One of the early ideas for this game was an story driven game where the player would interview various people in a village to see if they were worthy to be sacrificed to the monster train. Gavin Eisenbeisz of Two Star Games scrapped the idea because it was considered too weird and because he decided to put bigger emphasis on gameplay rather than storytelling.
In June 2010, several players noticed that a package file was attaching itself to other packages in The Sims 3. The file was a corrupted girl doll object titled "Girl Doll Dressed", which was incorrectly cloned from the Teddy bear. Game installations became "infected" by players downloading lots, houses or Sims with the hidden doll attached, similar to how computer viruses spread, and the doll was determined to cause longer loading times and game crashes. Players then unknowingly uploaded these infected packages to The Exchange, the game's online custom content workshop, causing it to spread to even more players.
Many Sims community sites began reporting the issue and one user posted a guide on how to manually remove the doll from the game to prevent the glitch from spreading, and a SimGuru on EA's official Sims forum eventually responded with a stickied post informing the community about the issue, and stated that EA would patch the game in the future to institute measures preventing corrupted objects from being uploaded to The Exchange.
By setting the "age" in Options to at least 21, then achieving a top-10 score in Survival, and entering "REALDEMO", the original opening cutscene will be altered to feature a scene of a naked Kasumi being cloned in a tube of liquid.
If you have a full inventory up until the point where Porky's mom squashes Buzz Buzz, he will notice that Ness can't hold the Sound Stone right now and won't give it to him. Instead, he will transport it to Tracy, meaning that you don't have to hold the Sound Stone in your inventory for the entire game and it will still record the melodies of the "Your Sanctuary" locations even in Tracy's possession. Normally, the Sound Stone remains in your inventory for the whole game and cannot be held by Escargo Express. If you do wish to have the Sound Stone back from Tracy, you must talk to her in-person.
One of the news articles and forum posts that appear in the game talk about the announcement of a new nonexistent handheld device from Bandai called the "WonderHawk", touted as the successor to the also nonexistent device the "WonderSwan Revolution". In reality, the only new models Bandai made after the original WonderSwan were the WonderSwan Color and the SwanCrystal. All three were originally meant to be competitors to the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance and all three were outsold by them, leading to the WonderSwan's discontinuation in 2003, the year after this game's release in Japan.
In the original game, the mural in Hyrule Castle Town was blurry and hard to make out. In Twilight Princess HD, the textures were updated with clearer, brand new designs. Notably, this updated mural features a Rito, a species which does not exist at the time the game takes place nor in the series' Child Timeline.
Separately, in the Temple of Time, a picture frame can be found with a backwards message written in Hylian along the lower border. Translating it reveals a hidden developer credit: "Jack Kirby Crosby Made This".
Crosby, a graphics designer working for Tantalus on the HD remaster of Twilight Princess, later confirmed that he was responsible for both that credit and the mural, the latter of which was the result of a higher-up at Nintendo asking for some reliefs in Hyrule Castle Town to be redone in the same style as a shop he had re-textured. The new mural design was inspired by Crosby's own idea of a story for a Zelda game and drew additional inspiration from a Zelda art book without any story direction from Nintendo, meaning the events depicted therein are non-canon.
In early pre-release screenshots and in the first playable demo of the game, Link could ride a canoe in Ordon Village's river, although this feature was removed from this area in the final game. These screenshots also suggest that the river was planned to be bigger and potentially a Fishing Hole before being sized down, although Hena's pond in the final game bears some resemblance to this area.
Interestingly, an unused yet fully implemented feature for canoes allows dogs to hop on and ride with Link on the bow, and then hop off when returning to land. However, dogs and canoes do not appear together in any location in the final game unless they are modded in. Seeing as Ordon Village has two dogs inside different houses and was originally meant to have canoes, it's possible this place would have done more with this feature before it was scrapped.
In Level 3-17, after blasting yourself down past a set of two crushers, you will come to a split path with two scientists on each side. Going down the left path and activating the switch at the end will open a pit which will lead to a small laboratory featuring a creature contained inside of a tube. Destroying the tube will trigger a bonus cutscene featuring The Maw, the titular star of Twisted Pixel Games' first game released a few months earlier in 2009, getting sucked out into space as 'Splosion Man nearly gets sucked out himself before waving goodbye, and cutting to a shot of The Maw hungrily swimming after a suffocating scientist. This cutscene rewards you with an Xbox Achievement called "Eventual Destruction of a Galaxy".
The song that plays during Map 09: Deimos Anomaly, "Breath of Horror", features several slowed down voices saying something unintelligible. Speeding up the song reveals that it is actually several slightly edited copies of the same sound clip of a few people singing what most closely resembles the phrase "Danny won! Hey!" and noises that fans have speculated sounds like a ping-pong match happening in the background. When asked about the origin of the clip in a 2010 Game Scares interview with the PlayStation version's composer Aubrey Hodges, he said:
"I did use a spoken phrase in that piece from a previous game but I can neither confirm or deny it’s exact content. Hehe"
At Lakehill Seattle Hospital, while Ellie is looking for Nora, she holds a guard named Whitney at knifepoint, who is seen during the game playing a PlayStation Vita. The game she is playing is Hotline Miami, as indicated by the second floor of Chapter 7: Neighbors on the Vita's screen and the song "Hydrogen" playing in the background.
In a 2020 Eurogamer interview with the game's co-director Neil Druckmann, he revealed that they were originally going to use a previous Naughty Dog game in that scene, until they thought:
"Okay, is there an opportunity here to just make some meta-statement about the kind of narrative we're after? And we're also just huge fans of Hotline Miami - like, I love that game. I love the engine of that game. So we reached out to those guys, and they were nice enough to let us put it in there."
If you get the Dragon Fang through trading or by hacking it into the game rather than getting it from the shrine within Dragon's Den, Clair will call you out for cheating and will not give you the Rising Badge until you get the Dragon Fang yourself:
Clair: "You did not get that at Dragon's Den. Trying to cheat like that… I'm disappointed in you."
It's possible to use the Shinespark to deal devastating amounts of damage (often being enough to kill a boss in one hit) to several bosses in the game, with known bosses it can be performed on including Spoiler:the Central Units, the Chozo Robots in Ferenia and Ghavoran, Escue, Golzuna, Experiment No. Z-57, and the Red Chozo Soldier in Artaria.
If you can sequence break by acquiring the Grapple Beam and Bombs early, a quicker way to defeat Kraid can be performed during the second phase of its fight. Spoiler:By bombing the bottom left corner of the area once the second phase starts, a Morph Ball Launcher can be accessed which will shoot Samus into Kraid's stomach, where you can continually bomb him to death so long as Samus has enough health, which will gradually be drained the longer she is in Kraid's stomach.
Additionally, acquiring the Flash Shift through sequence breaking gives Samus an additional way of attacking Kraid. Spoiler:When the Spider Magnet platform raises back up to Kraid's face, Samus can Flash Shift into Kraid's mouth and hold onto it for a short period of time to get some shots in.
A Famitsu Column with game director Masahiro Sakurai revealed that Sora was able to get into the game because of a chance meeting that he had with a Disney executive at an unspecified awards ceremony where they expressed how cool it would be for the Kingdom Hearts protagonist to be a part of the Super Smash Bros. roster. This soon lead to negotiations between Nintendo, Square Enix, and Disney that eventually got the extremely highly requested character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Before then, Sakurai admitted he and Nintendo thought getting the Disney-owned character was a total impossibility.
The German rating board deemed the game's gore and violence excessive and refused to rate the game at all. Since this had the potential to place the game on Germany's "List of Media Harmful to Young People", banning shops from either advertising or selling the game to customers of 18 years or older, Tecmo censored the PAL version to obtain a rating. A year later, Tecmo managed to obtain an 18+ rating for the uncensored release of Ninja Gaiden Black.
According to a 2003 the Sega Meisaku series interview with the game's director/designer Noriyoshi Ohba, he was asked what kind of work directing the game specifically entailed. He responded that since he was the only planner/designer working on the game, he "basically had to be involved in everything" from the planning, to designing the gameplay system, to the art (including which backgrounds to use, among other things), etc.
According to a 2003 the Sega Meisaku series interview with the game's director/designer Noriyoshi Ohba, he was asked why the game wasn't a stealth game despite the name "Shinobi" implying the protagonist would be more stealthy. Ohba responded that this was probably due to the team wanting to show off "how cool and badass ninjas are" as they can jump higher than normal people and have stronger physiques.
According to an interview with the game's graphic designer Keisuke Tadakuma published in the game's Official Fanbook in 1996, he stated that some enemy designs were inspired by the experimental weapons created by the Germans during World War II.
When Kirby absorbs Sora and then uses his Magic, it is immediately clear that Kirby does not get a Keyblade of his own. Instead, Kirby uses an ethereal glowing weapon that resembles a keyblade but is entirely made out of light and sparkles that changes color depending on the spell. While this can be interpreted as being a restriction by Disney over the Keyblade's imagery, Masahiro Sakurai on Twitter chalked it up to being done for lore reasons as he said "...only Keyblade Wielders can use Keyblades..." implying that Kirby isn't "chosen" as barer of one and thus has to use the three spells differently.
In June 2010, several players noticed that a package file was attaching itself to other packages in The Sims 3. The file was a corrupted girl doll object titled "Girl Doll Dressed", which was incorrectly cloned from the Teddy bear. Game installations became "infected" by players downloading lots, houses or Sims with the hidden doll attached, similar to how computer viruses spread, and the doll was determined to cause longer loading times and game crashes. Players then unknowingly uploaded these infected packages to The Exchange, the game's online custom content workshop, causing it to spread to even more players.
One of the news articles and forum posts that appear in the game talk about the announcement of a new nonexistent handheld device from Bandai called the "WonderHawk", touted as the successor to the also nonexistent device the "WonderSwan Revolution". In reality, the only new models Bandai made after the original WonderSwan were the WonderSwan Color and the SwanCrystal. All three were originally meant to be competitors to the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance and all three were outsold by them, leading to the WonderSwan's discontinuation in 2003, the year after this game's release in Japan.
In the original game, the mural in Hyrule Castle Town was blurry and hard to make out. In Twilight Princess HD, the textures were updated with clearer, brand new designs. Notably, this updated mural features a Rito, a species which does not exist at the time the game takes place nor in the series' Child Timeline.
In early pre-release screenshots and in the first playable demo of the game, Link could ride a canoe in Ordon Village's river, although this feature was removed from this area in the final game. These screenshots also suggest that the river was planned to be bigger and potentially a Fishing Hole before being sized down, although Hena's pond in the final game bears some resemblance to this area.
At Lakehill Seattle Hospital, while Ellie is looking for Nora, she holds a guard named Whitney at knifepoint, who is seen during the game playing a PlayStation Vita. The game she is playing is Hotline Miami, as indicated by the second floor of Chapter 7: Neighbors on the Vita's screen and the song "Hydrogen" playing in the background.
According to an interview with the game's graphic designer Keisuke Tadakuma published in the game's Official Fanbook in 1996, he stated that some enemy designs were inspired by the experimental weapons created by the Germans during World War II.
When Kirby absorbs Sora and then uses his Magic, it is immediately clear that Kirby does not get a Keyblade of his own. Instead, Kirby uses an ethereal glowing weapon that resembles a keyblade but is entirely made out of light and sparkles that changes color depending on the spell. While this can be interpreted as being a restriction by Disney over the Keyblade's imagery, Masahiro Sakurai on Twitter chalked it up to being done for lore reasons as he said "...only Keyblade Wielders can use Keyblades..." implying that Kirby isn't "chosen" as barer of one and thus has to use the three spells differently.