Throughout October 2023, children's entertainment restaurant Chuck E. Cheese held a promotion titled "Five Nights of Fun", coinciding with the release of a movie based on Five Nights at Freddy's, a horror game franchise inspired by Chuck E. Cheese and littered with references to the company's history. The marketing for FNOF directly pastiches the poster for the FNAF movie and refers to the purple-furred character Mr. Munch as a "purple guy", referencing the overarching villain of the game series.
Despite the obvious parody, an alleged internal document was posted online by a former employee, who had left Chuck E. Cheese days prior to the promotion coming under scrutiny, informing employees that they should feign ignorance of FNAF during the promotion if asked by children or their parents. One example of terminology provided is:
SAY THIS Oh, is there a movie coming out...? That's news to me! We're celebrating Five Nights of Fun in a row this October!
NOT THIS Yeah, they wanted to combat that idea of that people think that we are like that place they have in the movie... so they did this
Contrary to popular belief, the name "Pikachu" is not derived from the pika (a rodent-like lagomorph found in Japan that gains a yellow tinge in the winter), but rather a Japanese onomatopoeia for an electric spark. It should be noted that pikas are known as "nakiusagi" in Japan.
The 8-bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has two endings:
• A good ending, played if the player collects all the emeralds, where Sonic and Tails run off together at night, and see a constellation in the shape of their heads in the sky. • A bad ending, where Sonic runs alone in the night, and sees a constellation in the shape of Tails' head in the sky
Although it has never been confirmed, many fans have speculated that the bad ending is supposed to involve Tails dying at the hands of Dr. Eggman, with some even going as far as to suggest that a large star on the right of Tails' forehead is supposed to represent a gun wound. The @sonic_hedgehog Twitter account has jokingly acknowledged this theory without confirming one way or another if it is true - once in a cross-promotion for The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog and the 8-bit game's addition to Sonic Origins Plus, where it compares both games' inclusion of "a beloved character's possible demise", and in a piece of promotional artwork taking place at a carnival, where Tails gets nausea on an intense ride and his constellation can be seen above him, with the "gun wound" star being placed on his muzzle.
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Prior to the official announcement of Yoshi's Crafted World's title, a fake leak was posted on 4chan listing off future Nintendo games, containing the title of Yoshi's Crafted World. This leak was humorous in nature, contrasting legitimate sounding titles such as Animal Crossing: Town Founder and Paper Mario: Clay Catastrophe with obvious jokes such as Metroid: Equestrian Races and Rhythm Heaven and Hell - this lead to a short-lived theory that the leak was indeed real and slid in the joke names for humorous effect. Over time, reveals of installments in other franchises featured in the leak that didn't line up would show that Crafted World was simply a lucky guess. However, some other articles from the leak, such as a multi-part DLC pass for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl remakes, a Tokyo 2020 Mario & Sonic Olympics game (albeit without Pac-Man), a Switch port of Overwatch, and the at-the-time-believed-to-be-cancelled Pikmin 4 would come into fruition later by coincidence.
In Mrs. Puff's sprite sheet for SpongeBob Saves the Day!, an image can be found of an unnerving semi-realistic CGI character, internally called "Yummer". The character's unsettling design, combined with an image present in the code of Sandy's torn-up scuba suit, caused a lot of speculation about the image's potentially macabre origin. The original creator of the graphic eventually came forward and revealed that the character was simply a developer in-joke from the late 2000s used as a placeholder for a scrapped feature where an undecided character would peek from the back of one of the Krusty Krab's poles. The character's name is also not "Yummer", but rather simply "Yum", named as such because "that's the opposite of what you'd use to describe him". The torn Sandy suit was part of a puzzle where SpongeBob would need to wear one of the treedome's helmets.
subdirectory_arrow_rightXbox (Platform), Microsoft (Company), Blinx (Collection)
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Despite being positioned as the Xbox's mascot by the gaming press, Blinx the Time Sweeper was not created to fill that role or rival the likes of Mario and Sonic. Despite an internal push from the Blinx team for the character to become the platform's mascot in Japan (of which executive producer Ed Fries claims to be "not sure how seriously [the Blinx team] took it"), as well as the desire of Bill Gates for Microsoft's gaming department to have a mascot, the character was not officially used as an Xbox mascot. The game did still get a major marketing push in Japan thanks to convenient timing during a Christmas dry spell of game releases and being a Japanese game.
When Tsuyoshi Tozak, director of Bubble Bobble 4 Friends, was asked about if Bub and Bob would appear in the Super Smash Bros. franchise, they simply responded "let's skip that question". The interviewer theorized that they may have been under a non-disclosure agreement, citing a similar response when asking Studio MDHR, the developers of Cuphead, about if they wanted to make an animated series based on their game, which did eventually happen. However, come the end of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's DLC cycle, a Bubble Bobble multimedia adaptation did not happen in any form, suggesting that Tozak was likely indifferent on the possibility rather than under NDA.
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.
Dutch electronics company Philips planned to release a Donkey Kong game for the CD-i as part of the deal with Nintendo that led to the release of Hotel Mario, Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure. The Donkey Kong game's existence was alluded to in two "Gaming Gossip" articles by Electronic Gaming Monthly as well as a trade ad which depicted Donkey Kong exiting a limousine alongside Mario, Link, and Zelda. However, more concrete evidence for the game's existence didn't emerge until former Riedel Software Productions employee Adrian Jackson-Jones included a post on his LinkedIn page stating that he programmed the engine for it (the LinkedIn post incorrectly cites Australian visual effects studio Rising Sun Pictures due to them sharing initials). This information was then brought to public attention in 2022 by the LostMediaWiki, a website which documents searches for lost or otherwise publicly unavailable works.
An investigation by Time Extension led to writer John Szczepaniak getting in contact with both Jackson-Jones and Riedel Software Productions owner Michael J. Riedel. Both parties have little memory of the Donkey Kong game due to the amount of time that passed and the company's habit of erasing their data for cancelled projects. Additionally, Jackson-Jones revealed that due to a memory disorder, he recalls little about the game other than his direct experiences programming it. Despite this, Jackson-Jones was able to confirm his involvement with the Donkey Kong game, stating that one of the biggest difficulties during development was the CD-i's memory limitations, which were circumvented by only loading in assets that would be visible on-screen, using the player's movement to determine what to put into memory.
Additional investigations by DidYouKnowGaming further revealed that the Donkey Kong CD-i game was intended to be a side-scrolling title similar to the later Donkey Kong Country series. According to an anonymous Riedel Software Productions employee who served as a lead animator for the game, development quickly stalled before June 1993, never making it past initial storyboards due to the CD-i's technical limitations and Philips' inexperience with the video game industry (contrary to Electronic Gaming Monthly's claims that it would be a sequel to the original arcade game and that it would be ready by 1994).
On the character designer for Nitros Oxide in Crash Team Racing, Bob Rafei's website, he has a portfolio containing various works sorted by game. In the Crash Team Racing folder of the site, there is an image of a blue hippo in an aviator suit named "trippo.jpg". According to Rafei in 2017, this character was designed as a mascot for an airline search engine during the dot-com boom, but was placed in the CTR folder of the site by mistake. However, in the time between the image's discovery and the clarification, the image was spread online as if it was a lost Crash Bandicoot character, gaining the accepted name of "Fasty" through unknown means.
In Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled, the character Hasty the Moose, one of two completely original characters alongside King Chicken, was inspired by the myth of "Fasty", with a similar body build; face; outfit; and name in both meaning and spelling.
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.
It is often rumored that Nintendo filed a lawsuit or sent a C&D to Rainbow Arts over The Great Giana Sisters' resemblance to Super Mario Bros. - however, according to the game's music composer Chris Hülsbeck, this is not true, Nintendo only sent Rainbow Arts an "angry letter" over the UK release's cover art containing the phrase "the brothers are history!", leading to the game being pulled.
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A year before Everybody 1-2-Switch's announcement, an article was released on Fanbyte detailing the turbulent process of its development, where it tested so poorly with test groups that there were fears that it'd harm Nintendo's reputation, and localisation staff would nickname the game "Horseshit" after its' host, Horace the Horse.
The Coolmath Games website has often been noted for a severe lack in mathematics-related content. The title of the website was often theorized to have been chosen in order to bypass school browser filters, but that is not the case. It was instead named that to act as a spin-off of the Coolmath website, which was math-themed.
Despite the product line being marketed as if Mavis Beacon is a real person who endorsed the software, Mavis Beacon is a fictional character. The first version of Mavis was portrayed by Renée L'Esperance.
There is a rumor that claims that Rob Paulsen, the voice actor who provided the voice for Bubsy in Bubsy 2, Bubsy in: Fractured Furry Tales, and the 1993 Bubsy cartoon pilot hated the character and regretted taking the gig. However, Paulsen has stated that he does not regret his role in the Bubsy franchise and would do the voice again for future Bubsy projects if paid to.
A common internet rumor, typically pushed by Nintendo fans upset over rival console manufacturer Microsoft's purchase of former Nintendo collaborator Rare, is that Kinect Sports and Kinect Sports: Season Two were mandated by Microsoft, and were not something that employees of Rare wanted to work on. According to Yooka-Laylee creative lead Gavin Price, this was not true, claiming:
"Phil Spencer taking the mantle of Xbox is one of the best things that could have happened for Rare. Because he’s always said to people at Rare [as general manager of Microsoft Studios], ‘Do what you want to do and we’ll back you,’ and he’s always stayed true to his word in that regard. It was people in Rare’s management at the time who said: ‘Well, Kinect is a great opportunity for the studio – go all in on it.’ So when executives at Microsoft see that the management team are passionate about doing that, they back them. Microsoft to their credit did that, and perhaps the story online isn’t quite reflective of the truth."
When the Street Fighter skin set was released for Fortnite, a back bling of an arcade machine was released that would show attract mode footage from Street Fighter II. Coinciding with this, a texture was found in the data, under the name "FrenchFry" showing animation from Family Guy in a similar format. While many believed this confirmed that Peter Griffin was planned to be featured in the game alongside a back bling that would show Family Guy clips, it was later stated by a reputable Fortnite leaker named FNBRUnreleased that the Family Guy content could've only been added for one of two reasons: to annoy dataminers, or to internally test the Street Fighter graphics in a humorous way.
Griffin would eventually be added to Fortnite in Chapter 5. To coincide with his addition, a video titled "Peter Griffin Seeks Fitness Advice From Meowscles" was released: animated in the same style as "Family Guy", it features Griffin getting a fitness exam from Fortnite character Meowscles, ending with him drinking an expired bottle of Slurp Juice in order to become "swole", explaining his design in the game. The expiration date on the Slurp Juice is a reference to the date when the leak originally happened, and the trailer also used the leaked back bling. Despite appearing to be animated by Family Guy's animation department, the video noticeably does not feature any spoken dialogue, or voice acting by Family Guy creator and Griffin's voice actor Seth MacFarlane.
There has been a trend of retrospective reviews and historical content relating to the North American video game crash of 1983 mentioning Chase the Chuck Wagon as a contributing game to the crash, despite the fact that it only had a limited mail-order release and was not the first product-placement-based video game. This is theorized by the blog/website "Bad Game Hall of Fame" to be the result of a quote from the G4 docuseries Icons that was taken out of context, referring to a proliferation of companies trying to branch into video games as opposed to any specific games or the use of product placement, with the mistaken belief that Chase the Chuck Wagon was published or developed by Purina itself like with Quaker Oats' "U.S. Games" brand. The quote in question reads:
"Toy companies like Parker Brothers and Hasbro form video game divisions. But when unrelated companies like Chuck Wagon dog food and Quaker Oats jump on-board, the market begins to turn."
A popular rumor existed within Russian school playgrounds relating to the Elektronika IM-02, a Soviet-era Russian bootleg version of the Game & Watch game Mickey Mouse/Egg featuring characters from the Russian cartoon Nu, Pogodi!. The rumor claimed that if one achieved 1,000 points in the game, the device would play a full episode of the cartoon.
Throughout October 2023, children's entertainment restaurant Chuck E. Cheese held a promotion titled "Five Nights of Fun", coinciding with the release of a movie based on Five Nights at Freddy's, a horror game franchise inspired by Chuck E. Cheese and littered with references to the company's history. The marketing for FNOF directly pastiches the poster for the FNAF movie and refers to the purple-furred character Mr. Munch as a "purple guy", referencing the overarching villain of the game series.
In Mrs. Puff's sprite sheet for SpongeBob Saves the Day!, an image can be found of an unnerving semi-realistic CGI character, internally called "Yummer". The character's unsettling design, combined with an image present in the code of Sandy's torn-up scuba suit, caused a lot of speculation about the image's potentially macabre origin. The original creator of the graphic eventually came forward and revealed that the character was simply a developer in-joke from the late 2000s used as a placeholder for a scrapped feature where an undecided character would peek from the back of one of the Krusty Krab's poles. The character's name is also not "Yummer", but rather simply "Yum", named as such because "that's the opposite of what you'd use to describe him". The torn Sandy suit was part of a puzzle where SpongeBob would need to wear one of the treedome's helmets.
Dutch electronics company Philips planned to release a Donkey Kong game for the CD-i as part of the deal with Nintendo that led to the release of Hotel Mario, Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure. The Donkey Kong game's existence was alluded to in two "Gaming Gossip" articles by Electronic Gaming Monthly as well as a trade ad which depicted Donkey Kong exiting a limousine alongside Mario, Link, and Zelda. However, more concrete evidence for the game's existence didn't emerge until former Riedel Software Productions employee Adrian Jackson-Jones included a post on his LinkedIn page stating that he programmed the engine for it (the LinkedIn post incorrectly cites Australian visual effects studio Rising Sun Pictures due to them sharing initials). This information was then brought to public attention in 2022 by the LostMediaWiki, a website which documents searches for lost or otherwise publicly unavailable works.
On the character designer for Nitros Oxide in Crash Team Racing, Bob Rafei's website, he has a portfolio containing various works sorted by game. In the Crash Team Racing folder of the site, there is an image of a blue hippo in an aviator suit named "trippo.jpg". According to Rafei in 2017, this character was designed as a mascot for an airline search engine during the dot-com boom, but was placed in the CTR folder of the site by mistake. However, in the time between the image's discovery and the clarification, the image was spread online as if it was a lost Crash Bandicoot character, gaining the accepted name of "Fasty" through unknown means.
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.
It is often rumored that Nintendo filed a lawsuit or sent a C&D to Rainbow Arts over The Great Giana Sisters' resemblance to Super Mario Bros. - however, according to the game's music composer Chris Hülsbeck, this is not true, Nintendo only sent Rainbow Arts an "angry letter" over the UK release's cover art containing the phrase "the brothers are history!", leading to the game being pulled.
When the Street Fighter skin set was released for Fortnite, a back bling of an arcade machine was released that would show attract mode footage from Street Fighter II. Coinciding with this, a texture was found in the data, under the name "FrenchFry" showing animation from Family Guy in a similar format. While many believed this confirmed that Peter Griffin was planned to be featured in the game alongside a back bling that would show Family Guy clips, it was later stated by a reputable Fortnite leaker named FNBRUnreleased that the Family Guy content could've only been added for one of two reasons: to annoy dataminers, or to internally test the Street Fighter graphics in a humorous way.
