During the planning phase of development, the Mexico Team was originally going to be made up of Ryo Sakazaki, Robert Garcia, and Lee Pai Long. Over the course of development, Lee was drop in favor of Yuri, who would finally be replaced with Takuma in the final game.
According to a 2001 developer interview published in V-Jump magazine, the game's character designer Tetsuya Nomura stated the main character's name, Tiida (Tidus in the international release), was the Okinawan word for "sun". After Final Fantasy VIII, the team wanted to give their next main character a brighter and more cheerful personality. Kazushige Nojima gave Tiida his name, and Nomura thought he had a "bright" motif for the character in mind considering his name's meaning.
According to a 1998 The Playstation magazine interview with the game's director Hideki Kamiya & writer Noboru Sugimura, they were asked about the chief of police character Brian Irons. Kamiya stated that he was originally going to be a normal police chief. His chubby exterior was still the same, but he would be seen properly wearing his uniform, talked like a normal officer, etc.
Sugimura credited himself as the one who made his deviant personality. Once they changed the police station building from a modern-day one to an old art museum, someone on the development team commented that it would be strange if there were medals just lying around in that place. Then Sugimura said "Well, we'll just have to make the police chief a weirdo then!", and Irons was what he came up with. He then created the character's hidden room, the idea that Chief Irons had been given bribes from Umbrella, and gave him "an insane grin on his face". Those who first saw the idea did not think it was very realistic, but Sugimura replied that "reality depends on persuasion and belief, so as long everything was consistent, it would appear real".
Kamiya stated that he was initially against turning Irons into a weirdo and protested it, but as the game's development progressed, the staff grew to like the idea and began coming up with "ridiculous details" to complement the personality shift. One example he cited are the hallway's torches leading to Irons' hidden room. The person who made it told him, "The Chief uses those to light a fire when he has his rituals!".
After confirming that Brian Irons' name appeared as a signature on the player select screen ID card in the first Resident Evil game, Kamiya revealed that wanted to use an "-ian" sound for both the first name and surname when coming up with the name, and decided that "Brian Irons" worked perfectly. He didn't think it would be anything more than just a lighthearted signature.
Sugimura commented that he didn't know that, and that when Resident Evil 2's development started the police chief was actually named Gordon until someone pointed out he was already given the name Brian Irons and stuck with it to connect it to the first game.
The games' real-time action platforming aspect (in contrast to the turn-based combat of previous Square RPGs) came from a desire by series creator Tetsuya Nomura and others at Square of wanting to make a game extremely similar to and as thrilling as Super Mario 64 after they played that game and were enamored by it. However in order to make the concept stand on its own two feet, they decided to use Disney properties (which made Nomura in particular even more excited and obsessed with the project) as they believed Disney was the only thing that could compete with Nintendo and Mario.
When coming up with a name for the game and eventual series, the developers were attracted to the name "Kingdom" because, to Nomura and his team, the game's iconic premise of the different Disney movies' stories being rendered as "Worlds" for the player to visit reminded them of Disney's theme parks, such as the Magic Kingdom and Disney's Animal Kingdom, which are segmented into different "lands" or areas for visitors to explore. However, Square had difficulty in securing the name "Kingdom" alone, so they decided to add the word "Hearts" to it because such entities played an important role in the lore of the game and series.
Disney heavily restricted the use of Mickey Mouse in the game especially as the central character like Square initially wanted. This was because Disney was nervous about the success of the game and did not want its possible failure leaving a black mark on the company and its mascot. Tetsuya Nomura stated that these contractual restrictions went so far as to have Disney allow Mickey to only make a minor cameo appearance (such as "in the background of a crowd" as Nomura put it). Spoiler:Nomura and his team got around this by having Mickey have an extremely important but brief role at the end of the game in the form of Mickey helping Sora close the Door to Darkness so no more Darkness gets out of it, separating the two. King Mickey even appears mostly in silhouette in this scene. When the first Kingdom Hearts became a humongous success for both Disney and Square, the former allowed the game developers to feature their mascot in a much more prominent role in the franchise from then onward.
According to Capcom's Senior Community & Esports Manager Matthew Edwards, Akira Kazama from Rival Schools was originally meant to be included as a playable character in the game. She didn't make the cut, however.
According to background artist, Masatoshi Ohara, the designs for many of the stages were originally early concepts from The King of Fighters XII that did not make it into the final game.
Takuma's ability to combo off of his desperation move was originally a glitch:
"Takuma is able to combo off his Super Strike Gale, but originally this was a bug. We tried taking it out, but he was too weak without it: 'I don’t know… if Takuma doesn’t have this, he’s kind of… um…' So we re-added it again! Thanks to that decision though he became a pretty cheap character. So I kind of regret it now."
During the planning phase of development, there were plans to make an "Ultimate Young Style Karate Team" consisting of Ryo, Robert, and Yuri. But with Yuri being committed to the England Team, along with other changes, Takuma was made the third member instead. The idea for this team wouldn't happen until The King of Fighters '96.
Joe's win pose was going to have a bigger smile with missing teeth. However, this animation was scrapped out of respect for the fans of his character:
"Joe makes a big toothy grin during his win pose, and at first we made it even larger, with more teeth missing! It was amazing… but of course, after considering the feelings of all the Joe fans out there, we thought it looked both too sad and too scary, so we asked the designer to fill those missing teeth back in."
According to the game's planner Hideki Kamiya in an interview published in the June 1998 issue of The PlayStation (JP) magazine, the pin-up poster in the laboratory originally featured a picture of Chun-Li from the Street Fighter series, but she was ultimately replaced with a different woman due to Kamiya thinking her appearance clashed too much with the world of Resident Evil.
According to series composer Yoko Shimomura in a KH Ultimania interview with the game's sound team, they believed the operatic song "Destati" was "cursed":
"In the beginning and ending of the game, there is a song with a chorus. That chorus is a phrase that expresses the dark side of Kingdom Hearts, and it was used in several songs. However, once we tried loading the chorus data in when we were creating the songs, something bad would happen. The worst thing that happened was when the electricity to the building was cut off. (laugh)"
According to a 1999 interview with the Capcom team published in the game's official Japanese guide book, the team stated that the code for the locker with the shotgun parts was written on the memo next to the dying researcher was out of necessity for how the game needed to flow after they experimented with her holding several different things in that scene. Originally, she was going to be clutching a memo with Kirk's employee ID number written in her blood, as a hint to the player about who killed her.
In the Nintendo 64 release of the game, there is a list of 2,170 names that when entered to save your high score will cause all menu text to be replaced with a string of gibberish unique to each name. Attempting to complete a Competition after doing this will likely cause the game to crash. The most popular example of this glitch is entering the name "TYR" which causes the menu text to instead display "RXJP Y HMB". The last two characters of names entered (including blank characters) that trigger this glitch act as a checksum of the preceding characters, suggesting that this glitch is a remnant of an early password system that was scrapped in favor of Controller Pak saves.
According to a 1997 The PlayStation magazine interview with the game's director Hideo Yoshizawa, he explained the story of how Klonoa's development began:
"The honest truth is that I simply wanted to make an action game. When I sat down to think seriously about how to do that, and I looked at the PlayStation market, there weren’t a lot of games that were playable for both children and adults at the same time. I wanted to make something that would fill that void."
"Also, there were a lot of Playstation games with 3D fields you could freely walk around in, and those games tended to be confusing; players often don’t know what they’re supposed to do. That’s why we decided to retain 2D controls, but with a 3D-ish feel."
"The idea for 3D backgrounds was there from the beginning, but I didn’t want it to be only for show—I wanted the 3D to have a purpose in the game. That’s where I got the idea for “information depth”. For example, in a 2D sidescroller you’ve got to keep moving forward (to the right) to see what’s next. But with a 3D screen, if we place something interesting deeper in the visual field, it prompts players to consider what’s there in the background, and explore whether it can be interacted with."
"Also, once we started playing around with camera angles, like tilting the camera upwards so players can get a clear view around them, it turned out to be really interesting. Some of these weirder camera angles have never been featured before in an action game, I think, so it was definitely something we were excited about doing."
"As I thought more about how to appeal to a wider demographic, I decided that the character shouldn’t be too serious, but should instead evoke gentle, nice feelings. That idea came, by the way, after soliciting the different developers at Namco for drawings of the character, in an informal in-house contest we held."
According to Toby Fox, Susie was originally inspired by Maya Fey from the Ace Attorney series, being a similar "small, friendly, sassy companion" without any major tension. However, she was eventually changed into a more acrid figure as development progressed.
The tracks "Bonetrousle" and "Heartache" were originally composed for an early idea for Deltarune (whose gestation predated that of Undertale) before being repurposed here. "Bonetrousle" was initially the main battle theme for Deltarune before being replaced with "Rude Buster", while "Heartache" was originally titled "Joker Battle", implying that it was initially the battle theme for Spoiler:Jevil before being replaced with "THE WORLD REVOLVING".
According to creator and director Toby Fox, the idea for Deltarune originated in 2011, when he had a literal fever dream about witnessing the ending to a game that didn't exist; upon waking up, he became determined to make that game a reality.
Development originally started the following year, but was put on hold before designing even a single room before the project resumed after Undertale's release; two of the songs originally composed during that initial stage would later be reused in Undertale as "Bonetrousle" (previously the main battle theme before being replaced with "Rude Buster") and "Heartache" (previously titled "Joker Battle", apparently being Spoiler:Jevil's early battle theme before being replaced with "THE WORLD REVOLVING").
According to the game's planner Hideki Kamiya in an interview published in the June 1998 issue of The PlayStation (JP) magazine, the pin-up poster in the laboratory originally featured a picture of Chun-Li from the Street Fighter series, but she was ultimately replaced with a different woman due to Kamiya thinking her appearance clashed too much with the world of Resident Evil.
