Dan Arey, a former Crystal Dynamics and Naughty Dog developer who worked on the second and third games in the series, praised the first game in a 1996 Retro Gamer magazine interview. Prior to joining Naughty Dog, he talked about how the game maintained its unique identity in the world of 3D platformers, even when faced with the groundbreaking influence of Super Mario 64. Arey emphasized that while Super Mario 64 embraced open-ended levels, programmer Andy Gavin and director Jason Rubin designed Crash Bandicoot to adhere to a more old-school, level-based structure while adding 3D depth to its platforming challenges by "going down 3D roads with occasional 2D side-wave elements, but everything was very focussed in terms of mechanics". Arey also expressed admiration for the game's technical achievements even before he joined Naughty Dog, which likely soon motivated him to do so:
"We saw some early demos when I was at Crystal Dynamics, and we were asking ourselves how they were getting so many polygons on the PlayStation. What they had done was pre-calculate the polygons you couldn't see from a fixed-camera viewpoint, so it looked like there were many more polygons being pushed on the system than ever before."
Some of the character models in Stellar Blade were created using a 3D scanning process. This is most notable with the game's protagonist Eve, whose character model was based on the real life Korean model Shin Jae-eun.
Nightingale was originally planned to be an MMORPG, but this idea was scrapped in favor of making it a survival game. Inflexion Games, the company behind the game, also stated that unlike most role-playing games, Nightingale was intended to have an interesting premise and lore rather than a strong narrative. This was done to allow players to create their own stories for the game.
Game designer Yuki Nakamura, who was in charge of writing the DLC episode "Turnabout Reclaimed", used the concept of "lighthearted fun" to set it apart from the episodes in the base game. The episode featuring an orca and taking place in an aquarium was the first thing she decided on, but she struggled to come up with the rest of the story. One scrapped idea had the orca stealing treasure from the aquarium and attacking people by the shore as it escaped to sea, with the mystery involving the reason for the orca's behavior. The draft for this version of the episode opened with Bobby Fulbright and some guards vaguely referring to somebody escaping. This was intended to mislead players into thinking that they were referring to Simon Blackquill, before it was ultimately revealed to be the orca.
Within the 2023 Insomniac Games ransomware leak, a PC developer build of the game was found to include several unused Symbiote bosses, including Riot, Lasher, Agony, and Phage. These characters were intended to appear as a team alongside the main antagonist, Venom. However, during development, the game’s story likely underwent changes and the focus shifted to other characters, such as Kraven and Venom. As a result, the Symbiotes besides Venom, Scream, and Anti-Venom were abandoned.
In 2021, a 15-second clip of early animation tests for the game dating back to 2006-2007 was discovered on the website of animator Michael Daubert, who worked on animations for an early iteration of the game, but went uncredited in the final release as everything in the test footage was scrapped. These tests showcase a completely different art style from the final game and unused gameplay elements, with Mickey shooting ink out of his body to quickly surf around, and jumping and slamming the ground to summon a tidal wave of ink to attack large Blotling enemies. This tidal wave attack also causes Mickey to lose all of his colors, turn white and become exhausted, suggesting that the known early idea of ink/paint/thinner usage changing his physical appearance was going to involve a stamina meter tied to his attacks. Mickey's early design was more stylized compared to his traditional appearance in the final game, featuring a prominently tall forehead, a lanky, stretched body, no visible mouth, and crooked oval ears. This early design would live on through an emblem used in promotional materials and as a recurring icon throughout the final game, with the inky black outline of the early design's head forming an "M".
Bubsy voice actress Lani Minella had concerns that Bubsy was too annoying during recording, but her voice directors simply told her that this was by intent.
Director Takeshi Yamazaki knew from the start that he wanted all three player characters to have their own motivations and purposes that would play out throughout the game. At one point, he even considered having five lawyers in the game, on account of Dual Destinies being the fifth game in the series. He later stated that the idea was "crazy and overly ambitious", and that they had dodged a bullet by not doing it.
Beta Star Fox 64 footage circa 1996 shows that Corneria was originally covered in snow. Early footage of the boss fight with the Granga robot even showed it capable of blowing snow as an attack, possibly indicating that it was responsible for Corneria's current state in this build.
Originally, the development team behind Star Fox 64 themselves actually tried to provide the voice lines for the characters:
—Back in the day, a lot of Nintendo’s games used voices provided by the staff.
Imamura: We dubbed Star Fox 64 ourselves at first, too. We were all like, wow, this is gonna be so cool! But when we showed it to people outside the team, they responded with “laaaame” (laughs). We were told “this is unforgivably bad” (laughs), and so we switched to professional voice actors.
—Ahahaha! But, now I want to hear it for myself… (laughs)
Imamura: Rare did the same thing with their game, except they were really good at it (laughs)
The culture around voice acting isn’t cemented in the US to the extent that it is in Japan; in the US, voice acting is performed by regular actors, whereas in Japan, voice actors have a very specific and distinctive style of delivery, and it could be that it’s left such an impression on us that we’re not as capable of tolerating amateurish voice acting.
What’s funny is that some of the sales people who didn’t like our N64 dub told us that the Super Famicom “buh-buh-buh-buh” voices were cooler, so as a trial, we looked backwards and imported those SFC-style “buh-buh-buh”s, but the reaction was, “nah, that sucks” (laughs). We really did experiment with the animal language (laughs).
As mentioned by Takaya Imamura above, this was met with negative reception internally and thus they switched over to using professional voice actors. What remains of this lost developer dub was recently discovered within the Nintendo gigaleak from 2020.
The official Japanese Star Fox 64 guidebook reveals that it was programmer Nobuhiro Sumiyoshi who provided the original voice for Leon Powalski, who is voiced by Shinobu Satouchi (who also voices Fox McCloud) in the final Japanese version of Star Fox 64.
Planet Zoness was originally a beautiful water planet similar to its twin planet, Aquas. It was famous for its resorts and was where Peppy Hare had taken his wife, Vivian, for their honeymoon. However, Andross' forces would invade and pollute its waters with their bioweapons, mutating the local wildlife to become larger and violent.
Early footage of Star Fox 64 circa 1996 actually show Zoness in its pure, unpolluted state, which seems to indicate that making it polluted was decided on later in development. There's actually appears to be dialogue remnants of this cleaner version in the developer's dub:
Peppy: Be careful of the wildlife on this planet.
Falco: Huge, these guys!
Slippy: I want to live in a sea like this, ribbit.
When finishing the stage:
Peppy: I didn't know this planet was under Andorf's power too.
Slippy: I will come back when there is peace.
But in the final polluted version, this exchange in the JP version goes:
Peppy: 何て事だ・・・これがあのゾネスか？ (What the... is this Zoness?)
Slippy: 泳ぐ気にもならないよ (I don't even feel like swimming.)
The cancelled Atari Jaguar game Tiny Toon Adventures: Plucky Duck in Hollywood Hijinks ran into trouble with its art direction. It originally used photorealistic backgrounds, uncharacteristic of the cartoon and described by a developer as "build and[sic] engine and insert your favorite licensed character here." Despite a complete reset being done to the game's art direction following this iteration, the art did not live up to Warner Bros.' standards for how the Tiny Toon characters and world should look, lacking color and brightness. After Warner Bros. provided model sheets with specific instructions for drawing the characters, the development team instead switched to taking photos of the TV show and converting those into sprites, which caused issues as the sprites would come out corrupted. Atari ultimately concluded that no artist at Telegames was able to create proper Tiny Toons art, requiring art duties to be swapped out to Digital Delirium, which also failed to deliver Warner Brothers-quality animation, which caused the game's development to start implementing pencil tests into their animation process, which slowed down the game's development significantly. Eventually, all of the art for the first 2 worlds was finished, however Telegames stated they did not need the art at that point, with the art (and its respective levels) not being implemented over a year later. Telegames laid out an offer where they would only release a milestone document if a fully laid-out stage map could be provided, something the developer who released this story believed was a stalling tactic, as they already had the art and mockup stage layouts. Shortly after this, the artist assigned to complete the level layouts was laid off, requiring Digital Delirium to be brought in-house, and some music was made for the game that was completely unfit for the source material.
An unused cutscene in the game has the character Stumbler O'Hare openly mock Harley Mullins (the wife of Mark Mullins) and her situation. This was scrapped both for being "WAY too on the nose", and because Stumbler's personality was altered during development. The cutscene would be replaced with a YouTube video titled "How to say Goodbye", in which Stumbler, despite knowing about Mark's crimes, tries to help him grieve over the loss of Harley. Despite the cutscene's removal, Stumbler's statue in The Dam still has him wearing a nurse's cap like in the cutscene.
There are unused files in the original version of Shipwrecked 64 that suggest that the character Olive Otter was originally planned to be playable, but was scrapped.
"I felt that Phoenix's story had been told, and that the series should not continue. Knowing when to end a story is very important and I wanted to avoid dragging it out and having it become a shadow of its former self."
When it was decided that a fourth game would be made, Takumi wanted the game to have a new main character and story, with Phoenix originally not planned to appear. However, his colleagues wanted Phoenix in the game in some form, which ultimately lead to him being the defendant in the game's first case, "Turnabout Trump".
Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly's villain was originally going to be a dragon, but the lead designer was adamant that the Spyro universe could not have any evil dragons. Ironically, the following release Spyro: A Hero's Tail would introduce Red, an evil dragon.
CrazyBus was at one point intended to have an RPG system, but was not included due to developer Tom Maneiro lacking the programming skills and resources to include it.
Although CrazyBus is often discussed or reviewed as if it were a real video game sold for money, and included in ROM sets and pirated cartridges with authentic games, it was actually intended as a simple tech demo by a beginning developer posted on a Sega Genesis modding forum in 2004.
Yo! Noid 2's hub world, the Noid Void, was originally going to be a tower that the player ascends, similarly to the Assassin's Creed series, where the Noid would see a set of Domino's franchises in the sky.
In 2021, a 15-second clip of early animation tests for the game dating back to 2006-2007 was discovered on the website of animator Michael Daubert, who worked on animations for an early iteration of the game, but went uncredited in the final release as everything in the test footage was scrapped. These tests showcase a completely different art style from the final game and unused gameplay elements, with Mickey shooting ink out of his body to quickly surf around, and jumping and slamming the ground to summon a tidal wave of ink to attack large Blotling enemies. This tidal wave attack also causes Mickey to lose all of his colors, turn white and become exhausted, suggesting that the known early idea of ink/paint/thinner usage changing his physical appearance was going to involve a stamina meter tied to his attacks. Mickey's early design was more stylized compared to his traditional appearance in the final game, featuring a prominently tall forehead, a lanky, stretched body, no visible mouth, and crooked oval ears. This early design would live on through an emblem used in promotional materials and as a recurring icon throughout the final game, with the inky black outline of the early design's head forming an "M".
Beta Star Fox 64 footage circa 1996 shows that Corneria was originally covered in snow. Early footage of the boss fight with the Granga robot even showed it capable of blowing snow as an attack, possibly indicating that it was responsible for Corneria's current state in this build.
Originally, the development team behind Star Fox 64 themselves actually tried to provide the voice lines for the characters:
Planet Zoness was originally a beautiful water planet similar to its twin planet, Aquas. It was famous for its resorts and was where Peppy Hare had taken his wife, Vivian, for their honeymoon. However, Andross' forces would invade and pollute its waters with their bioweapons, mutating the local wildlife to become larger and violent.
