In a promotional article published by Gamefan magazine, the game's art style was stated to have been heavily influenced by the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote Looney Tunes shorts directed by Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones. On top of this, he was credited in promotional materials for overseeing some of the game's art direction and for choosing the game's flat-shaded, polygonal graphics, but was not credited in the final product.
According to Mike and Matt Chapman, a representative of Sega of America offered them the chance to make a game based off Homestar Runner, but they declined their offer because they were not offered creative control over the game's development.
"There was a dude from Sega of America awhile ago that we were kinda just talking to. I was like, 'Is there any way that this wouldn’t just be put into the factory and stuck out on the other end with something that looks kinda like our characters?' And the guy was like, 'Ehhhn, probably not.' He was very up front, and we were like, 'Well thanks for being honest, we’ll pass.'"
They were later approached by Telltale Games who offered more creative freedom and they both believed the episodic format would work better for the characters of Homestar Runner, leading to the creation of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People.
There is a memorial to YouTuber and video game commentator TotalBiscuit found north-west of Slepe. Examining the grave adorned with his signature top hat prompts the text "He was always there to ask and answer one simple question", which is a reference to the opening statement from TotalBiscuit's series "WTF is...?".
Before its release, a free one-shot comic book produced by Marvel Comics detailing the events just before the start of the game was used to promote it in America. The cover art for the comic, drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, was also used as the game's final cover art in North America. The person on the cover and initial protagonist of the comic is S.T.A.R.S. Bravo team member Richard Aiken.
In the mid 1980's, Nintendo began producing Famicom Disk Writer Kiosks in Japan where a customer could pay ¥500 yen (roughly $5 US dollars) as opposed to ¥2600 yen (roughly $26) for a game and have the game's data written onto a blank cartridge, and replace that game with another game whenever they wanted for ¥500, as an alternative to renting video games which is prohibited in Japan. The Kiosk played a 6 minute demo reel featuring three original music tracks and a short remix of the "Ground Theme" from Super Mario Bros., and cutscenes primarily featuring Mario and Luigi (and a brief appearance by two unknown characters) demonstrating the transfer process using updated assets from Super Mario Bros.
A pre-release screenshot shows an unused American bus modeled after buses owned by Coach USA, and was most likely scrapped to avoid copyright issues with that company.
There is a glitch whenever Jak walks in front of a mirror that causes a slightly different model of Jak with dark grey horns to appear alongside the "reflected" second model of the room, initially suggesting that Jak was used as a test model for shaping Dark Jak's horns. However, a 2003 promotional contest advertisement hosted by Cartoon Network's programming block Toonami features a higher resolution model of Jak with white horns instead, suggesting that the model sent to Cartoon Network still had the horns on them and they just altered the model for the advertisement, or that Jak was originally supposed to have visible horns like Dark Jak.
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During the scene where Spoiler:: Vincent and Leo arrive at Garden Hill Medical Center to search for Vincent's wife Carol, an NPC can be found standing in front of a vending machine who is voiced by the director of the game Josef Fares. When approached by Leo, if the player chooses the response "You need help", Fares' NPC will end the conversation with the line "Fuck the Oscars!", a direct reference to a remark Fares made in an interview with Geoff Keighley during The Game Awards 2017.
According to the game's director, Katsuhiro Harada, the reason why Roger Jr. wasn't a playable character in Tekken 7 was due to the controversy regarding Greig Tonkins, a zookeeper who punched a kangaroo in order to rescue his dog from it during a trip in Australia. Bandai Namco later faced backlash from the animal rights organization PETA, who petitioned to have Roger Jr. removed from all Western versions of the game entirely.
In the Dreamcast version, despite having only been released in Japan, the entire English localization is present in the game, even retaining the English title "Puyo Pop Fever", and can be toggled from the Options menu. This hints at a possible Western release of the Dreamcast version that never materialized due to the discontinuation of the console by the time the game was released elsewhere, making it the last Dreamcast game developed by Sonic Team, as well as the last first-party Sega title released on the platform. The Dreamcast version is also the only version of the game to use sprites instead of 3D models.
One of the primary Western influences of Ace Attorney is the American crime drama series "Columbo", of which series creator Shu Takumi is a professed fan, and who based his character profiles on the sharpness and secrecy of Lieutenant Columbo:
"I don't touch upon Phoenix's past in the games, and the players don't even know where his parents are. Fans often ask me about the birthdate of a character, or their bloodtype or favorite food, but I don't talk about them on purpose. On the other hand, my own personality might be shining through my characters... In the game, Phoenix's thoughts are shown as monologue, but those inner monologues are just my own, personal thoughts. So when people say "Phoenix is actually quite sarcastic", they're actually talking about me (laugh)."
In the 2015 interview the above quote came from, Takahiro Ookura, writer of the Japanese crime drama series "Enter Lieutenant Fukuie", commented afterwards:
"I can feel the influence of "Columbo" in "Ace Attorney". For example, there's the thing with the IV drops in "Turnabout Succession", episode 4 of "Ace Attorney 4". I won't go into details, but the part where it goes "the only way you can know about this if you were there at that time", that's a type of logic often used in "Columbo"."
Additionally, the character design for Detective Dick Gumshoe is likely modeled off of Columbo's actor Peter Falk; Gumshoe's squint and uneven eyebrows mirror those of Falk, whose signature squint was the result of using an artificial right eyeball stemming from a childhood eye surgery.
NetherRealm Studios was able to get the likeness rights of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Terminator guest character, but he was not able to provide the voice for the character. Instead, Schwarzenegger himself chose voice actor Chris Cox to be hired to voice the Terminator according to senior UI artist Daanish Syed.
In South Korea and Australia, the game was rated their respective equivalents of a Mature rating due to the inclusion of casino banking/gambling games like Blackjack, Texas hold 'em poker, and Riichi mahjong.
In the Japanese release of the game, there is hidden meaning in the game's ending. Spoiler:Big Boss is portrayed by voice actor Chikao Ōtsuka; father of Spoiler:Solid Snake's voice actor Akio Ōtsuka.
Hideo Kojima has claimed that the two had fallen out years before and had not spoken to one another since, and Kojima intentionally cast Chikao in the game hoping to help patch things up between the two.
According to president and co-founder Sugiura Hirohide, the company was formed after the release of the Squaresoft film "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" proved to be a box-office bomb. With the film losing $94 million at the box office, Squaresoft had very little money left to create a sequel to Xenogears, thus causing Hirohide to leave the company and create Monolith Soft along with Tetsuya Takahashi, also a former employee at Squaresoft.
Prior to the start of 2017, there were 976 known Banana Coins in the game. In early January of that year, a speedrunner discovered a widely undocumented 5-Banana Coin hidden in Fungi Forest while looking at how the game formats its save data. While looking through the stage's flags in the BizHawk emulator, the speedrunner noticed that the flag for 5-Banana Coins was incomplete, and used script analysis tools to reveal a DK Dirt Pile hidden under tall grass located near the Tag Barrel by the exit to the Chunky Minecart. Walking over the pile would cause the player to slightly bob upwards from the grass in an easy-to-miss moment, and slamming it revealed the 5-Banana Coin, bringing the known total to 977 Banana Coins.
Hidden in the background of the song "Adam's Apartment" used in that area, a quiet, distorted sample of dialogue spoken by actress Sean Young from the 1982 film "Blade Runner" can be heard, specifically the scene where Deckard meets Rachael after a replicant owl flies across the room and she asks him "Do you like our owl?"
According to the PlayStation Blogcast with Seth Killian, Nathan Drake from the Uncharted series nearly got in the game.
He commented: “We were committed to try and provide some extra content to Sony and we were excited about looking at the different roster and seeing who was out there, and you know you’ve got all sort of cool characters like Nathan Drake, but you know Nathan Drake has kind of a nice Han Solo kind of everyman and he’s a comical guy but the Japanese team got really excited about Cole and the flexibility of his powers, projectiles, grabs, and all sorts of cool stuff.”
The original Xbox release of Shrek is noted as being the first commercial game to use "deferred shading," a technique where light is only calculated for the pixels it actually interacts with, meaning multiple light sources can be used at a lower cost than standard shading techniques and allowing the game to better imitate the ambient lighting of the original film. This technique would later be seen in Battlefield 1942, another game developed by DICE and released the following year.
In The PlayStation magazine interview with the game's art designer Kazuma Kaneko, he was asked about how the game's title 'Sin' (Persona 2: Innocent Sin) and the main theme of 'rumors' tied together in the game's story. He responded:
"My definition of “rumor” is when a person makes a judgment based on their own preconceptions and prejudices, and then recklessly disseminates that to the wider world. When that stuff circulates and circulates, you know… it could eventually become a sin. Even though we never intentionally think we’re committing a sin, I bet in our everyday lives this kind of thing happens a lot. A careless comment you make could have a major impact on someone else’s life. Those ideas are intertwined with the story of Persona 2."
There is a memorial to YouTuber and video game commentator TotalBiscuit found north-west of Slepe. Examining the grave adorned with his signature top hat prompts the text "He was always there to ask and answer one simple question", which is a reference to the opening statement from TotalBiscuit's series "WTF is...?".
Before its release, a free one-shot comic book produced by Marvel Comics detailing the events just before the start of the game was used to promote it in America. The cover art for the comic, drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, was also used as the game's final cover art in North America. The person on the cover and initial protagonist of the comic is S.T.A.R.S. Bravo team member Richard Aiken.
In the mid 1980's, Nintendo began producing Famicom Disk Writer Kiosks in Japan where a customer could pay ¥500 yen (roughly $5 US dollars) as opposed to ¥2600 yen (roughly $26) for a game and have the game's data written onto a blank cartridge, and replace that game with another game whenever they wanted for ¥500, as an alternative to renting video games which is prohibited in Japan. The Kiosk played a 6 minute demo reel featuring three original music tracks and a short remix of the "Ground Theme" from Super Mario Bros., and cutscenes primarily featuring Mario and Luigi (and a brief appearance by two unknown characters) demonstrating the transfer process using updated assets from Super Mario Bros.
A pre-release screenshot shows an unused American bus modeled after buses owned by Coach USA, and was most likely scrapped to avoid copyright issues with that company.
There is a glitch whenever Jak walks in front of a mirror that causes a slightly different model of Jak with dark grey horns to appear alongside the "reflected" second model of the room, initially suggesting that Jak was used as a test model for shaping Dark Jak's horns. However, a 2003 promotional contest advertisement hosted by Cartoon Network's programming block Toonami features a higher resolution model of Jak with white horns instead, suggesting that the model sent to Cartoon Network still had the horns on them and they just altered the model for the advertisement, or that Jak was originally supposed to have visible horns like Dark Jak.
One of the primary Western influences of Ace Attorney is the American crime drama series "Columbo", of which series creator Shu Takumi is a professed fan, and who based his character profiles on the sharpness and secrecy of Lieutenant Columbo:
Prior to the start of 2017, there were 976 known Banana Coins in the game. In early January of that year, a speedrunner discovered a widely undocumented 5-Banana Coin hidden in Fungi Forest while looking at how the game formats its save data. While looking through the stage's flags in the BizHawk emulator, the speedrunner noticed that the flag for 5-Banana Coins was incomplete, and used script analysis tools to reveal a DK Dirt Pile hidden under tall grass located near the Tag Barrel by the exit to the Chunky Minecart. Walking over the pile would cause the player to slightly bob upwards from the grass in an easy-to-miss moment, and slamming it revealed the 5-Banana Coin, bringing the known total to 977 Banana Coins.
