subdirectory_arrow_rightYoshi (Franchise), Turnip Boy (Collection)
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In 2016, a post was uploaded to Tumblr responding to a post claiming that "there is nothing wrong with Yoshi" by jokingly accusing Yoshi of committing tax fraud, which would become a running gag within Nintendo fan circles, and eventually a meme in 2018 with the bait-and-switch YouTube account SiIvaGunner posting soundtracks from a fake Yoshi Commits Tax Fraud game.
It would be discovered after the meme's peak of popularity that in 2011's Fortune Street, Yoshi is the only character in the game who asks to be exempt from paying taxes when a tax office is built. This means that while Yoshi is not guilty of committing tax fraud, he does attempt to commit tax evasion.
In October 2019, the Nintendo Versus eSports account posted a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate highlight tournament featuring Yoshi, and titled it "This Yoshi is no fraud", seemingly in reference to the meme.
The meme of Yoshi evading his taxes would also inspire the Turnip Boy series of games.
Action Girlz Racing claims on its box to be made "for girls, by girls". However, the credits of the game show that many of the developer names are simply female versions of the names of developers credited on other Data Design Interactive games, such as Karl White becoming "Karla White", Julien Alden-Salter becoming "Julia Alden-Salter", and Teoman Irmak becoming "Teowoman Hermark".
Many fans and critics have noted similarities between the aesthetic of Pizza Tower and "off-model" 1990s cartoons such as Ed, Edd, n' Eddy and The Ren & Stimpy Show. Game creator McPig has claimed not to be a fan of those series and to have not been influenced by them, although he did still take influence from the more cleanly-drawn SpongeBob SquarePants, and an unclear inspiration from 1990s cartoons would still be cited on the game's Steam store page description.
While the protagonist of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Ichiban Kasuga, is commonly stated to have debuted in the 2018 game Ryu Ga Gotoku Online, he actually was first revealed in a trailer for the game Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, which is considered a spin-off of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise. This trailer aired almost a year before Ryu Ga Gotoku Online and is notable as Ichiban does not appear in Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise.
In 2022, Pinbit LLC, the developer of Flying Gorilla, uploaded a pre-roll advertisement on YouTube using copyrighted footage from the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "I Had an Accident", presumably without permission, as well as the tagline "Gorilla's Bizarre Adventure", referencing Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. The advertisement for the game itself had been previously released on its own without the copyrighted content, alongside an advertisement for a related game they produced called Run! Gorilla that appears to have been removed from app stores for unknown reasons.
The Atari Jaguar, despite being marketed as a 64-bit platform, was only a 32-bit platform. Specifically, it used two 32-bit processors (named "Tom" and "Jerry") in parallel, with the marketing adding up those two processors as if they could be mathematically combined.
Pyoro, the star of the game-within-a-game series that rivals Wario's microgames in the WarioWare series, is a parody of the Japanese malt chocolate ball brand Chocoball's mascot, Kyoro-Chan.
Parroty Interactive had planned to preview Microshaft Winblows 98 at the COMDEX computer expo in 1997 with a Bill Gates look-a-like, but were stopped by security at the convention after 2 days.
In the 1999 Sega Dreamcast commercial for Crazy Taxi, the DMV features the address number 666 (the Number of the beast) in reference to common complaints about long wait times and poor service at DMVs.
The September 2000 issue of Nintendo Power contains a "Nintendo Power Online" section on page 12, featuring an article titled "Mamma Mia! It's Waluigi!" The accompanying text introduces Waluigi to readers, reveals that he has his own website: www.waluigi.com, and claims to have an upcoming online game called "Waluigi's Toenail Clipping Party".
At the time of the Nintendo Power issue's release, www.waluigi.com was identical to the official website for Mario Tennis, www.mariotennis.com. One of the files hosted on the Mario Tennis website was the Adobe Flash file "toenails_coming.swf", which is an advertisement for the game instead titled "Waluigi's Foot Fault" depicting him showing his bare feet and unkempt toenails (he also occasionally blinks). Another file hosted on the website was "toenails.swf", which was supposedly the game itself. Catalogued alongside this file are two additional .swf files named "paint_the_lines" and "deface_painting", which could be evidence of other Flash games hosted on the Mario Tennis website.
However, the waluigi.com domain has since been turned into a redirect to the official Nintendo website. The toenails.swf file was not preserved, and as of 2023 has not resurfaced.
The October 2001 issue of Nintendo Power included a page with preview screenshots of Luigi's Mansion, including a screenshot of an earlier build of the Safari Room with the caption: "When your ghoul-busting mission takes you to the trophy room, proceed with caution. If you meet up with the ghost of a hunter, he'll want to add Luigi to his collection." This sparked rumors among players that the Safari Room originally featured a hunter boss who wanted Luigi's head as one of his trophies, and that it was removed from the game for being too frightening to the target audience of children.
However, no evidence of a hunter ghost is present in the game's data despite the presence of other unused ghosts, and no direct mentions of the boss exist in previews prior to the game's release in Japan in September 2001. The caption was likely an attempt at hyperbole rather than a serious indication that a hunter-themed ghost was in the game, as the article was written after Luigi's Mansion was released in Japan, meaning all characters would have been finalized long before the article was published.
Although the Headless Snowman is a minor character in his few appearances, he received some publicity in the form of a Nintendo Power joke published around the time of the main circulation of the "L is Real 2401" Super Mario 64 rumors.
In Volume 107 of Nintendo Power, in the April Fool's-themed "April News Briefs" segment, a "Luigi 64" article is present, where Nintendo states that Luigi fans had been campaigning to have the character in his very own game, and the company's response was to create a hoax upcoming game known as "Headless Snowman 64". This game was apparently intended to satisfy fans of the "second bananas" by featuring a cast of both well-known and obscure Nintendo characters, with the obscure characters including the Wave Race 64 announcer, "random audience members from Super Punch-Out!!", "the frogs in the meadow" from Diddy Kong Racing, and the Headless Snowman himself. Additionally, the game would supposedly contain some non-Nintendo characters such as "that bald guy from Blast Corps," and "the bikini woman in Cruis'n USA." Humorously, this never-made game was not going to feature Luigi, with a developer comment at the end of the article confusing him for "one of the civilian women in GoldenEye 007".
Following the release of the BBC Micro, independent branches of rival free-to-air channel ITV initiated plans to brand a microcomputer by Transam Computers with the ITV name, selling at the same price as the BBC Micro. This was ultimately vetoed by the Independent Television Companies Association due to ITV being prohibited from sponsoring products at the time, alongside potential conflicts of interest with ITV's own advertisers, which included other microcomputer manufacturers.
Raid: Shadow Legends was criticized for its aggressive marketing campaign through sponsorships with YouTube channels, usually ones that lack demographic overlap with a high-fantasy Western RPG to the point where adverts for the game are considered "inescapable". Developers Plarium Games have tried to claim that they don't actually sponsor content creators, and that content creators are simply shouting out the game unpaid because of how much they like it, which is easily disproved by watching any of the sponsor segments, where the legal clarity precautions for sponsorships are consistently followed.
Leading up to the game's release, it was advertised as being the first Dragon Ball Z game to feature Broly. This was not necessarily true as he had made his first appearance a decade before in Dragon Ball Z: Super Butouden 2 which was only released in Japan and Europe. He was even playable through the use of an obtainable cheat code. Although this would be his American debut, the advertising was still false.
In late 2018, a trailer for the film's sequel "Ralph Breaks the Internet" premiered on TV as part of Disney Channel's "Movie Surfers" series. The first half of the trailer used almost 40 seconds of cutscenes from the 2012 Wii game based on the first movie, and used unreleased higher quality renders of these cutscenes rather than the compressed footage released in the game. This trailer also features a noticeably bad, ad-libbed narration from an unknown actor portraying Ralph; this actor does not sound like the original film's actor John C. Reilly, nor the soundalike actor used in the Wii game and commercials Brian T. Delaney. Considering the overall confusing cheapness of the trailer, it's not known why the show's producers chose to use unreleased HD renders of these cutscenes instead of footage from the first film, which they had to have had access to and would have matched the visual quality of the film's sequel better.
"Puppy Pong", a rare alternate cabinet design for Pong intended for use in non-coin-op environments such as waiting rooms or entrance-fee arcades, was originally designed after Snoopy from the Peanuts comic strip. However, the concept was rejected by Charles Schulz, leading to the creation of a generic puppy in Snoopy's place. An unthemed version titled "Dr. Pong" was also released.
The Steam release of Pushover leaves all of the Quavers-licensed imagery from the Amiga version intact, to the point that mentions of Quavers in quoted 90s magazine reviews in the blurb are left uncensored, even though a Quavers-free version exists on the SNES. This seems to have been unauthorized, as the current owner of the Quavers brand, PepsiCo, is not mentioned anywhere in the rerelease's Steam legal info.
During their time as "Ultimate Play the Game", Rare were known for having minimal marketing to the point of not even releasing screenshots in magazines, and having print advertisements comprise of game logos and nothing else.
In-game, the hero of The Great Giana Sisters is called "Gianna" with two N's, while on promotional materials and all future Giana Sisters games, she is called "Giana" with one N. Gianna was the intended name for the character, but the name Giana was a typo on the box art which had to stick due to there being too tight a deadline for the box to be reworked.
In 2016, a post was uploaded to Tumblr responding to a post claiming that "there is nothing wrong with Yoshi" by jokingly accusing Yoshi of committing tax fraud, which would become a running gag within Nintendo fan circles, and eventually a meme in 2018 with the bait-and-switch YouTube account SiIvaGunner posting soundtracks from a fake Yoshi Commits Tax Fraud game.
Pyoro, the star of the game-within-a-game series that rivals Wario's microgames in the WarioWare series, is a parody of the Japanese malt chocolate ball brand Chocoball's mascot, Kyoro-Chan.
In the 1999 Sega Dreamcast commercial for Crazy Taxi, the DMV features the address number 666 (the Number of the beast) in reference to common complaints about long wait times and poor service at DMVs.
The September 2000 issue of Nintendo Power contains a "Nintendo Power Online" section on page 12, featuring an article titled "Mamma Mia! It's Waluigi!" The accompanying text introduces Waluigi to readers, reveals that he has his own website: www.waluigi.com, and claims to have an upcoming online game called "Waluigi's Toenail Clipping Party".
The October 2001 issue of Nintendo Power included a page with preview screenshots of Luigi's Mansion, including a screenshot of an earlier build of the Safari Room with the caption: "When your ghoul-busting mission takes you to the trophy room, proceed with caution. If you meet up with the ghost of a hunter, he'll want to add Luigi to his collection." This sparked rumors among players that the Safari Room originally featured a hunter boss who wanted Luigi's head as one of his trophies, and that it was removed from the game for being too frightening to the target audience of children.
Leading up to the game's release, it was advertised as being the first Dragon Ball Z game to feature Broly. This was not necessarily true as he had made his first appearance a decade before in Dragon Ball Z: Super Butouden 2 which was only released in Japan and Europe. He was even playable through the use of an obtainable cheat code. Although this would be his American debut, the advertising was still false.
"Puppy Pong", a rare alternate cabinet design for Pong intended for use in non-coin-op environments such as waiting rooms or entrance-fee arcades, was originally designed after Snoopy from the Peanuts comic strip. However, the concept was rejected by Charles Schulz, leading to the creation of a generic puppy in Snoopy's place. An unthemed version titled "Dr. Pong" was also released.
During their time as "Ultimate Play the Game", Rare were known for having minimal marketing to the point of not even releasing screenshots in magazines, and having print advertisements comprise of game logos and nothing else.
