In the earliest builds of Yume Nikki, in-game text was not given windows outside of the game's menus; this feature was not added until Version 0.05. Curiously, while overworld text is generally sparse, Version 0.10 features data for a three-line window, far more than what is normally needed. This appears to line up with a text prompt in Version 0.04 – but not Version 0.06 onward – that appears when Madotsuki attempts to return the swivel chair to her desk in the dream world version of her apartment.
Because Version 0.05 is not currently available to the public, it is unknown if this window was indeed used for the prompt in that build or if the text was removed before the idea could be implemented.
Version 0.09 updated the Witch effect so that a unique sound plays when moving around while riding the broom, rather than simply reusing the regular footstep sounds. This is accomplished by giving every map two copies of the same tileset: one for regular mobility and one for the broom, with the game swapping between the two as needed. While this is retained in Version 0.10, the code is simplified in the later build so that a copy of the full string is not needed on every map.
However, three areas of the game were not properly accounted for during the conversion process: the second room in Neon Tile Path, the room full of beds in Number World, and the Pink Sea all play the regular footstep sound regardless of whether or not Madotsuki has the Witch effect equipped and active. Additionally, these areas still contain leftover event data from Version 0.09's method of swapping between the two tilesets. Because the indexes for the game's tiles were altered concurrently with the streamlining of the broom code, triggering these leftover events with cheats instead swaps out the maps' graphics with ones from other areas:
• The pyramids in the second room of Neon Tile Path are replaced with Henkei Shita heads from Footprint Path A, and sitting down changes the entire tileset to that of Snow World, with the background additionally changing from solid black to solid white. It reverts back to the mostly complete Neon Tile Path tileset when Madotsuki sits back up. • The tileset for the room full of beds in Number World is replaced with that of Forest World, temporarily reverting back to the proper visuals whenever Madotsuki sits down. The background, however, is unaffected. • The Pink Sea is completely blacked out, as the game attempts to call blank divider tiles when in this state.
Whenever Madotsuki turns on her TV in the dream world version of her room from Version 0.06 onward, there is a 1/8 chance that the view will cut to a full-screen event in which two rows of Paracas-esque figures scroll across the screen. "KALIMBA", the theme song for this event, was originally uploaded on Kikiyama's players.music-eclub.com profile on January 13, 2004, almost five months before Yume Nikki first released. This version of the song is substantially longer than the one that would ultimately be included in the event, clocking in at eight minutes instead of several seconds. Additionally, the cover art for the full-length version features the same rows of figures depicted in the event, albeit with a slightly duller color scheme.
Due to a lack of public statements from Kikiyama, it is unknown if the song was composed with Yume Nikki in mind from the outset or if the KALIMBA event was included as an Easter egg referencing their non-game work.
The unpatched release of Version 0.10 contains unused data for an event on Mars called "階段←↓". Re-enabling this event opens an alternate, invisible entrance to the Martian underground, to the left of the hole that leads to it in the final game; however, the map's collision data prevents Madotsuki from actually using it without the aid of further cheats.
Furthermore, the game contains unused graphics for a stairway that matches the visuals of the Martian surface, and the Martian underground features several flights of stairs at the beginning. This indicates that the underground was originally meant to be accessed via the unused stairway rather than needing Madotsuki to activate the Midget effect, with the summit's layout being changed concurrently with the altered entrance. The Yumesyuusei Patch and all releases based on it (including the official English release) remove the data for 階段←↓, though the unused stair tiles are unaffected.
Additionally, the game's code contains tiles for doors on the walls of the Martian underground, indicating that the sub-area was originally planned to feature multiple rooms rather than just one. This, combined with the unused alternate entrance, implies that Kikiyama had to leave Mars incomplete for unknown reasons, polishing up what was already completed late into Version 0.10's development.
Within all available builds of the game are sprites for three possible effects that were never implemented. One set of sprites depicts Madotsuki blindfolded, another depicts a grayscale version of her similar to the "ghost" found in Mini Hell, and a third depicts 8-bit versions of the "crick in the neck," which in the final game is instead an event where Madotsuki randomly wakes up with her head stuck facing leftward. Of note is that Versions 0.07 to 0.09 additionally feature sprites for blindfolded and grayscale Madotsuki pinching herself awake; Version 0.10 overwrites them with the "active" sprites for the Spirit Headband effect.
Additionally, the game's data contains an unused mugshot depicting what appears to be an early iteration of the Spirit Headband effect, in which Madotsuki turns into a hitodama (a disembodied soul which appears as a floating ball of fire, comparable to a will-o'-the-wisp in many Western cultures) rather than becoming invisible. A full set of sprites for this version is also present in Version 0.04's data, showing that rather than turning invisible, pressing the 1 key would've simply changed the fire's color.
In all earlier builds of the game, Neon World featured a radically different layout, matching the open-world structure of the other "main" locations accessible from the Nexus. The sole relic of this in Version 0.10's segmented design is the room that Madotsuki starts in, which is much bigger and features a more spread-out tile pattern compared to the other rooms in Neon World.
One noteworthy casualty from the layout change is the removal of various head-like figures scattered across Neon World in Version 0.09. These figures are not seen anywhere in Version 0.10, making them the only documented "characters" that were outright removed (rather than relocated) in a later update.
Street Combat was originally released in Japan as Ranma ½: Chounai Gekitou Hen, a tie-in with the anime adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi's 1987 manga Ranma ½. The American release stripped out all references to the source material due to its obscurity in the United States at the time, though the in-game sprites for Street Combat's cast are visibly traced over their Ranma ½ counterparts. Additionally, Happosai and Cologne are merged into a single character, Happy, in Street Combat.
In the PlayStation port, there are several death animation screens should the player get a "Game Over." However, these screens are left out in the Nintendo 64 version of the game.
Within the data for Chapter 2 is a placeholder graphic for Queen's arcade cabinet that depicts it with green paneling and the word "XBOX" crudely written on the marquee. Despite the fact that it was never intended to be featured in the normal course of play, the sprite was altered in the version 1.06 update to remove the "XBOX" text, presumably to avoid potential trademark issues.
In a tweet made a few months after Chapter 2's release, development staff member Samanthuel Gillson shared an early sprite sheet of Hacker featuring a considerably different design compared to the final game, depicting his body as the shaft of a pointer icon rather than making the entire symbol his head. While these were ultimately done away with after Hacker's design was revised, one sprite depicting him pointing forward is still present in the game's code.
Of note is that Hacker's head turning into a click icon is present in the sprite sheet in Gillson's tweet, indicating that this component of Spamton's sidequest (in which the click icon indicates an area that Kris must check in order to access the mansion basement) was already conceived by this point. Consequently, it is unknown what the leftover pointing sprite was made for.
After Kris exits the bathroom during Chapter 2's epilogue, the interior of the Dreemurr household noticeably changes: the phone and the painting by the trash can are both moved further up the wall, and the refrigerator grows noticeably taller.
These changes are also present in a mockup of the interior found in the game's files. However, the mockup is set during the day instead of at night, and the painting beside Toriel's chair is moved upward. This implies that the nighttime version of the interior was based on the mockup (with only minor touch-ups) without cross-referencing the layout seen earlier in the game.
In Chapter 2, when Queen challenges Kris to an arcade match, the arcade cabinet presented is so large that Kris is unable to reach the controls. While the released game conveys this solely through narration, its internal data contains an unused animation depicting Kris reaching up towards the cabinet's joysticks. It is unknown why this was removed, given that it fulfills the same function as the textual description.
Behind-the-scenes pictures from the game's development show that former wrestler Jeff Jarrett did green screen capture work for appearing in the game as a playable character. However, due to his departure from the WWF (now known as the WWE) in 1995 regarding a contractual dispute before the game's release, he was subsequently removed from the roster.
In the original release of the game, the monster that the player could summon to attack the city was a thinly veiled parody of Godzilla, right down to using the character's iconic roar from the film series; the sound effect is even named "God" in the game's files, furthering the reference. The Godzilla parody is also depicted on the game's box art, gleefully waving at the viewer.
According to programmer Don Hopkins, who notably ported SimCity to numerous versions of Unix, Maxis ended up getting sued by Toho, the owners of the Godzilla franchise; additional details were recounted to him by Maxis CEO Jeff Braun:
"We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement."
As a result of this suit, the monster was redesigned in the v1.2 release to resemble a giant orange salamander. The creature's roar is also changed and the game's box art is redesigned to replace the Godzilla parody with a tornado. In the v1.3 release, the salamander is given a slightly larger and more detailed sprite to fit the revised art style, but its roar (now internally renamed "Monster") is corrupted.
The South Korean version of the game (released two years after the original Japanese edition) contains eleven unused maps not found in any other release, featuring fully 3D environments which do not line up with any locations present in the finished product. All assets related to these maps are dated after the game's Japanese release, with intervals ranging from five days to just over three months. Additionally, the maps' texture names are written in Romanized Japanese rather than Korean, indicating that they were not created by Nintendo of Korea.
Two of these maps, kri_04 and kri_05, additionally feature various cat NPCs, all drawn in substantially different art styles compared to not only each other, but also the final game. Each one is named after a developer from the Super Paper Mario staff: yamada_neko02 (Koichiro Yamada), koba_neko (Sayuri Kobayashi), tuka_neko (Naoko Tsukamoto), and kawa_neko (Chie Kawabe).
Of these four, kawa_neko is the most unique, and was apparently designed as a player character. Firstly, the cat's name is only given to its mesh, with its sprite instead being named bc_all.1. Additionally, kawa_neko features an animated tail and a mesh that is centered on the ground rather than the middle of the room. Furthermore, new_neko_18, a redesigned version of kawa_neko with white fur instead of black, can be found in kri_08, kri_09, and kri_10; new_neko_18's mesh is explicitly labeled "PLAYER" in the data for these maps.
Taken together, all of these elements imply that these early rooms were created as a proof-of-concept for an original project by Intelligent Systems that ended up cancelled for unknown reasons.
The now defunct Jurassic Park Institute website featured what appeared to be an unused 3D model of a Chasmosaurus for Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. This would line up with the developer's comments about wanting to include more dinosaur species outside of the 25 present in the final game, although curiously, this species is not mentioned within the game's "Constant.ini" file, which mentions dozens of other unused dinosaur species.
The development team for this game experimented with baby dinosaurs midway through the project, attempting to use schemes such as scaling the adult dinosaurs down to make them infants. The team realized that this didn't look right and that making proper infant dinosaurs would require new models and AI, which would be similar to the work required for adding more dinosaur species. As a result, baby dinosaurs were dropped, along with any ideas for a "Dino Petting Zoo".
Only the PlayStation 2 version of the game includes proper shadows for the dinosaurs and guests. In earlier versions, shadows were originally apart of all entities (which also includes buildings and foliage) in at least the PC version of the game.
A port of Bubsy 2 to the Sega Game Gear was planned and seemingly completed, but never released. In the surfaced screenshots of the game's prototype, it appears to be a fully colorized version of the Game Boy version (playing the Game Boy version of Bubsy 2 on a Super Game Boy will give the graphics a slight red tint).
The developers of Super Mario Strikers were concerned that one of Waluigi's goal celebration animations, referred to by fans as the "crotch chop", would not be approved. When developers from Nintendo saw the animation, they did not say anything about it at all, so the developers did not bring it up to Nintendo, fearing that drawing attention to it would result in their approval board changing its mind. The game's director, Mike Inglehart, described the reasoning behind Waluigi's crotch chopping:
"The inspiration for that came from quite frankly like the shape – even though it’s a ‘V’, we thought it was a representation of part of the ‘W’, so that’s sort of his way of connecting into his first initial. Waluigi, we kind of depicted him as being – yeah, he’s a bit, I don’t know, a bit edgier than Wario. Wario’s kind of on-the-nose in terms of a bad guy, and Waluigi, we just wanted to explore him a bit more. He’s actually kind of mean to his sidekicks too. They’re both mean to their sidekicks but Wario’s about self-loathing and Waluigi is about blame, and everybody else has done something wrong."
The animation was also used in the game's sequel Mario Strikers Charged.
In the earliest builds of Yume Nikki, in-game text was not given windows outside of the game's menus; this feature was not added until Version 0.05. Curiously, while overworld text is generally sparse, Version 0.10 features data for a three-line window, far more than what is normally needed. This appears to line up with a text prompt in Version 0.04 – but not Version 0.06 onward – that appears when Madotsuki attempts to return the swivel chair to her desk in the dream world version of her apartment.
Version 0.09 updated the Witch effect so that a unique sound plays when moving around while riding the broom, rather than simply reusing the regular footstep sounds. This is accomplished by giving every map two copies of the same tileset: one for regular mobility and one for the broom, with the game swapping between the two as needed. While this is retained in Version 0.10, the code is simplified in the later build so that a copy of the full string is not needed on every map.
Whenever Madotsuki turns on her TV in the dream world version of her room from Version 0.06 onward, there is a 1/8 chance that the view will cut to a full-screen event in which two rows of Paracas-esque figures scroll across the screen. "KALIMBA", the theme song for this event, was originally uploaded on Kikiyama's players.music-eclub.com profile on January 13, 2004, almost five months before Yume Nikki first released. This version of the song is substantially longer than the one that would ultimately be included in the event, clocking in at eight minutes instead of several seconds. Additionally, the cover art for the full-length version features the same rows of figures depicted in the event, albeit with a slightly duller color scheme.
The unpatched release of Version 0.10 contains unused data for an event on Mars called "階段←↓". Re-enabling this event opens an alternate, invisible entrance to the Martian underground, to the left of the hole that leads to it in the final game; however, the map's collision data prevents Madotsuki from actually using it without the aid of further cheats.
In all earlier builds of the game, Neon World featured a radically different layout, matching the open-world structure of the other "main" locations accessible from the Nexus. The sole relic of this in Version 0.10's segmented design is the room that Madotsuki starts in, which is much bigger and features a more spread-out tile pattern compared to the other rooms in Neon World.
Street Combat was originally released in Japan as Ranma ½: Chounai Gekitou Hen, a tie-in with the anime adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi's 1987 manga Ranma ½. The American release stripped out all references to the source material due to its obscurity in the United States at the time, though the in-game sprites for Street Combat's cast are visibly traced over their Ranma ½ counterparts. Additionally, Happosai and Cologne are merged into a single character, Happy, in Street Combat.
Within the data for Chapter 2 is a placeholder graphic for Queen's arcade cabinet that depicts it with green paneling and the word "XBOX" crudely written on the marquee. Despite the fact that it was never intended to be featured in the normal course of play, the sprite was altered in the version 1.06 update to remove the "XBOX" text, presumably to avoid potential trademark issues.
In a tweet made a few months after Chapter 2's release, development staff member Samanthuel Gillson shared an early sprite sheet of Hacker featuring a considerably different design compared to the final game, depicting his body as the shaft of a pointer icon rather than making the entire symbol his head. While these were ultimately done away with after Hacker's design was revised, one sprite depicting him pointing forward is still present in the game's code.
After Kris exits the bathroom during Chapter 2's epilogue, the interior of the Dreemurr household noticeably changes: the phone and the painting by the trash can are both moved further up the wall, and the refrigerator grows noticeably taller.
In Chapter 2, when Queen challenges Kris to an arcade match, the arcade cabinet presented is so large that Kris is unable to reach the controls. While the released game conveys this solely through narration, its internal data contains an unused animation depicting Kris reaching up towards the cabinet's joysticks. It is unknown why this was removed, given that it fulfills the same function as the textual description.
In the original release of the game, the monster that the player could summon to attack the city was a thinly veiled parody of Godzilla, right down to using the character's iconic roar from the film series; the sound effect is even named "God" in the game's files, furthering the reference. The Godzilla parody is also depicted on the game's box art, gleefully waving at the viewer.
The South Korean version of the game (released two years after the original Japanese edition) contains eleven unused maps not found in any other release, featuring fully 3D environments which do not line up with any locations present in the finished product. All assets related to these maps are dated after the game's Japanese release, with intervals ranging from five days to just over three months. Additionally, the maps' texture names are written in Romanized Japanese rather than Korean, indicating that they were not created by Nintendo of Korea.
The now defunct Jurassic Park Institute website featured what appeared to be an unused 3D model of a Chasmosaurus for Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. This would line up with the developer's comments about wanting to include more dinosaur species outside of the 25 present in the final game, although curiously, this species is not mentioned within the game's "Constant.ini" file, which mentions dozens of other unused dinosaur species.
Only the PlayStation 2 version of the game includes proper shadows for the dinosaurs and guests. In earlier versions, shadows were originally apart of all entities (which also includes buildings and foliage) in at least the PC version of the game.
A port of Bubsy 2 to the Sega Game Gear was planned and seemingly completed, but never released. In the surfaced screenshots of the game's prototype, it appears to be a fully colorized version of the Game Boy version (playing the Game Boy version of Bubsy 2 on a Super Game Boy will give the graphics a slight red tint).
The developers of Super Mario Strikers were concerned that one of Waluigi's goal celebration animations, referred to by fans as the "crotch chop", would not be approved. When developers from Nintendo saw the animation, they did not say anything about it at all, so the developers did not bring it up to Nintendo, fearing that drawing attention to it would result in their approval board changing its mind. The game's director, Mike Inglehart, described the reasoning behind Waluigi's crotch chopping: