During Chapter 1: Dark Energon, specifically during the part where the Decepticons navigate across the space debris, if the player looks up they can spot a celestial body that greatly resembles the logo of the game's developer High Moon Studios.
Having Dante expose more skin was partly inspired by the fashion style and live performances of Johnnys, originally the name of a Japanese boy band that was active in the 1960s, now an umbrella term for Japanese boy bands that specialize in exuberant stage performances.
"The "nothing but a jacket" look is perfect for young, cool stage performers, no? So we were always going to have him "naked" under the jacket. We never wavered on that design element. For a while there was also a design that had the jacket closed in front, but we realized that would be a waste of Dante's incredible, chiseled abs. The red coat contrasts nicely with his sharp, lively body."
Lisa was originally going to be named Monica. However, because of the allegations surrounding then-United States President Bill Clinton, the name "Monica" would draw too much negative attention. So the name was abandoned and eventually changed to Lisa.
Menat's moveset has some divergences between the Japanese and English names. Both the Japanese and English names are filled with references to Egyptian mythology:
•Overflowing Nile in the Japanese version is ナイルの氾濫 Nairu no hanran (“Flooding of the Nile”). Nile floodings have exceptional importance for both ancient and modern Egyptians.
•Wisdom of Thoth was ジェフティの知恵 Jefuti no chie, “Wisdom of Thoth”. This discrepancy in spelling is due to the Japanese using one of the most common of Thoth’s transliterations, from his ancient Egyptian name ḏḥwty, also pronounced as Jehuti amongst other spellings.
•Left Eye of the Lion is 獅子の左目 Shishi no hidarime (“Lion Left Eye”, or “the Left Eye who is a Lion”). This alludes to Sekhmet, the lion goddess of war and destruction.
•Judgement of Anubis is 黒犬の審判 Kuroinu no shinpan ("Judgement of the black dog"). The Japanese name comes from the fact that he has a jackal’s (or black dog) head.
•Divine Retribution is a generic adaptation of the original 罪人を喰らう顎 Zainin wo kurau ago (“The jaws that eat the sinner"), an allusion to the goddess Ammit, the monster who devours the dead whose heart ends up being heavier than the feather of Ma'at.
•Khamun Kick is カーメンキック Kāmen Kikku, and derives from a common liberty the Japanese took with Ancient Egyptian language: coming from Tutankhamun's name, the most famous of all the pharaohs. His name in Ancient Egyptian is Twt ˁnḫ Jmn, "living" ˁnḫ, better known as ankh) "image" (twt) "of Amun" (Jmn). Amun's name was written first for respect towards the god, even if it was pronounced last. Given that Tut, Ankh and Amun are single words, "Khamun" doesn't make sense in context. Nevertheless, Japanese already popularised the use of カーメン kāmen as an ancient Egyptian reference, maybe prompted by the fact that the Japanese 仮面 kamen means "mask" and Tutankhamun's funerary mask is well known.
•Guardian of the Sun is in Japanese 太陽の守護者 Taiyō no shugosha, a direct translation. This references Khepri, the beetle Sun god. Khepri rolls the Sun across the sky, and he is visible on Menat's nape.
•The Nefertem is in Japanese ウン・ネフェル Un - Neferu. Nefertem is the lotus god of scent and good perfumes, as well as the son of Sekhmet. On the other hand, the Japanese name doesn't actually reference Nefertem, because the title wnn nfr, variously transliterated "Wenennefer", "Wenufer" or Unnefer, "The perfect one", "The happy one", is one of the epithets of Osiris.
Contrary to popular belief, Menat's name doesn't come from Arabic, even though that's the language spoken in modern-day Egypt. The character's name actually comes from "menat", a necklace which was used in ancient Egypt as a musical instrument for cultic dances and religious processions rather than a necklace proper.
In 1993, then chairman of Nintendo of America Howard Lincoln told the U.S. Senate that Night Trap would never be released onto a Nintendo system. Despite this famous quote, 25 years later in 2018 the game would be released onto the Nintendo Switch with the Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition.
According to a 2003 interview with the game's producer Hideo Kojima published in the 4/03 issue of Nintendo Dream magazine, he was asked how the game's development started? He responded:
"I’ve been saying for a long time now that I want to make something weird. I had an idea, for example, for a CD game where if the player dies, the disc itself actually breaks. I want to make something *that* weird. Of course it sounds like a commercial disaster waiting to happen, right? Plus I had the Metal Gear series to contend with, which always got prioritized over other projects. But in my head all these game ideas have been piling up, being warehoused for future use, and one of them was a hazy idea for a game that used the sun somehow. Then the GBA came out, and it was more powerful than the Super Famicom. Wow—handheld hardware is starting to get really good, I thought."
"For a game that uses the sun, I knew a sensor would be the best choice. But I had absolutely no idea how to make that happen. As it happened, a little before that Konami had been designing some portable, handheld medical devices equipped with a variety of sensors. And so when that got released on the market, my previously vague concept of “catching the rays of the sun” came into clearer focus—if we attach this sensor to a GBA cart, it could work! That was the official start of everything. It was right around the end of the Metal Gear Solid 2 development.
"Originally, I thought we’d make a different type of game. It wasn’t going to be a sequel to Ghost Babel or anything, but I actually wanted to use the “hiding” (stealth) concept in Metal Gear 2 to create an entirely different kind of “escape game.” It would have begun with you being caught and imprisoned by the enemy… I thought a game like that could work really well on a portable system, but after a lot of planning, it turned out we just couldn’t work it into something satisfying. At that point, although it was quite a risk, we decided to challenge ourselves with an entirely new game."
In 2017, iLife originally won a court case against Nintendo stating that they infringed on their patents and Nintendo was ordered to pay iLife $10 million. However, in 2020 after Nintendo appealed the verdict, a federal court in Dallas overturned the verdict stating that iLife patent was invalid. Thus iLife's $10 million award from Nintendo was declared null and void.
Several signs in the game contain Easter Eggs that reference different names and other things from the original series or Generation 1 themed Transformers lore and media. A few examples are:
•"Maccadam's Vintage Oil" - A reference to a place on Planet Cybertron, equivalent to an Earth Bar, where Transformers can consume recuperating oil and that was also known as a non-conflict-zone during the Cybertronian war.
•"Bahoudin's" - An homage to the "Pearl of Bahoudin", a powerful MacGuffin from a storyline in the first Transformers animated series.
•"S. Witwicky" - A callout to Spike Witwicky, the young human protagonist from the same show, and his father Sparkplug.
•"Lander's Beverages" - a rather deep cut to one of the lead characters in the "Super God Masterforce" anime, a TV show that acted as somewhat of a sequel to the G1 cartoon that was only aired in Japan and featured "Pretenders" (such as Lander), which are Transformers that can take human form, among other things.
There are a series of Transformers: Devastation PlayStation 4 faceplates that were only released in Japan and in a limited number, despite the game getting no Japanese release.
Sakurai and his team were already working on the Byleth DLC before Fire Emblem: Three Houses was even released. The game director had to work with an early developer's build of the game, which he said took quite a long time to finish. This early build was in fact so Top Secret Sakurai couldn't even been seen playing it and he was even forbidden from taking it to his house.
Ryo Horikawa (voice of Captain Falcon) revealed that when he was asked to record lines for the Min Min reveal trailer, he thought he was going to re-record alot of Captain Falcon’s lines in game. However, because Captain Falcon’s voice lines have been reused since Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64, he was brought in to simply record ramen slurping sounds for the trailer.
Near the end of the game when you reach Lycentia's lair, using the Bagpipes on her instead of the Book of Magic will cause her to kill Torin and trigger a secret audio message from the game's creator Al Lowe instead of a regular death screen, with Lowe thanking you for playing the game and encouraging players not to tell others how they found the message and instead taunt them with "Why, I got a personal message from Al Lowe at the end. Didn't you?"
In the end credits of the Japanese release, three additional images with captions underneath them are shown during the montage of official artwork. These images appear to be drawings and fan mail sent by young Japanese fans to Capcom that influenced the game's development:
• The first image shown in the credits, submitted by 14-year-old Masahiro Onuma from Osaka, reads:
"Kobun Mole It comes out of the land on the ground, and comes out of anywhere in the cave. You can hit the body with a drill and crush the scattered soil and stones!"
This drawing appears to be the first design for the Servbot Borer that was later simplified for the final game and later modified again in Mega Man Legends 2.
• The second image, submitted by 11-year-old Takumi Miyayoshi from the Ishikawa Prefecture, reads:
"Kobun's Bomb Dummy dolls are passing one after another from right to left. (It's a bomb)"
This drawing may be the first design for the Servbot training minigame in the Gym, where a Servbot has to dodge and catch bombs volleyed at it by two other Servbots and then throw them back at targets behind them.
• The third image, submitted by 10-year-old Masashi Kaga from Tokyo, reads:
"Bonne Rocket Bazooka There is a roller under the trigger, so you can move while doing something!!"
This drawing appears to be the first design for the Bonne Bazooka, a weapon used by the Gustaff that can be developed by Servbot #31 after he obtains his skill and the Pipe from the Nakkai Ruins.
The text featured on the fan drawings themselves have been left untranslated in this submission as the pictures were scaled down to fit in the credits and thus appear smaller, grainier and more difficult to read.
Pixar were heavily involved in the creation of the Toy Box and Monstropolis worlds based on their properties. They collaborated with with Square Enix on the story, character design, and look of the worlds among other things and helped to design the Infinity Badge Keyblade. They even negotiated to have the story of Toy Box be set between Toy Story 2 & Toy Story 3. This went so far as to have Pixar suggest Andy's Room have the Starfield wallpaper instead of the iconic Cloud wallpaper, so the area can be chronologically accurate to the film series.
The characters Ruddin, Hathy, Clover, Lancer, and King all took their designs from a series of playing card illustrations that Tumblr user Kantonytes published in 2012, the year Deltarune first started development. In a tweet posted shortly after Chapter 1's release, Toby Fox credited Kantonytes' work as a key inspiration for the game as a whole.
According to a 1997 interview with the game's designer Masahiko Sato published in The PlayStation magazine, "in April 9th, on a Sunday afternoon, 2 or 3PM", out of nowhere, he came up with the idea for I.Q. that was "just like" the final game that was later released. After being asked again if the final version was the same as the original idea, he repsonded:
"Excluding the music, yes—visually it was almost exactly the same. I saw humans standing in an abstract, open space, with giant cubes coming at you. There were about 7 people, and in my initial vision, there were also dogs."
"At that time, I also imagined that, in addition to cubes, there would be blocks with more complex shapes: ones that were two stories high, for instance, or ones were more flat and oblong. However, when I actually made them, I realized that they made the game incomprehensible to human beings. The problem was that once the blocks became too complex in shape, people could no longer predict how they would move. Once I got into the actual development and created rules that humans could actually predict, that was when I first discovered the gameplay of I.Q."
"Gameplay, to me, is about finding the right balance. For example, take a game like Tic-Tac-Toe: it has a simple 3×3 board with players alternating between Os and Xs. This kind of game is easy to understand just by looking at it. But on the other hand, you have games like Othello and Go, which introduce a degree of non-intuitiveness that I think is handled well. When I ask myself why these games have continued to be played for so long, I think it’s because they strike just the right balance in having a moderate degree of complexity."
"My own initial image for I.Q, however, was far too complicated. It was too difficult and hence not very interesting. Gradually I refined the gameplay and the game changed accordingly."
"However, despite changing the number of humans on the game board, the one thing that remained nearly the same as my initial vision was the tone and atmosphere of the game."
According to a 1996 interview with the game's director Masaya Kobayashi published in the GSLA archive, he stated that he loves snowboarding, that he wanted to make a sport game about it, so he then drew up the initial plans. He also stated that it's like car racing, but racing in snowboarding by jumping and soaring through the air, and he thought including these elements in the racing game would be interesting.
According to a 1993 interview with the game's programmer Kan Naitou published in the 5/93 issue of Famicon Tsuushin, he stated that the game took a lot of inspiration from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s movies. He also stated that a single action in the game took 7 frames of animation, an idea which came from Disney's animated movies.
According to a 2003 interview with the game's director/writer Yoshio Sakamoto published in GSLA, he stated that after Super Metroid on the Super Famicom, they couldn't use the underpowered Game Boy Color for a new Metroid game. When the Game Boy Advance was released, a console whose specs surpassed the Super Famicom, the team from the mobile games division really wanted to work with it.
During Chapter 1: Dark Energon, specifically during the part where the Decepticons navigate across the space debris, if the player looks up they can spot a celestial body that greatly resembles the logo of the game's developer High Moon Studios.
In 1993, then chairman of Nintendo of America Howard Lincoln told the U.S. Senate that Night Trap would never be released onto a Nintendo system. Despite this famous quote, 25 years later in 2018 the game would be released onto the Nintendo Switch with the Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition.
Several signs in the game contain Easter Eggs that reference different names and other things from the original series or Generation 1 themed Transformers lore and media. A few examples are:
Ryo Horikawa (voice of Captain Falcon) revealed that when he was asked to record lines for the Min Min reveal trailer, he thought he was going to re-record alot of Captain Falcon’s lines in game. However, because Captain Falcon’s voice lines have been reused since Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64, he was brought in to simply record ramen slurping sounds for the trailer.
Near the end of the game when you reach Lycentia's lair, using the Bagpipes on her instead of the Book of Magic will cause her to kill Torin and trigger a secret audio message from the game's creator Al Lowe instead of a regular death screen, with Lowe thanking you for playing the game and encouraging players not to tell others how they found the message and instead taunt them with "Why, I got a personal message from Al Lowe at the end. Didn't you?"
In the end credits of the Japanese release, three additional images with captions underneath them are shown during the montage of official artwork. These images appear to be drawings and fan mail sent by young Japanese fans to Capcom that influenced the game's development:
The characters Ruddin, Hathy, Clover, Lancer, and King all took their designs from a series of playing card illustrations that Tumblr user Kantonytes published in 2012, the year Deltarune first started development. In a tweet posted shortly after Chapter 1's release, Toby Fox credited Kantonytes' work as a key inspiration for the game as a whole.
