. We're working hard to make an enjoyable experience, and are working to really up the quality lately. However, this does not mean that we're not open to slightly less orthodox roster decisions. We just don't want a literal meme character is all.
To those who are following the project, we have been working on redoing older content to bring it to a higher quality standard. This does not mean that the game is done expanding. It just means that we have some catching up to do before we can really push forward."
According to the British magazine Nintendo Magazine System, before settling on Yoshi's Island characters for Tetris Attack, Nintendo reportedly asked Rare to replace Panel de Pon's fairies with characters from the Killer Instinct series.
Slap City was originally envisioned as a mini-game in Ittle Dew 2 before being reworked into a full title. The scrapped mini-game had intentionally poor presentation, being locked to 30FPS with interlacing, something that was not retained in Slap City given it's focus on competitive play, and a low-poly style inspired by the original Super Smash Bros. The polygonal alternate form of Fluffy Fields, where the Clone Team is fought in arcade mode, is based on this version of the game.
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Power Punch II was originally intended to be a licensed game starring Mike Tyson titled Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch, but, following accusations and an eventual (albeit dubious) conviction of rape against Tyson, was reworked to star an original boxing character named "Mark Tyler", with the title gaining a "2" at the end despite the non-existance of a Power Punch 1, possibly to fool customers who previously bought Punch-Out!!, but did not remember the game's name. It was at one point misreported that Nintendo were backing the game as a Punch-Out!! sequel, but this is untrue.
Swampy, the protagonist of the Disney mobile game Where's My Water?, was added to the game data for Disney Emoji Blitz as part of the 1.11.5 update, released on May 10, 2017. Despite this, however, he has not been added to the game as an obtainable emoji and no design for him exists in the game's data, with the inactive code still being present in later versions.
Kabuto, the first boss of Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, is a parody of Ken-O, a recurring first boss in the Shinobi series - in prerelease screenshots, he is shown to be a composite parody of both Ken-O and Nintendo's Mario, known as Mari-Oh. While his appearance would lose its Mario-esque qualities in the final game, two elements of this parody would remain: Kabuto shooting fireballs, and Kabuto becoming small on his final hit point.
According to designer Norio Okubo, Wario Blast was originally going to feature Mario instead of Wario - this was changed due to cultural sensitivity regarding bombs in certain regions, where it was decided that having a villain like Wario plant bombs would be seen as more appropriate than if a hero like Mario were to do so.
In the GameCube and Xbox versions of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, it was intended for there to be portraits littered throughout Hogwarts of various real world people, specifically developers, their families, and some people the developers forgot about years after the fact (but believed they were involved in some kind of contest). The portraits of family members in particular were included as a coping mechanism, as they were suffering during development.
According to Tropical Freeze's creative director Vince Joly, the development team had seriously considered including Enguarde the swordfish from prior Donkey Kong Country titles as a ridable animal buddy, but ultimately dropped him to focus more on the playable Kong characters.
According to leaked development files from The Simpsons: Hit & Run, Sideshow Bob and Poochie were originally planned to appear in the game. There is an unused low-polygon model for Poochie that is pre-posed, meaning that it was likely supposed to appear as merchandise of the character (most likely alongside Itchy and Scratchy's balloons in Level 2), rather than appearing in an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon cutscene. No models for Sideshow Bob are known to exist.
When looking for additional characters based on pre-existing fighters to include in the tail-end of Super Smash Bros.' development, Masahiro Sakurai had considered including Clefairy from the Pokémon series as a derivative of Kirby's skeleton. Ultimately, he chose Jigglypuff, as he felt its personality stood out more as a weaker character likely to be defeated.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure marks the first official appearance of Big Challenges, a Sanrio character who was created in 1978, but was never used in any merchandise, and had gained internet meme status thanks to his mysterious origins. Island Adventure plays into the cult nature of the character, referring to him as enigmatic and stating he was frozen in ice for many years.
In Speed Highway, several billboards can be found depicting an unknown female character. In 2020, Satoshi Okano, a former designer at Sega who worked on Sonic Adventure, revealed that this was a scrapped spider character he designed with the prototype name "Spider Girl", and posted an old sketch of the character alongside a sketch of another scrapped character, a bat named "Fly the Vampire". In 2023, Okano posted an inked version of the original Spider Girl sketch from the same time period alongside several inked sketches from the development of Samba de Amigo. Spider Girl's appearance on the billboards in Sonic Adventure suggests that the character lasted far enough into the game's development to receive a 3D model, but the character was ultimately scrapped for unknown reasons, and this 3D model has yet to surface on its own. It's unknown what role either Spider Girl or Fly were intended to have, though fans have noted that Spider Girl has some similarities to Rouge the Bat from Sonic Adventure 2, namely that both characters have large bosoms and prominent heart-based/romantic imagery.
Hard 'n' Heavy was originally conceived as a sequel to The Great Giana Sisters titled Giana 2 - Arthur and Martha in Future World, but was changed due to the threats the developers had received from Nintendo over the previous Giana game. Screenshots and a box art for Giana 2 exist, and show that seemingly only the character of Giana was removed in the transition to Hard 'n' Heavy, but the version of the game with Giana is not known to exist.
Kabuto, the first boss of Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, is a parody of Ken-O, a recurring first boss in the Shinobi series - in prerelease screenshots, he is shown to be a composite parody of both Ken-O and Nintendo's Mario, known as Mari-Oh. While his appearance would lose its Mario-esque qualities in the final game, two elements of this parody would remain: Kabuto shooting fireballs, and Kabuto becoming small on his final hit point.
