Chin's character is heavily inspired by Yuen Siu-tien's portrayal of the Qing Dynasty drunken boxer Beggar So (Sam Seed) from the Drunken Master film series.
There are many similarities between Psycho Soldier Team's design and characters from the Drunken Master film series. Kensou's character is possibly influenced by Jackie Chan's portrayal of Wong Fei-hung from the first Drunken Master film. Kensou's love of Steamed Buns is may also be a reference to a scene from the film where Chan's character attempts to steal food from a restaurant. Likewise, Athena's final design in the game is likely inspired by the lead female character from Story of the Drunken Master. Both characters were students of the Begger So in the films.
When Hiroshi Matsumoto and Takashi Nishiyama were working on the first Street Fighter game, they created a concept for a "caucasian man wearing a leather jacket" who would later be known as Joe in the final game. This character was originally planned to be the protagonist, going so far as to feature him in the opening sequence. But the idea was dropped, and the team ultimately decided on making Ryu the main character. After their move to SNK, still wanting to use their original concept, they based the design of the lead character on that design. This character ultimately ended up becoming Terry Bogard.
Developer Richard Rouse III said that he developed the game with open narratives in mind. Rouse was surprised to find that many video games tend to focus on “fixed narratives”. Therefore, he wanted to leave the player open to interpretations of their own since the game technically doesn’t have a story.
Raiden (and his babyface persona in the sequel, Big Bear) is based on the real-life American professional wrestler, Big Van Vader (Leon White), who frequented both Japanese and American wrestling circuits in the 1990's.
Cammy's character, fighting style, and animations are believed by some fans to be heavily inspired by Gally, the protagonist of the 1990 manga Battle Angel Alita.
When composer Jason Gallaty wanted a wholly traditional Balinese score, he reached out to Balinese music group Gamelan Çudamani for their assistance since their traditional music fit his ideas. However, the group was initially thinking of turning down the offer because as traditionalists, they viewed video games and their music as things they were "working against". The Gamelan group eventually put their prejudices aside and warmed up to the idea however, because the game and its themes as described by Gallaty really struck a chord with them.
"...The themes [of the game] are so beautiful and so resonant with our culture and our values and philosophy. And you know, it’s exciting to see that."
Lucky's design is based directly on the villain character Hakim from Bruce Lee film Game of Death. He was originally planned to be "a black man obsessed with Japanese culture, but as his design got updated and [they] added his American clothes and appearance, it no longer made sense for him to be a Japanophile", and the idea was dropped.
The game was originally planned to be an official licensed adaptation of the second film in the Rambo series, titled "Rambo: Ikari no Dasshutsu" ("Rambo: The Furious Escape"). However, SNK was unable to acquire the rights to the film, resulting in the game's title being shortened to Ikari, referencing part of the film's Japanese title.
After the game was released in North America, SNK got in touch with the film's star Sylvester Stallone, who was personal friends with the president of the SNK sales office in America, about acquiring the rights to the film. However, by that point it was too late as the game had already become well known by its Japanese title "Ikari" among North American players after being debuted at an American arcade expo, leading to the deal falling through and the game being officially released as Ikari Warriors in North America.
One of Elena's rotoscoped animations in 3rd Strike was modeled after an actress in the music video to David Lee Roth's cover of "Just a Gigolo / I Ain't Got Nobody".
During BlizzCon 2016, Mei's voice actress Yu Zhang revealed that the character's popular line "Sorry! Sorry, I'm Sorry. Sorry." was a botched take that was put into the game anyways. The following year, the game's senior designer at the time Michael Chu took credit for including the line in the game after catching the mistake on tape in the recording booth, citing it as his favorite voice line in the game.
The original version of StarCraft developed prior to 1996 was considered to be inferior to other games shown at the time, most notably the real-time strategy (RTS) game Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 being developed by Ion Storm Dallas, which was also shown at E3 and the Consumer Electronics Show that year. The game appeared to be miles ahead of what StarCraft was, with consumers responding to the latter game weakly as "Warcraft in space". Realizing that the version of StarCraft they had was worse than they had thought, following the release of Diablo at the end of that year, Blizzard began to "lick [their] wounds and plan for the future" by restarting development on StarCraft and completely overhauling their development process as a whole. StarCraft eventually released in March of 1998 to critical and commercial success, and was retrospectively dubbed as one of the defining games of the RTS genre.
However, after Ion Storm Dallas closed in 2001, a few of their former employees were scooped up by Blizzard and two of them later revealed to former Blizzard executive Patrick Wyatt that the demos Ion Storm presented of Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 were actually pre-rendered trailers, and the players "presenting" the game's demos were actors pretending to play the game. This meant that the only reason why StarCraft was released in the form it was was because Blizzard got tricked into raising their standards to compete with a pre-rendered video, resulting in the creation of one of their most successful games.
The second disc of the game has long been the subject of controversy due to its seemingly unfinished nature, where Fei and Elly sit in an empty area and narrate the remainder of the game's events as they are shown in a slideshow/montage format, with lengthy dialogue scrolls in front of them and little actual gameplay compared to the first disc. For almost two decades since the game's release, there was seemingly no official explanation about the production of the second disc, and fans believed that director Tetsuya Takahashi had more ambitious plans that the development team was forced to ditch because of budget and time constraints imposed by Square.
In a 2017 Kotaku interview with Takahashi, he revealed that while this speculation was correct, there was more to it than that:
"Honestly speaking, what had happened is Xenogears as a project was staffed pretty much entirely out of new staff members, young staff members... Back then, we had the direction of, ‘All projects take two years and that’s when we need to get it done.’ So on top of developing the game, we had to nurture and teach and grow these younger employees. Things like 3D were extremely new, which led to some delays in the schedule. It just wasn’t possible to get everything done."
The higher-ups at Square, when seeing that the team would not be able to reach the deadline in the state they were in, suggested that Takahashi end the game after the first disc when Spoiler:Fei and his team escape from Solaris. However, he did not feel the game's story should have ended there even with the lack of gameplay:
"It was a rough way to end it, and I felt like if we do that, then the players will not be satisfied... so we had a proposal—I proposed that if we do disc 2 in this way that it turned out to be, we can finish the game with the current number of staff and the current time allotted for the schedule and the remaining budget we have."
"I do think my decision was the right one to make, because if we had just ended at Disc 1 it would have been bad."
In a 2020 interview conducted by the YouTube channel Archipel with series creator Shinji Mikami, he stated that Dino Crisis was not a project he had first created. There was a team within Capcom that was working on original projects, when one day the team's leaders suddenly quit working at the company, leaving the rest behind. They came to Mikami with a pitch for a game with a 3-4 member party system (which Mikami likened to a Dragon Quest game) and asked him what they should do now. In response, he took them under his wing and told them to do their best.
Mikami's team initially brainstormed ideas together, but after struggling to find any good ideas, he asked each individual member to come up with their own ideas so they could decide on which one was the best to pick. At that point, someone from Capcom's graphics department had an idea for a game that took place in a locale similar to Skull Island from the 1933 film "King Kong". Mikami thought that idea was new; there were not that many creatures inhabiting the island, but the only kind was dinosaurs, so they stuck to dinosaurs and applied a gameplay and camera system similar to the first three Resident Evil games to make what would become Dino Crisis.
According to Tomonobu Itagaki, the Temple on the Mountain stage was originally going to be filled with human tourists. But, for an unknown reason, the team filled the stage with 108 white monkeys instead (the number 108 representing worldly desires in Buddhist teachings). The lead designer of the game became so inspired by their addiction that he suggested making an all-monkey fighting game.
According to a 1994 Gamest magazine interview with the game's planner Junichi Ohno, he was asked what made him want to make a fighting game where every character was a monster? He responded:
"One reason, as you can probably guess, is that we wanted to create a new, different style of versus fighting game. In the midst of our brainstorming, someone proposed, well, why not make it all about monsters then? With monsters, we wouldn’t have to create brand new characters from wholecloth, and we could use famous monster characters that people would already be familiar with."
As Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors was a brand new fighting game, Ohno and his team also wanted to create brand new special moves for the monsters that were different from those from the Street Fighter II series.
In a 1994 interview with the game's planner Junichi Ohno & Capcom producer Noritaka Funamizu published in Gamest magazine, they stated that they considered putting monsters from all regions in the series. From the beginning, there were lots of yōkai (traditional Japanese monsters), but they cut the number of them down due to the team realizing that most international players would not recognize them.
Some "weird" characters from the beginning of Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors' development that were rejected include: •An old man who was dressed head-to-toe in a salaryman’s suit. •A nurikabe yōkai that could not move and was always in a guard state, which the game's planners mentioned would be easy to finish due to there being little about the character to animate. •An Invisible Man where the only thing about it the player would be able to see was his floating gloves, which was done so the development team could draw fewer graphics.
According to a 2001 V-Jump magazine interview with the game's designer Fumi Nakashima, she stated that her inspiration for the Al Bhed’s clothing came from bondage fashion. She recalled having various bondage books and magazines on her desks at work and her co-workers giving her "weird looks" in response to seeing them.
In a 1991 interview with the game's composer Yoko Shimomura published in vol. 62 of Gamest magazine, she stated that her idea for Dhalsim’s theme was inspired by a CD she owned of Indian and Pakistani music, and that she "may have gone a little too far" in selling the idea to the development team. She also thought using tsuzumi drums in the music would make it sound more Japanese, and more akin to "that fusion sound, the king of music that's great to listen to when you're driving around."
In a 2001 V-Jump magazine interview with the game's art director Yusuke Naora, he was asked where the idea for an "asian" themed world came from? He responded:
"Let’s see… after the cyberpunk and “near-future” settings of VII and VIII, we returned to our roots with FFIX. So the question became, what should we do next…? And to be honest, that question vexed us. Around that time, I happened to be looking through some books and travel pamphlets and randomly thought to myself, “you know, Asia is really nice too…” There haven’t been many fantasy games in that kind of setting. There have been games set in China, or with a Chinese atmosphere, but nothing with a Southeast Asian or similar setting. So I thought I’d try drawing some pictures to flesh out this vision I had, when lo and behold, I read Kazushige Nojima’s script and by chance it turned out to have the same feeling. Then it was like, OK, now we’ve got to do this. We all brainstorm ideas on our own, but when we meet up and share them, the ideas that happen to be similar to each other are always good ones."
Raiden (and his babyface persona in the sequel, Big Bear) is based on the real-life American professional wrestler, Big Van Vader (Leon White), who frequented both Japanese and American wrestling circuits in the 1990's.
One of Elena's rotoscoped animations in 3rd Strike was modeled after an actress in the music video to David Lee Roth's cover of "Just a Gigolo / I Ain't Got Nobody".
In a 1994 interview with the game's planner Junichi Ohno & Capcom producer Noritaka Funamizu published in Gamest magazine, they stated that they considered putting monsters from all regions in the series. From the beginning, there were lots of yōkai (traditional Japanese monsters), but they cut the number of them down due to the team realizing that most international players would not recognize them.
According to a 2001 V-Jump magazine interview with the game's designer Fumi Nakashima, she stated that her inspiration for the Al Bhed’s clothing came from bondage fashion. She recalled having various bondage books and magazines on her desks at work and her co-workers giving her "weird looks" in response to seeing them.