In an interview with LEGO Island's creative director Wes Jenkins from around 2013, he revealed that Mindscape fired the game's entire development team the day before the game was released in order to avoid paying promised bonuses:
"Long story but basically – the industry tradition (back then) was that you will receive product bonuses if you stay to the day of product release. The best solution for them (administrators) at the time was to fire everybody the day before release. There's bigger profits and then [sic] could get their investment money back before the product sells… if you don't have to pay bonuses or continued salaries. They also sold [Mindscape] eventually to bigger companies, which ended up in some legal complications… It was explained to me later when we won best of the show at E3 later that year, that "it wasn't personal – it was just business"."
The version of GoldenEye 007 that was released was technically a ROM hack of the version submitted to Nintendo for final certification. While the game was undergoing said last-minute testing, an issue was discovered with the game's memory that caused glitches in the textures featured in the Frigate level. To combat this, programmer Mark Edmonds wrote a tool to extract the game's code and data from the ROM, adjusted the hex values in the game's memory to improve the performance in the level, recompressed it, and directly added it back into the ROM image without recompiling. This version was sent back to Nintendo and certified for release as the final version of the game.
In the Shura ending during Sekiro's fight with The Owl, he reveals part of his name before being cut off. The only reason his full name, Ukonzaemon Usui, is known is because of lingual differences in personal name order between Western and Eastern countries that are reflected in the game's script. In the English script, the first name "Ukonzaemon" is said first, while in the Japanese script, the surname "Usui" is said first.
In the level "Interval 09 - Incursion - Lapdog", there is a secret room that contains a whiteboard texture previously featured in an earlier game developed by Monolith Productions, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, as well as a radio that plays audio of a news station reading traffic reports in Maritopa, a town from that game, before playing "Negai (Wish)", the game's theme song.
Due to lacking the sufficient budget needed to hire actors, the staff, interns and associates of Remedy Entertainment ended up lending themselves to the likenesses of many of the game's characters. Most notably creative director Sam Lake provided the face model for Max Payne, and many of his relatives ended up being part of the game's cast, including his parents who posed in multiple shots as Nicole Horne and Alfred Woden.
In the first three games, a glitch can be performed when bouncing on multiple enemies consecutively. Normally, by bouncing on 5 enemies in a row, you get an extra Life in addition to 3 Wumpas from the previous 3 enemies in that combo. However, the bonuses that come from bouncing combos go further beyond that into triple-digit combos as a result of there being no set combo limit. This means if performed correctly, triple-digit combos can overflow the item table to give key items that you are not intended to get through them including Tokens, Crystals, Gems, Sapphires, Relics and Powers.
This can be achieved through tool assistance or through human play by building up the bounce combo on a respawning enemy or more ideally an Iron Arrow Crate, and then continuing the combo on enemies to start reaping these items. Preserving a bounce combo can be done by spinning and crouching right before hitting the ground, as the combo count is lost when Crash enters the standing or walking animations.
The attached image features a list of items that can be earned through this glitch, as well as the requirements for glitched higher percentage runs of each game, created by speedrunners dass and ThaRixer, the latter of whom originally utilized the glitch to dramatically lower the speedrun record of Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back in 2012.
Rolento's Super Combo "Take No Prisoners" can be blocked by every fighter in the game except for Cody, because he is a prisoner and is being sought out by Rolento in the game's plot.
The development of the first Donkey Kong game was outsourced by Nintendo to Ikegami Tsushinki, a company who is believed but not confirmed to have previously worked with Nintendo on several of their early ventures into arcade games. They produced and sold to Nintendo somewhere between 8,000 and 20,000 printed circuit boards for Donkey Kong, and it is believed that Nintendo went on to copy an additional 80,000 boards from this batch without Ikegami's permission. Despite the sale, because no formal contract was known to have been signed between the two companies, Ikegami owned the source code to Donkey Kong as they had created it, and never sent it over to Nintendo.
In order to create a sequel on the coattails of the success of the first game, Nintendo employed subcontractor Iwasaki Giken to reverse-engineer Donkey Kong so Nintendo’s staff could develop the game's sequel, Donkey Kong Jr. Should this narrative be verifiably true, this would make Donkey Kong Jr. Nintendo's first "in-house" video game created by themselves without any assistance from outside development companies. Ikegami viewed this use of the source code as blatant copyright infringement, and sued Nintendo in 1983 for ¥580,000,000 (around $91,935,800). A trial in 1990 ruled that Nintendo did not own the source code to the original Donkey Kong, and the parties settled out of court the same year for an undisclosed amount.
The game's antagonist General RAAM was a last-minute addition to the game, and due to time constraints and looming production deadlines, his backstory and related context in Act 5 were not included in the original Xbox 360 release of Gears of War, but would be included in all of its future releases.
RAAM was also named after the owner of a local Indian restaurant that Epic Games' staff frequented during development.
In the Beetle Forest during the capture training tutorial with Koris, the Blue Cocoon Master, the player will normally receive an Arpatron as their starter minion. However, if a PocketStation is plugged into Memory Card Slot 1, the exclusive starter minion called Vatolka will be caught instead.
The element of the Vatolka is determined by finding the unique ID provided by the PocketStation's serial number represented by "XXYYYYYY" (with "XX" referring to the hexadecimal ASCII value of the PocketStation's letter on the serial number, and "YYYYYY" referring to the result when converting the numbers on the serial number from decimal to hexadecimal), then performing modulo 4 on it. Based on that result, your Vatolka's element can turn out to be either Fire with a 0, Air with a 1, Earth with a 2, or Water with a 3.
Through the use of transferring saves between the ePSXe and Xebra/Arbex emulators, it is possible to have captured both Vatolka and Arpatron in the same save file. Furthermore, they count as having captured two different minions, despite them sharing the same in-game slot in the Minion List.
In the Paris level, the Mona Lisa painting can be burned with napalm to reveal a cheat code hidden underneath: Up/Down/L1/R1. This four-button code is meant to unlock Cyburbia, a level from the first Twisted Metal game, as one of three secret stages for the 2 Player Challenge Match mode by entering it on the level select screen. However, entering this code does nothing, because the code found in the Paris level has a typo: the Up and Down buttons are accidentally switched, so the correct code is actually: Down/Up/L1/R1.
The Last Giant, a boss enemy in the Forest of Fallen Giants, has a semi-rare instant-kill move during the second part of its fight where it simply tries to fall and crush the player with its body. If the giant is killed while it is still laying flat on the ground, a unique death animation will play where it lifts up the upper-half of its body to wail before dying.
In the Japanese release, an enemy that looks strikingly similar to Donkey Kong named Guerilla in the English release is named ドソキーユング, or "Dosokī Yungu" when Romanized. This character's Japanese name is a joke based on the Katakana writing system, as Dosokī Yungu's Katakana is visually similar to Donkey Kong's Katakana ドンキーコング, but actually has two different, yet similar-looking characters that are swapped out to make Dosokī Yungu (the first ン is changed to ソ, and コ is changed to ユ). Just like how the enemy resembles Donkey Kong, but is not actually him, the name resembles "Donkey Kong", but is not actually read that way.
"Dosokī Yungu" itself could possibly be a reference to the 1949 film Mighty Joe Young, which was produced by the same creative team that made the 1933 film King Kong, one of the main influences for the creation of Donkey Kong.
In the Plague of Shadows campaign, during the penultimate boss fight Spoiler:against the titular Plague of Shadows inside Plague Knight's mind, you can defeat it by standing still and doing nothing for around 40 seconds, because the boss cannot hurt you in the spot you stand in at the very start of the fight. After this time has passed, the boss (labelled as "????" in the game's text box) will say:
????:Spoiler:YOU ARE STEADFAST IN YOUR RESOLVE... MAYBE THERE'S HOPE FOR US YET...
before transforming into its second form and the campaign's final boss fight, Spoiler:the Corrupted Essence.
The Sega VR is an unreleased virtual reality headset prototype add-on for the Sega Genesis announced and worked on primarily by Sega of America throughout 1991-1994. Its release was ultimately cancelled due to development issues and younger users inducing motion sickness and severe headaches from use.
Only 5 games were known to have been announced or in development before its cancellation: •Nuclear Rush: A simulation in which users pilot a hovercraft in a futuristic war. •Iron Hammer: A shoot 'em up piloting a helicopter gunship inspired by EA's Strike series. •Matrix Runner: Reportedly a cyberpunk adventure game inspired by Konami's Snatcher. •Outlaw Racing: A vehicle racing and combat game. •Virtua Racing: A port of Sega's 1992 Formula One racing arcade game announced as a launch title for the Sega VR. It's unknown how far this port made it into development, but Virtua Racing would later be released for the standalone Sega Genesis in 1994.
In November 2020, the Video Game History Foundation announced that they had successfully emulated the Sega VR's original hardware through HTC Vive with the help of fellow preservation website Gaming Alexandria by using parts of the source code of Nuclear Rush, as well as insight on the hardware and inner-workings of the cancelled games from some of their lead programmers.
After joining Wigglytuff's Guild, you will unlock the game's second dungeon, Drenched Bluff. If you fail your first two attempts at completing the dungeon, at the end of the second day, you and your partner will be summoned by Chatot to the Guildmaster's chamber, assuming that Wigglytuff is angry about the past two failures. After entering his room however, a chipper Wigglytuff gives you a Reviver Seed, an Oran Berry, and a Max Elixir, encouraging you to do your best to succeed tomorrow.
The Whomp King, the boss of the Throwback Galaxy, will recite his original speech from his first encounter with Mario at Whomp's Fortress in Super Mario 64. If you lose the fight and then try again, he will start to recite the speech again, and then stop himself declaring he's tired of it. Excluding Bowser and Bowser Jr., the Whomp King is the only standard boss in the game with dialogue. When you deal the final blow to the Whomp King, he makes a unique face that cannot be seen normally because he is lying down when defeated.
When bringing the game in the west, publisher XSEED games was worried about releasing an Anime-based game during a time when the games had notoriously low sales and retailers were reluctant to stock them. To combat this, XSEED put a generic boxer silhouette on the box art. Fans of the series reacted negatively to this change.
To fix the error, XSEED changed the silhouette on the box to that of the main character, Ippo, on top of boxing glothes, and created a bonus reversible cover. To this day, XSEED Games tries to make reversible covers whenever possible.
The game faced controversy around its release, as it was reported that Ubisoft initially recalled copies of the game in the UK due to a line that was considered offensive. Ubisoft refuted this however, stating the title wasn't being recalled. The game was later re-released in the UK with a PEGI 12 rating.
Golf was never planned to be in the game. However, Shigeru Miyamoto incorrectly stated in an interview that golf was in the game, so Nintendo felt they had to put it in.
According to Director Takayuki Shimamura: "Right after getting back to Japan, he suddenly said: "You know we're including golf now." Apparently he'd stated in an interview that this time round golf shots would be determined by the backswing, even though at that time a golf game didn't exist in any shape or form!"
In the level "Interval 09 - Incursion - Lapdog", there is a secret room that contains a whiteboard texture previously featured in an earlier game developed by Monolith Productions, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, as well as a radio that plays audio of a news station reading traffic reports in Maritopa, a town from that game, before playing "Negai (Wish)", the game's theme song.
In the first three games, a glitch can be performed when bouncing on multiple enemies consecutively. Normally, by bouncing on 5 enemies in a row, you get an extra Life in addition to 3 Wumpas from the previous 3 enemies in that combo. However, the bonuses that come from bouncing combos go further beyond that into triple-digit combos as a result of there being no set combo limit. This means if performed correctly, triple-digit combos can overflow the item table to give key items that you are not intended to get through them including Tokens, Crystals, Gems, Sapphires, Relics and Powers.
Rolento's Super Combo "Take No Prisoners" can be blocked by every fighter in the game except for Cody, because he is a prisoner and is being sought out by Rolento in the game's plot.
In the Paris level, the Mona Lisa painting can be burned with napalm to reveal a cheat code hidden underneath: Up/Down/L1/R1. This four-button code is meant to unlock Cyburbia, a level from the first Twisted Metal game, as one of three secret stages for the 2 Player Challenge Match mode by entering it on the level select screen. However, entering this code does nothing, because the code found in the Paris level has a typo: the Up and Down buttons are accidentally switched, so the correct code is actually: Down/Up/L1/R1.
In the Japanese release, an enemy that looks strikingly similar to Donkey Kong named Guerilla in the English release is named ドソキーユング, or "Dosokī Yungu" when Romanized. This character's Japanese name is a joke based on the Katakana writing system, as Dosokī Yungu's Katakana is visually similar to Donkey Kong's Katakana ドンキーコング, but actually has two different, yet similar-looking characters that are swapped out to make Dosokī Yungu (the first ン is changed to ソ, and コ is changed to ユ). Just like how the enemy resembles Donkey Kong, but is not actually him, the name resembles "Donkey Kong", but is not actually read that way.
The Sega VR is an unreleased virtual reality headset prototype add-on for the Sega Genesis announced and worked on primarily by Sega of America throughout 1991-1994. Its release was ultimately cancelled due to development issues and younger users inducing motion sickness and severe headaches from use.
The Whomp King, the boss of the Throwback Galaxy, will recite his original speech from his first encounter with Mario at Whomp's Fortress in Super Mario 64. If you lose the fight and then try again, he will start to recite the speech again, and then stop himself declaring he's tired of it. Excluding Bowser and Bowser Jr., the Whomp King is the only standard boss in the game with dialogue. When you deal the final blow to the Whomp King, he makes a unique face that cannot be seen normally because he is lying down when defeated.
