In the living room of the Border House, to the left of the corkboard, there is a small, unmarked wall area that when hovered over will reveal a caption for a "Painting". Clicking it will instead cause April to walk to the adjacent right wall where the unseen painting is hung and comment:
April: "It's a reproduction of an early Lebowski. Not a particular favorite of mine, but, there ya are."
During the cutscene "Vision in the Living Room" which is only played if April has chosen to not work the evening shift at the Fringe Café, a shot of the painting depicting an abstract rendition of a woman's head can be seen. This painting appears to be a caricature of American actress Julianne Moore, who appeared one year prior to The Longest Journey's release in the 1998 film "The Big Lebowski" in the role of artist Maude Lebowski, suggesting that the painting may be a self-portrait.
Outside the Mercury Theatre, a poster can be found for a fictional film called "A Welsh Ghost Story" that April claims is "a classic", and is written and directed by Ragnar Tørnquist, the game's creator. This film was actually based on a real work-in-progress screenplay with the same tentative title by Tørnquist that would later be uploaded online in 2014 under the name "In the Dark Places".
According to the game's main designer/planner Takane Ohkubo in a 2013 ROM Cassette Disc in MELDAC liner notes, he was asked why he chose the game to be available on the Famicom console. He responded:
"It was mostly a business decision. We talked about developing it for the PC Engine too, but the only system we had the skills to develop a game for right away was the Famicom. We had some extremely talented people on our team. Our programmer Hiramatsu was a real wizard: he had once created a ROM Emulator from spare parts he bought at Akihabara."
The bonus stage music that is used in Tapper is a slight variation of the song "Here Comes the King", a jingle written to promote the alcoholic beverage Budweiser which was the first sponsor of Tapper and featured the drink's logos plastered on multiple screens in the game. After Anheuser-Busch ended their sponsorship and the game was revised as "Root Beer Tapper", some song names needed to be changed to avoid legal trouble.
David Bowie, who composed music for the game, included its lyrical songs on his 1999 studio album 'hours...' The album was the first to be officially available via the internet, with Bowie creating his own ISP and website to host the download.
In 2021, a secret display mode for the PlayStation 2 version of the game was discovered that involves first setting the standard video output to 480p (through the "Progressive Scan Mode" option), and then starting a new game with the profile name "PSONE". Doing this will cause the game to lower the standard output from 480p to 240p and disable texture filtering, making it more closely resemble a PlayStation game. For unknown reasons, this mode is referred to as "Christian Slater mode" in the source code.
On Twitter, Toby Fox revealed that he didn't know how people would receive the character of Spamton, and he even thought that he would be negatively received. His fears were exacerbated after the character got a disdainful and disgusted reaction from test players. However Spamton, nonetheless, turned out to be popular with fans and even garnered his own cult following with the massive sales and popularity of his merchandise not being able to meet demand at times.
In the Canalave Library there is a Book that was not in the original games for the DS, called the "The Sea's Legend", that the game describes as being "recently discovered" and that states the mysterious following text:
Spoiler:"Once upon a time in the East Sea, there was a Pokémon known as the prince. A brave human asked Pokémon living in the sea to let them see the prince. Mantyke, Buizel, and a Quilfish with huge spikes acknowledged the human's bravery and joined them. Together, they set off in a boat over the sunset-streaked sea, sailing through the ocean gate stretched over the waves. News of this reached the ears of the prince, who went to meet the brave little party at the Seaside Hollow."
It's possible that this text was put into Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl Spoiler:to tease the upcoming game Pokemon Legends: Arceus via giving the player a hint of a storyline or event that may happen in the latter game's plot. Furthering the suspicious nature of the text, Game Freak, when sending out review copies of the games, forbid any reviewer from talking about any of the text in the library.
Austin Wintory became the first person to be directly nominated for a Grammy Award for a musical score to a video game when his score for Journey became nominated in the "Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media" category. However, it lost the award to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their score soundtrack to the film "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo".
The different musical themes of the Wii and its applications, such as the Mii Channel and Wii Shop Channel, were written by Nintendo's in-house Music Producer Kazumi Totaka, who is responsible for numerous game themes and scores to some of Nintendo's most celebrated IPs and who is also responsible for the reccurring "Totaka's Song" Easter Eggs hidden in the numerous games he's worked on.
Although the GameCube Controller itself was well beloved by fans, head of Platinum Games (and former Capcom dev) Atsushi Inaba said it was actually quite frustrating to develop for for devs like him and he wasn't a big fan of it and it's layout and design.
"I didn’t play a lot of GameCube games myself, but on the development side of things you imagined that maybe when Miyamoto-san was designing his games, the large green A button was the one he wanted to get hit first so he made it big [...] When working on Viewtiful Joe, we made the A button the jump button but because it was an action game players wanted to punch and kick, so they would sometimes hit the A button expecting that. In development, you don’t want the player to pick up the controller with any kind of strange prejudices about which button is going to do what. It’s almost safer not to have too much imbalance with the buttons."
Inaba, however still praised the system's software and hardware, saying that it was very easy to develop games for the console itself.
In the GameCube 20th anniversary VGC interview, it was revealed that former Nintendo of America VP of marketing Perrin Kaplan thought that there was one aspect of the GameCube that he and NoA were not fond of and made them extremely nervous about the console's perception:
"We actually suggested that the purple was not the best [console color] to start with and [Japan] said, ‘no, we’re going to use that [...] Then we pushed for black and silver, because I think in the US nobody had ever really done the purple colour before. [...] It wasn’t that you couldn’t bring out hardware that was a different colour, it was just a very… ‘female’ looking colour. It just didn’t feel masculine, I think. I remember us being very nervous at E3 that we were going to get bad press purely based on the colour.”
Nintendo of Europe was not to easy on the color either with the company's veteran Shelly Peirce revealing that one person referred to it as a "Fischer-Price record player". However Pierce remained optimistic because he felt that what Nintendo was doing was uniquely different than the competition.
In an interview with VGC for The GameCubes's 20th anniversary, veteran Rare developer Martin Hollis revealed that not only was he among the first people to see "Project Dolphin", but also that he was possibly responsible for the GameCube's name and theme:
“I arrived in Kyoto, went into the big building, and Mr. Miyamoto and his team straight away took me to this empty meeting room and sat me down in front of a television [...] They switched it on, and Miyamoto told me to press the A button on the controller. I pressed it and the purple rolling cubes appeared on screen with the boot up music that we now know so well, revealing the GameCube name. [...] As the on-screen reveal happened, Mr. Miyamoto stared at my face intensely! That was my initiation, which was maybe because I’d actually suggested the name ‘Cube’ during my time at NTD. Months earlier I did a sheet of paper at Nintendo of America with a whole load of suggestions for names and one of them was ‘Star Cube’ or something like that.”
Nintendo did indeed trademark "Starcube" lending more legitimacy to Hollis' suspicion.
In the Campsite map, there are a few references to popular horror media:
•A stick figure can be found on a gate which is the same stick figure the three main characters frequently find in the woods in the found-footage horror film The Blair Witch Project.
•Going to the lake and pointing any other source of light toward the water will cause a hockey mask to surface. This is a clear homage to horror film villain Jason Voorhees from the campsite-set slasher franchise Friday the 13th.
•Also pointing a source of light toward any area in the woods may reveal the internet creepypasta character Slenderman, however he is quite hard to see unless the player looks closely.
For the game's fictional hard rock band Star-Lord, Eidos Montreal's Senior Audio Director Steve Szczepkowski ended up singing the band's songs himself until a proper singer could be found. However, the game's creative director, after hearing the temp tracks and asking who sang them, was shocked and pleasantly surprised to learn it was Szczepkowski himself and the dev team ended up using the Szczepkowski vocals in the final release, much to his delight.
In May 2021, Richard Raaphorst who directed the 2013 film "Frankenstein's Army" accused Capcom of plagiarism, because the boss enemy Sturm looks almost identical to one of the monsters in the film.
In the "Pet the Doggo" level, if you zoom out in photo mode a message can be seen on the side of the platform that reads: "I made this level for my GF ;D".
There are numerous callbacks to different pieces of Alien media in this game:
•In one of the hangers, a power loader, similar to the one Ridley uses at the end of Aliens Spoiler:to fight the Xenomorph Queen, can be found behind partially closed doors.
•The iconic drinking bird figurine that's seen bobbing it's head on the dinner table of the Nostromo in the original Alien film can be found in the Crew Quarters area of this game.
•The lines "Elevator to Hell" and "Let's Rock!" can be selected to be emblazoned on the player's firearm in reference to two lines said by Aliens film characters Pvt. Hudson and Pvt. Vasquez respectively.
•On a table in one of the levels is a cowboy hat, a homage to Danny McBride's Tennessee Faris character from Alien: Covenant.
For the Art Direction of the game, In addition to the obvious Generation 1 influence, the designers at High Moon Studios also looked to classic sci-fi franchises that had a certain dark or distinctive look such as the Alien franchise, Blade Runner, and the Tron films among others.
High Moon Studios pitched the project to Hasbro by sliding a picture of their depiction of Bumblebee across the table during a conference and saying "What do you think?". However, while they were seemingly confident in their more "adult and realistic" take on the franchise, internally for them it was extremely nerve-racking with Jim Daley (Lead Designer) saying it was like "George Lucas looking at [someone] redesigning Luke Skywalker". Hasbro as it turns out really liked the idea and were excited to see the intense Cybertronian war fleshed out more.
In the living room of the Border House, to the left of the corkboard, there is a small, unmarked wall area that when hovered over will reveal a caption for a "Painting". Clicking it will instead cause April to walk to the adjacent right wall where the unseen painting is hung and comment:
David Bowie, who composed music for the game, included its lyrical songs on his 1999 studio album 'hours...' The album was the first to be officially available via the internet, with Bowie creating his own ISP and website to host the download.
In 2021, a secret display mode for the PlayStation 2 version of the game was discovered that involves first setting the standard video output to 480p (through the "Progressive Scan Mode" option), and then starting a new game with the profile name "PSONE". Doing this will cause the game to lower the standard output from 480p to 240p and disable texture filtering, making it more closely resemble a PlayStation game. For unknown reasons, this mode is referred to as "Christian Slater mode" in the source code.
