In Baseball, when stepping on the home plate after getting a home run, Birdo, Daisy, Waluigi, Diddy Kong, Bowser, Metal Mario, and Pink Gold Peach will cheer. The rest of the characters in the game will not do this, suggesting that implementing cheers for every character was overlooked during development.
In volume 3 of Classic Gaming by GamesRadar+, Martin Edmonson, creator of the series, said Destruction Derby was inspired by memories of his father taking him to stock car races as a child. Martin would run up to cars left behind during the races and study their damages up-close before they would be towed away for repair. His experiences inspired him to create a video game that would allow players to "realistically" smash other cars.
The game originally started off a PlayStation 2 version of 007: The World is Not Enough, before making a new James Bond story and game altogether using the engine from said game. When asked about the game's delay and title change, developer Jon Horsley stated:
"We thought we could deliver a good [The World is Not Enough (TWINE)] game for the PS2--but we also thought we could combine forces with some of our other studios and deliver a great original Bond experience with Agent Under Fire. The extra time has provided us the opportunity to create an entirely new game, not tied to a specific movie, and address some points that we knew we couldn't get into TWINE under that timeline. And we cherish and respect our players too much to pass up the opportunity."
The announcement of a Wii version of Just Dance 2020 was met with confusion from some fans as to why an eighth generation game would be released on a discontinued console, speculating that it was because hospitals and rehabilitation centers still used the Wii for physical therapy and recreation, with Just Dance being a popular series for those purposes. However, Ubisoft released an official statement in response to the speculation that claimed that "it would be inaccurate to say that Just Dance is available on the Wii solely because it’s developed for physical therapy purposes" and that "a lot of our players are children and families who continue to play on Wii."
Sakurai and his team originally had different plans for a Xenoblade Chronicles 2 DLC character. He tried to include Rex as a playable character alongside Pyra, at first thinking of an Ice Climbers-like system where the player would control both characters at the same time, but this ended up presenting programming problems including one involving the game's memory capacity due to the size of the characters. He then had an idea of making Rex a background character whenever Pyra fights, in a similar manner to the Pokémon Trainer. He eventually felt this second method would also be taxing to the game and that fans would not be fond of it anyway so it was scrapped. He then came up with the idea to have Pyra be a transforming character (similar to how Zelda and Shiek were before Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U) with her turning into Mythra and additionally have Rex appear only in taunts, Final Smashes, and other extraneous details involving the characters.
Lead designer Dan Greenawalt and his team looked to the Gran Turismo series, and also played Animal Crossing and Diablo II for inspiration. They also hired a former designer from the Pokémon series to work on the game. Greenawalt explained that they wanted to make a "car-collecting game" and tried to implement the best elements from the aforementioned games and franchises that they considered to be "especially good at delivering superb collecting and ongoing social experiences".
According to a 1998 Famitsu interview with the game's director Yoshinori Kitase, he stated that when the game's development started, character designer Tetsuya Nomura suggested for Squall & Laguna's stories to end in a way that would have tied them together. This idea was scrapped for unknown reasons and forgotten about completely.
After being worked on for two years, the original 1984 draft of the game explained by EA's founder Trip Hawkins to the retired American football coach and sportscaster John Madden was only going to feature 6 or 7 players per team on the field. When he heard this, Madden refused to put his name on the game unless it featured 11 players on both sides, stating "If it isn’t 11 on 11, it isn’t real football.” Not expecting Madden to be as involved in the game's planning as he became and needing his endorsement and involvement to ensure the game's success after two prior failed endorsements with other football players, it was delayed by an additional three years as the development team struggled to implement 11 on 11 play. This lead to EA staff to start referring to John Madden Football as "Trip's Folly" due to its lengthy development, and Madden himself to start believing the game had been cancelled. The game was eventually finished after EA hired Bethesda Softworks to help work on it, although their help was limited due to a lawsuit between the two over another football game they worked on entitled Gridiron! that extended the game's development even longer, and was released in 1988.
Originally there were plans to have Bayek incapacitated or killed early on in the game, with his wife Aya becoming the main character of the game. This idea was scrapped for then-unknown reasons, but was later revealed by anonymous Ubisoft employees in a 2020 Bloomberg article investigating internal abuse and sexism among the company's executives.
There were possibly going to be further sequels to Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse released on the NES, but due to the high sales and popularity of Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES games, their development team was prioritized above all else leaving several other dev teams, including Castlevania's, to survive on the lesser profits their series generated.
In a Famicom Tsuushin magazine interview, the game's designer Masanori Hara stated that Lloyd & Natalie's relationship is complex. They tried to arrange it with the hope of getting to make another sequel of the series, so they didn't want to focus too much on just the robots. They also thought it would be cool for the players to watch human relationships.
Yoshi Touch & Go started off as a tech demo for the GameCube called "Balloon Trip," a side-scrolling platformer. The game later shifted to the Nintendo DS in order to focus on the touch screen, as they wanted to make a feature that would allow the player to draw paths on.
The executive producer of Dead Rising 3 Josh Bridge, stated that Blue Castle Games had to create the game from scratch by looking at videos from Dead Rising, because they could not obtain any kind of code of the game from Capcom to build the sequel from.
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.
According to a 1997 Sega Saturn magazine interview, the game's planner/director Takashi Oda mentioned that he wanted to target the game towards adults rather than children or teenagers, and did so by making the protagonists a decade older compared to other games at the time which commonly featured protagonists in their 20's, allowing the developers to avoid toning down the violent content in the game for a younger audience:
"I did that because our target audience was adults and up. From the start of the project we knew we didn’t want children playing this game. Had we wanted to target them, I think we would have made the game more about ghosts or something, not zombies. Those considerations were one of the tougher parts of this development."
According to series creator Tokurou Fujiwara, his team's early vision for the stage designs were going to take their art direction into a darker and splatter horror-influenced direction, but this idea was scrapped, likely due to pressure and expectations from higher-ups for the game to be a more faithful sequel to Ghosts 'n Goblins.
According to the game's art director Yūsuke Naora, he liked how his design of the city of Midgar turned out, having envisioned the city in his head as a pizza while he was designing it.
After the first AVALANCHE mission at the start of the game, Barret will reference this inspiration when talking to Cloud about the upper plate of Midgar:
Barrett: "The upper world...a city on a plate...It's cuz of that &^#$# 'pizza', that people underneath are sufferin'!"
Additionally, the name of the song "Underneath the Rotting Pizza", which prominently plays in many of the slum areas in Midgar, is a reference to its design.
In 2010, Rockstar Games graphic designer Mike Cala uploaded four unused early logos for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars that were considered before settling on the final logo. Interestingly, the "Grand Theft Auto" logo is from the PlayStation 2 era of games starting with Grand Theft Auto III, rather than the logo for Grand Theft Auto IV which was released two years prior. In the latter game's logo, the leftmost leg in the "R" character in "Grand" extends down to the first "t" in "Theft", whereas the prior variant of the logo left a small gap in between the two.
An unused enemy named "Gotouryu", a Flying Demon based on the Japanese yōkai of the same name, can be found in the data for the Wii version. When asked about why the enemy was cut, director Hideki Kamiya admitted that he forgot to add the enemy in the game.
According to the game's director Shuyo Murata, fusing both the first and second game's story and gameplay together into one experience was the most challenging part of the game's development.
In volume 3 of Classic Gaming by GamesRadar+, Martin Edmonson, creator of the series, said Destruction Derby was inspired by memories of his father taking him to stock car races as a child. Martin would run up to cars left behind during the races and study their damages up-close before they would be towed away for repair. His experiences inspired him to create a video game that would allow players to "realistically" smash other cars.
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.
In 2010, Rockstar Games graphic designer Mike Cala uploaded four unused early logos for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars that were considered before settling on the final logo. Interestingly, the "Grand Theft Auto" logo is from the PlayStation 2 era of games starting with Grand Theft Auto III, rather than the logo for Grand Theft Auto IV which was released two years prior. In the latter game's logo, the leftmost leg in the "R" character in "Grand" extends down to the first "t" in "Theft", whereas the prior variant of the logo left a small gap in between the two.
An unused enemy named "Gotouryu", a Flying Demon based on the Japanese yōkai of the same name, can be found in the data for the Wii version. When asked about why the enemy was cut, director Hideki Kamiya admitted that he forgot to add the enemy in the game.
