According to Fruit Ninja creator Luke Muscat in a comment on a YouTube video comparing the 1993 and 2023 Super Mario Bros. movies, there was a massive push following Fruit Ninja's success to have it be adapted for TV or cinema, something he attributed to other members of the studio feeling that the other 2 mediums were more "legitimate" in the face of an era where games were not taken as seriously. All of the characters and stories added to Fruit Ninja were made for the purpose of facilitating these unmade adaptations, something Muscat described as "divisive" and compared to having to try and adapt a film that does not exist into a game rather than the other way around.
Comment archived in case it gets deleted (YouTube link contains a comment hyperlink tag): "Great video Patrick and team. I was the designer / creator of Fruit Ninja, which obviously had absolutely ZERO story or character development. After the huge success of the game, (and as I was leaving the project), a push started to get film and TV adaptions made. For some at the studio, getting an adaptation made the whole thing more legitimate, like the property had "made it". Games were still struggling to be taken seriously despite being such a huge global business, but film and TV didn't have that problem. But given how narratively thin the source material was, new characters and story started getting added into the game specifically to support those future jumps to film and TV (and merch I guess). This was very... divisive. It was like having to adapt a film into an existing game... except the film didn't exist yet. It was a time."
During a Q&A with Kotaku in 2015, it was noted that both Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc and Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair had a female character that appeared to have been designed to be the player/main character's favorite, the former game having Kyoko Kirigiri and the latter game having Chiaki Nanami. When asked if this was intentional, series creator Kazutaka Kodaka stated:
"For number one, I didn't really specifically think of any female characters as the heroine. In regards to Kyoko Kirigiri specifically, it was just the idea that she was a detective and she had a good thought process that drove her to be perceived in that role for the player. On the other hand, wanting to specifically create a heroine is what drove Chiaki's creation."
Wuhu Island was originally created for Wii Sports before its debut appearance in Wii Fit. An early version of the island can be seen in a leaked development image for Wii Sports, and in footage of the unused Airplane sport in the E3 2006 demo for the game. The leaked image also indicates that the Airplane sport would have also given you the option to fly around the island with a Rocket Belt, an idea that would later be reused in Pilotwings Resort.
Baldur's Gate 3 was originally revealed with a CGI trailer at a conference for the Google Stadia cloud gaming service in June 2019 as part of an Early Access exclusivity deal that would ultimately be cancelled when Stadia was shut down in 2023. The game's director Swen Vincke touted the service at the time for its purported accessibility, and the potential for in-game community feedback to directly affect the game's development and playthroughs via Stadia's Crowd Choice feature. However, Vincke later expressed regret over having the game be revealed this way, calling it "a really stupid deal" due to the challenges of releasing an Early Access build to a second platform, but that "it allowed me to pay for the CGI."
The uDraw was conceived after THQ employees noticed how difficult drawing was with the Wii Remote in the Wii version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, and was originally called the Drawn to Life Pal. Multiple pitches for other licensed Drawn to Life titles in the same vein as Drawn to Life: SpongeBob SquarePants Edition were made, with Marvel Comics, Pixar, Star Wars, and Conan the Barbarian being pitched as examples. However, no Drawn to Life game with uDraw compatibility would ever release, though one uDraw launch title, Dood's Big Adventure, bears a fair resemblance to the series. No reason has been given for the series' absence or why a new IP was made with Dood's Big Adventure instead of using the brand recognition of Drawn to Life, but it may be connected to the controversial ending of the DS version of The Next Chapter and its finality for the core Drawn to Life Raposa universe.
Normally, when the player decides to build a public works project, Isabelle will prevent the player from going to the beach while scouting out a potential site due to the instability of the sand there. However, if the player uses cheats or glitches to bring Isabelle to the beach and then talks to her, she will give them the option to state whether or not they want to start construction. Despite this, she will deny the request anyway if the player answers yes; however, she will not cite the quality of the ground, but rather will state that there is no available space. Depending on where they are standing, she will state that the proposed site is either too close to the ocean or too close to the cliff, statements which do not otherwise come up in normal gameplay. This dialogue implies that building public works projects on the beach was considered at one point in development.
Within the game's data are sprites for Glad and Calm Goombas; the final game only features regular, Mad, and Sad varieties. Of note is that the Calm Goombas' sprites depict them with a pastel green palette, whereas the final game only differentiates Calm enemies from regular ones by having them stay asleep until provoked. Both unused Goomba types also feature a considerably different art style compared to the final game, indicating that the removal of color coordination for the Calm vibe occurred at around the same time as the overhaul in the game's aesthetics.
In an interview with the developers at Blue Tongue, they mentioned several buildings they wanted to include in this game, but had to drop due to design decisions or memory constraints on home consoles:
•Hotels, which would provide extra accommodation for guests. •Dino-Vet Station, which would have been vital for keeping dinosaurs healthy. •Hunting Platforms, which would let visitors hunt down carnivores in the park from afar.
The Dino-Vet Station can be found in earlier promotional material for Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis and also within its game files. Likewise with the Hunting Platform, which also still has Audio, Ini and even Rig Files within the game.
This game had two working titles before the final Operation Genesis subtitle was instated: "Jurassic Park: Project Genesis" and "Jurassic Park: The Game".
At some point, forest fires were one of the many disasters that could occur in the player's parks. There was also a Sprinkler System that was planned as an upgrade for structures in-game that would have been used to mitigate the aforementioned forest fires. All of this would be removed in the final game.
Originally, the protagonist of Dog's Life was going to be a female dog named Gem, named for the real-world dog of Frontier Developments chairman David Braben.
Within the game's data are unused voice clips for a solo boss fight against Professor Calamitous, who in the released game only appears during the final battle against the full Syndicate. Some of these clips feature Calamitous threatening to destroy Retroville with a doomsday device, a subplot not present in the final game. This implies that Jimmy Neutron's route was originally going to follow the same formula as Danny Phantom, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Timmy Turner's routes, in which the team visits an individual character's world and foils a villainous scheme by an individual member of the Syndicate there. This is corroborated by a pre-release screenshot in which the monochrome Retroville simulation seen in "Fantastic Voyage of Goddard" is instead in full color.
At the time of its release, Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis had managed to include nearly every on-screen prehistoric species found in the movies released up to that point ("Jurassic Park", "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III"), with only three notable exceptions:
•Pteranodon (featured in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III") •Compsognathus (featured in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III") •Mamenchisaurus (featured in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park")
Interestingly, out of this batch, the Iquanodon is the only dinosaur to have any more data pertaining to it with its own "Iguan.ini" file, which makes it the only cut species with a known Length (Aprox. 9 Meters Long), Health (500), Life Span (4 Years and 6 Months), and Herd Size (1-15 Individuals). It also had a known attack damage (150), which would have it made it the strongest Ornithopod in the game had it been included.
The development team for this game experimented with baby dinosaurs midway through the project, attempting to use schemes such as scaling the adult dinosaurs down to make them infants. The team realized that this didn't look right and that making proper infant dinosaurs would require new models and AI, which would be similar to the work required for adding more dinosaur species. As a result, baby dinosaurs were dropped, along with any ideas for a "Dino Petting Zoo".
The final version of Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis includes only 25 dinosaur species. However, the development team had originally hoped to include 40 species very early on, with many of them implied to be sea-dwelling and flying creatures. Ultimately, this was whittled down to the 25 dinosaurs seen in the final game due to time constraints, and also the developers wanting to focus on creating fewer, but more interesting dinosaurs, as opposed to a larger number of less interesting dinosaurs. As such, they decided to make the dinosaurs they had count and focus on species that players would recognize from the films.
Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales was originally intended to be a straight port of Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind to the Atari Jaguar, owing to the Jaguar's hardware similarities to the Sega Genesis. It was ultimately decided that, due to the age of Claws Encounters at the time, it would instead be a new game built off of the older game's engine. Accolade were not able to provide source code for Bubsy 2 due to it not having been completed at the time.
In the seventh episode of each course, the player is required to chase down and defeat Shadow Mario to obtain a Shine Sprite, which spawns from his dematerializing body as he teleports away. In actuality, the Shine Sprites are stored at fixed locations and are simply teleported to his location by the flag "appearShineFromKageMario". If the flag is replaced with "appearShineFromNPC", the Shine Sprites appear where they are stored, implying that these were their originally intended locations. The fixed points in "Shadow Mario Revisited", "Hold It, Shadow Mario!", and "Shadow Mario Runs Wild" also feature dedicated cameras for spawning cutscenes, corroborating the idea.
Of note is that the internal location for the Shine Sprite in "Shadow Mario Runs Wild" places it partially inside Pianta Village's golden mushroom, which further implies that this object had its height raised at some point during development.
According to art director Ikeno "Daigo Ikeno" Metaka, Dragon's Dogma's cover artwork was inspired by the Japanese covers of Dragon Quest, and also Dragon Quest II, because of the pawn placement on that cover. Both covers were illustrated by Akira Toriyama, and this information was revealed after his death was announced in March 2024.
Wuhu Island was originally created for Wii Sports before its debut appearance in Wii Fit. An early version of the island can be seen in a leaked development image for Wii Sports, and in footage of the unused Airplane sport in the E3 2006 demo for the game. The leaked image also indicates that the Airplane sport would have also given you the option to fly around the island with a Rocket Belt, an idea that would later be reused in Pilotwings Resort.
The uDraw was conceived after THQ employees noticed how difficult drawing was with the Wii Remote in the Wii version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, and was originally called the Drawn to Life Pal. Multiple pitches for other licensed Drawn to Life titles in the same vein as Drawn to Life: SpongeBob SquarePants Edition were made, with Marvel Comics, Pixar, Star Wars, and Conan the Barbarian being pitched as examples. However, no Drawn to Life game with uDraw compatibility would ever release, though one uDraw launch title, Dood's Big Adventure, bears a fair resemblance to the series. No reason has been given for the series' absence or why a new IP was made with Dood's Big Adventure instead of using the brand recognition of Drawn to Life, but it may be connected to the controversial ending of the DS version of The Next Chapter and its finality for the core Drawn to Life Raposa universe.
In an interview with the developers at Blue Tongue, they mentioned several buildings they wanted to include in this game, but had to drop due to design decisions or memory constraints on home consoles:
This game had two working titles before the final Operation Genesis subtitle was instated: "Jurassic Park: Project Genesis" and "Jurassic Park: The Game".
At some point, forest fires were one of the many disasters that could occur in the player's parks. There was also a Sprinkler System that was planned as an upgrade for structures in-game that would have been used to mitigate the aforementioned forest fires. All of this would be removed in the final game.
Within the game's data are unused voice clips for a solo boss fight against Professor Calamitous, who in the released game only appears during the final battle against the full Syndicate. Some of these clips feature Calamitous threatening to destroy Retroville with a doomsday device, a subplot not present in the final game. This implies that Jimmy Neutron's route was originally going to follow the same formula as Danny Phantom, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Timmy Turner's routes, in which the team visits an individual character's world and foils a villainous scheme by an individual member of the Syndicate there. This is corroborated by a pre-release screenshot in which the monochrome Retroville simulation seen in "Fantastic Voyage of Goddard" is instead in full color.
According to art director Ikeno "Daigo Ikeno" Metaka, Dragon's Dogma's cover artwork was inspired by the Japanese covers of Dragon Quest, and also Dragon Quest II, because of the pawn placement on that cover. Both covers were illustrated by Akira Toriyama, and this information was revealed after his death was announced in March 2024.