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.
The game was titled "Bravely Default II" because Square Enix producer Tomoya Asano felt the previous installment in the franchise, Bravely Second: End Layer, did not meet their fans' standards, and felt its underperformance made it harder for his team to continue on with the franchise.
The native children in the background of the Brazil stage were originally going to flash their buttocks. This idea was dropped after being deemed too distracting and distasteful.
In the original overseas arcade version of the game, Mai's "swaying bosom" animation was disabled to appear stilted. However, in a 1994 developer interview, SNK revealed the animation could be unlocked via a secret code which they themselves did not reveal, but instead directed curious players to ask SNK's American division for it.
Athena was originally planned to wear her schoolgirl uniform from her original appearance in Psycho Soldier. However, out of concern that overseas audiences wouldn't understand the reference, Athena received a redesign, prominently displayed in her entrance animation which starts her in the original schoolgirl outfit before throwing it off to reveal the new outfit. Athena's entrance animation is also the only one in the game to use 16 sprites, and her Shining Crystal Super Move was programmed in by the developers before proper work on the character had actually begun with the game's planners.
The design of the Anti-Funk, the final boss of the game, originally resembled the hood of a Ku Klux Klan member. This design made it into early review copies of the game before Sega discovered its existence and rejected it, forcing the developers to change it to a skull just before the game's release. In a 2003 Xbox Nation magazine interview with series creator Greg Johnson, he elaborated on the origin of the design:
"When I was doing it, it was actually an accident. We had done a bunch of designs for the Anti-Funk, and the artist had done this unintentionally. I looked at it and said, “Wow, that’s funny. That looks like a Ku Klux Klan hat.” And then I thought about it for a second and I said, “Well hey, what better villain for these black characters who are spreading the funk than the love and this kind of oblique reference?” Because it wasn’t [obvious]—it was open to interpretation."
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".
At Sega's Game Jam II showcase in March 2002, Red Entertainment announced two new PlayStation 2 games in collaboration with mangaka Yasuhiro Nightow that would be published by Sega, who announced they acquired a 67% stake in Red Entertainment moments prior. The first game announced was Gungrave, which was released in Japan in July of that year. The second game announced was a game based on Nightow's 1995 manga "Trigun" entitled "Trigun: The Planet Gunsmoke", with a short 20-second teaser trailer being revealed featuring silhouettes of multiple characters from the series before ending on Nicholas punching the screen and revealing the game's logo.
Since then, the game has become vaporware as no other updates from either Red Entertainment, Nightow, or Sega have been released about it since its announcement, with the exception of an official statement from Sega in 2002 that gave no comment on its development. Fans speculated that Gungrave was actually a modified version of Trigun: The Planet Gunsmoke citing its similar storylines and character designs to that of Trigun, but considering both games were first shown off at the same time and Gungrave was released in Japan only four months later, this is not the case.
In a 1989 interview with the game's director/scenario writer Yuji Horii in the 11/89 edition of Famicon Tsuushin, he was asked where the idea for the mini medals, a recurring hidden collectible in the series first introduced in Dragon Warrior IV, came from? He responded:
"DQIV is a multi-chapter story, and you ultimately end up gathering eight party members together, so we thought adding a bunch of story items you had to collect on top of that would be too much, and annoying. But collecting things like “orbs” and “crests” is undoubtedly one of the appeals of Dragon Quest, so we wanted to give players something to collect."
"“Ah hah! Coins!” — that was our first idea, and small medals were originally “gold coins”. But that name was too easily confused with the coins at the casino. Then we remembered the idea we had for “small medals” for Dragon Quest III, 2 and that’s how they got their name. (laughs)"
In a 1993 interview with the game's planner Hiroaki Chino in issue no. 7 of Marukatsu Mega Drive, he was asked what the biggest changes were in Sonic CD compared to past games that were released on cartridges? He responded:
"One place in particular where you feel the difference is the special stage. We used the Mega CD’s sprite rotation abilities for that. Also, a single regular stage will have past, present, and future to contend with… we could only bring that volume to life with the CD format—if you do a simple comparison with Sonic 2, it’s 3x the volume. But when you add in the secrets and other things, overall, I think it’s safe to say it has about 4x the volume."
In a 2019 IGN interview, Arthur's actor Roger Clark revealed that on top of playing Arthur, he also played "about two dozen" characters in Red Dead Redemption II. One character he had to play due to their actor being unavailable for motion capture recording that day was Spoiler:Mary in a post-credits scene where she mourns at Arthur's grave, ironically resulting in the actor mourning his own character's death.
According to The History of Castlevania: Book of the Crescent Moon, the Belmont family was originally planned to be called the Dante family, with Simon Belmont originally being "Peter Dante, Vampire Killer and grandson of Christopher Dante".
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.
According to a 1997 The PlayStation magazine interview with the game's director Makoto Ikehara & programmer Tatsuya Kitabayashi, they were asked how the game's development began. Ikehara stated that their developments "always sort of start the same way, with just a title." After which they just make whatever they want, and force it to all fit together after the fact. Ikehara also stated that when changing series to the PlayStation, the team considered calling the third game just "Breath of Fire" without the "III", but they ultimately decided not to as they wanted to bring about a conclusion to the work they had done up to then.
Kitabayashi added that after Breath of Fire II had finished, the team, now more confident, wanted to carry over that momentum from the previous game and begin working on Breath of Fire III straightaway.
Ikehara was also asked if there were things that they could not achieve in II that they wanted to do in III, to which he responded:
"Yeah. That’s true with every development, the whole “we’ll do it next time!” thing.
The reason why Taka-Arashi was cut from the roster was that the developers didn't think his large size and play style could fit with the new game's speed. He would later be added back to the roster in the enhanced versions of Virtua Fighter 5.
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."
Metroid Fusion is one of only a few Game Boy Advance games to have a save battery through an SRAM chip in its cartridge, though this would only appear in earlier-produced carts, as the SRAM chip was scrapped from use halfway through production in favor of a battery-free EPROM chip.
Athena was originally planned to wear her schoolgirl uniform from her original appearance in Psycho Soldier. However, out of concern that overseas audiences wouldn't understand the reference, Athena received a redesign, prominently displayed in her entrance animation which starts her in the original schoolgirl outfit before throwing it off to reveal the new outfit. Athena's entrance animation is also the only one in the game to use 16 sprites, and her Shining Crystal Super Move was programmed in by the developers before proper work on the character had actually begun with the game's planners.
The design of the Anti-Funk, the final boss of the game, originally resembled the hood of a Ku Klux Klan member. This design made it into early review copies of the game before Sega discovered its existence and rejected it, forcing the developers to change it to a skull just before the game's release. In a 2003 Xbox Nation magazine interview with series creator Greg Johnson, he elaborated on the origin of the design:
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".
At Sega's Game Jam II showcase in March 2002, Red Entertainment announced two new PlayStation 2 games in collaboration with mangaka Yasuhiro Nightow that would be published by Sega, who announced they acquired a 67% stake in Red Entertainment moments prior. The first game announced was Gungrave, which was released in Japan in July of that year. The second game announced was a game based on Nightow's 1995 manga "Trigun" entitled "Trigun: The Planet Gunsmoke", with a short 20-second teaser trailer being revealed featuring silhouettes of multiple characters from the series before ending on Nicholas punching the screen and revealing the game's logo.
Metroid Fusion is one of only a few Game Boy Advance games to have a save battery through an SRAM chip in its cartridge, though this would only appear in earlier-produced carts, as the SRAM chip was scrapped from use halfway through production in favor of a battery-free EPROM chip.