Sunsoft's NES Batman originally had cutscenes using the comic book iteration of Batman, but these had to be scrapped and replaced with digitized renditions of Micheal Keaton's live-action Batman as the game's artist was not aware that the Batman comics and movies were separate licenses. The Joker, however, was always depicted as Jack Nicholson's portrayal, even in prototypes using the comic version of Batman.
During development of Pizza Tower, multiple demo builds were released - among these was a build known as the "Peter Griffin Experience", built off of the 2018 "early test build". This demo replaced every single sprite of Peppino with a highly compressed edit of a stock image of Peter Griffin from Family Guy made to resemble Peppino, and replaced one of the game's musical tracks with a fan-made Family Guy remix.
After this build, the Peter Griffin "arms resting" pose would appear in some builds as a taunt, albeit as an actual sprite and not an edit, and a video would be posted by developer McPig showcasing the taunt, accompanied by the first note of the Family Guy theme song, under the name "family", likely referencing a a meme video that plays the first note and ends. This taunt was removed for unknown reasons in the final game.
In the lead-up to the release of Super Villain Island, a piece of concept art titled "Combo Breaker" was posted on the Daily Pop, depicting what appears to be a robot that combined elements from the four villains featured in the island's story (rabbit traits from Dr. Hare, jester traits from Mordred/Binary Bard, artist traits from Black Widow, and pirate traits from Captain Crawfish), as well as what appears to be traits reminiscent of a cowboy. This, combined with an earlier Daily Pop post titled "Perchance to Dream" that suggested the Dream Machine was originally going to have five containment units instead of four, has lead some fans to believe that El Mustachio Grande (the main antagonist of Wild West Island) was originally going to appear alongside the former four as one of the main villains. While this has never been confirmed, it's worth noting that El Mustachio Grande appeared as one of the answers to the Pop Quiz question "Who is your favorite Poptropica villain?" alongside the four. Additionally, while he does not play a role in the story of Super Villain Island, he does still make a cameo during the elevator sequence alongside various other Poptropica villains.
Death Stalker contains a long hidden message in its code, which includes calls for hires, promotions for other games by the same developer and publisher, and perhaps most interestingly, a message from the writer about how he had been locked out of his car:
Hello, good evening & wellcome to Qualtan, or Death Stalker in official form! Brought to you & (c) of course, by TAG computer games. We at TAG have always wondered why you hackers don't do something contructive like writing games! If you wan't to talk to us about this subject then ring HULL (0482) 215320 & have a chat. ( do this anyway if you like! we're also after graphic artists , games testers & designers. ) Watch out for 'Ninja Massacre' its beaut!! Hope you liked '19 boot camp' we did! Coming soon, Touchlight from Palace. Hello to Rogue who are writing the CBM version , featuring the first ever 16 colour HW scroll! More games from Codemasters later in the year! I am currently stranded in the TAG office because my car is locked in the multi story car park ! , just thought you might be interested. Thanks to PDS for the wonderfull Pd system, its wonderfull! TAG - the worlds first vegetarian computer company. We love Codemasters! Especially Mark, Tim, Richard & David! but is it TRUE or FALSE we ask? Fact is often stranger than fiction! more so where computers are concerned! Who was Paragon? Who are Tiertex? What is Artic ? South Hunsley , Britains crappist school! I know! theres loads more buffer left, but I've 20 miles to walk home!
[The original message contains no line breaks; they were added by The Cutting Room Floor for readability.]
In 2013, around the launch of Disney Infinity, Disney merchandise artist Jim Valeri posted a set of images to his portfolio of angular figures, resembling the character models from Disney Infinity, of Muppets Kermit, Gonzo, Miss Piggy, Animal, Beaker, and Fozzie Bear, mentioning that they were made a year ago and he had no clue what they were for or if they would be released. While not explicitly stated, it seems heavily likely from the timing and aesthetic that these were intended as characters for Disney Infinity who never saw the light of day, possibly due to the financial failure of the 2014 film Muppets Most Wanted.
In the files of Donkey Kong's NES port are 4 unused Pauline items: early versions of the hat and parasol, the hat from the arcade version that does not appear in the NES release, and an all-new item: a bouquet of flowers.
In the Wii version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, Heather is seen holding a croquet mallet at all times - this appears to be a reference to the musical Heathers, where the 3 main characters are all named Heather and play croquet. Early concept art of the character by Ken Capelli shows that she originally had a design more closely resembling costumes from the musical and was named "Heathers". This version of Heather has long, spiky hair that is half ginger and half shadow, split down the middle. She still has her mallet, but her early design wears a green sweater instead of a green dress.
During the height of Super Mario 64 DS' popularity, a popular rumor was that Waluigi was hidden as an unlockable character - this rumor was inspired both by the presence of Wario and Luigi without their combined counterpart, and a set of coincidences within the game and its supplementary material:
• The character switching room having 4 doors, one for Mario; one for Luigi; and one for Wario, along with a final, empty room (this room actually contained a Power Star). • 4 bunnies existing in the game: a yellow bunny who appears when playing as Yoshi, a pink bunny who appears when playing as Mario, a green bunny who appears when playing as Luigi, and an orange bunny who appears when playing as Wario. The manual's page on the mini-games that bunnies are used to unlock shows a purple bunny that doesn't appear in the game. • The title screen and floor of the Rec Room having a colour scheme based on yellow (Wario's color), green (Luigi and Yoshi's color), red (Mario's color), and purple (Waluigi's color). • The image of Peach's Castle on the file select screen having what appears to be an open window that does not exist in the game, which many assume is where Waluigi would be hiding.
The popularity of these theories would birth an infamous hoax known as "Purple Prizes", a graphic created by Andrew Brown of Nintendo World Report in an attempt to rebirth the mystery he felt as a child from trying to find Luigi in the original Super Mario 64 for the younger Nintendo DS generation, and posted it to DeviantArt and a set of gaming forums under the false pretense of being a scan from an unnamed magazine. Although he clarified that the picture was fake a mere 2 days later, the image still spread online like wildfire, and was misreported as originating from Nintendo Power or IGN. Brown noted that some attempts to debunk flaws in the image were not based on the actual and plentiful flaws he acknowledged the image as having, but rather misconceptions such as Waluigi's yellow gamma being a C or accusing certain images of being based on the original Nintendo 64 game instead of the DS remake.
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Cuphead's appearance at E3 2014 features an unused boss referred to by fans as the "Demon Bat". It is unknown why this boss went unused, but it is most likely that the developers decided that certain phases from the Demon Bat's fight may have fit better with another boss in the game as this design philosophy was mentioned in an IGN interview. This is evidenced by Djimmi the Great's third phase, where he transforms into a sarcophagus and spawns minions to go straight for the player, being nearly identical to one of the Demon Bat's attacks in a pre-release screenshot from E3 2014. Another underlying reason the boss may have been scrapped is due to its pink lips and black skin unintentionally resembling offensive blackface characters from the cartoons Cuphead was inspired by.
The Chex Warrior in Chex Quest's original design was an anthropomorphic Chex rather than a humanoid in Chex armor - this was redesigned for looking too close to the M&M's mascots. The final design was influenced by Buzz Lightyear, as Toy Story had come out one year prior.
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Power Punch II was originally intended to be a licensed game starring Mike Tyson titled Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch, but, following accusations and an eventual (albeit dubious) conviction of rape against Tyson, was reworked to star an original boxing character named "Mark Tyler", with the title gaining a "2" at the end despite the non-existance of a Power Punch 1, possibly to fool customers who previously bought Punch-Out!!, but did not remember the game's name. It was at one point misreported that Nintendo were backing the game as a Punch-Out!! sequel, but this is untrue.
Whenever a character speaks during a mission in Star Fox: Assault, their name appears above the message box. Curiously, when viewing the graphic with the full list of names found within the game files, Tricky is included despite him only being present during the end cutscene of the Sauria mission where there are subtitles instead.
This suggests that he originally either spoke to you during the Sauria mission in-game, or that the cutscenes were intended to have transmission boxes instead of subtitles.
Some of the characters during Star Fox Assault's briefing cutscenes feature details in the back that are typically unseen by the player, since the models are normally only viewed from the front. The only way around this is to move the camera using an emulator.
One such example is Beltino Toad, Slippy Toad's father. Rotating his model around reveals his coat has the logo for Space Dynamics, the manufacturer for many of the Star Fox team's vehicles, such as the Arwing, Great Fox and Landmaster.
This particular logo had actually first appeared in the official Star Fox Mission File Printout guidebook released for the original Star Fox on SNES in Japan, back in 1993.
This indicates that this was either merely a placeholder, or at some point, the development team had considered bringing the original Great Fox model back as it was prior to Assault's ending.
Leaked development files for Yoshi's Island show graphics of a razor blade hazard or weapon, possibly intended to be thrown by an enemy. This was likely removed from the game over concerns of violence and/or imitability.
Atari: 80 Classic Games in One! contains two unused ROMs created to test the emulators used in the compilation. Interestingly, the .txt file that contains the descriptions of all the featured games also has explanations of what these ROMs are, suggesting that they may have at one point been planned to be included as bonus content on the compilation for regular players:
"[colours] What is this? This ROM was created as part of the development process for ^RAtari 80 Classic Games^0[sic]. This ROM was transferred into a genuine first generation Atari 2600 (bought by the lead programmer's family back in 1977!) via a Cuttlecart. It cycles through all the available colours in the Atari 2600 palette, displaying the colour's number as a binary "bar code" at the top. The output of the Atari 2600 was hooked up to a video capture card, and each frame was digitised and its colour ID determined by reading the bar code on the image. All frames of the same colour were then averaged together to get an average "RGB" colour value for that number. This process was used to get accu- rate colour matches with the original Atari 2600. [sound] What is this? This ROM was created as part of the development process for ^RAtari 80 Classic Games^0[sic]. This ROM was transferred into a genuine first gener- ation Atari 2600 (bought by the lead programmer's family back in 1977!) via a Cuttlecart. It plays a sound sequence consisting of a one second low- volume beep, 1 second of silence, and then 4 seconds of a particular Atari 2600 "voice", followed by another 1 second of silence. Each of the available voices is played in turn at a preset frequency. (Once all voices were played, the frequency would change and the process would repeat.) The output was captured via a PC's
^G(more...) Page 2 ^G(...more)
sound card and a program found the sound's fundamental pattern. These captures were used to generate accurate sound matches with the Atari 2600.
Note: The left difficulty must be in the B position for the sounds to start."
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Early sprites from Yoshi's Safari that were leaked in a major data leak of Nintendo's servers in 2020 (known as the "Gigaleak") show Yoshi's nose bleeding in his damage animation.
Across PaRappa the Rapper, you can you posters of a human pop star named "Pony Pony" - this character was originally supposed to be a member of PaRappa's friend group, but never properly appeared.
Adding "FryFox=BurnBabyBurn" to the game's configuration file will unlock a special in-joke cutscene. By clicking the electric chair in Napoleon's lab, Spy Fox will be sit down and be electrocuted into a pile of dust, before respawning through a tribute to the death animations in Dragon's Lair.
Sunsoft's NES Batman originally had cutscenes using the comic book iteration of Batman, but these had to be scrapped and replaced with digitized renditions of Micheal Keaton's live-action Batman as the game's artist was not aware that the Batman comics and movies were separate licenses. The Joker, however, was always depicted as Jack Nicholson's portrayal, even in prototypes using the comic version of Batman.
During development of Pizza Tower, multiple demo builds were released - among these was a build known as the "Peter Griffin Experience", built off of the 2018 "early test build". This demo replaced every single sprite of Peppino with a highly compressed edit of a stock image of Peter Griffin from Family Guy made to resemble Peppino, and replaced one of the game's musical tracks with a fan-made Family Guy remix.
In the lead-up to the release of Super Villain Island, a piece of concept art titled "Combo Breaker" was posted on the Daily Pop, depicting what appears to be a robot that combined elements from the four villains featured in the island's story (rabbit traits from Dr. Hare, jester traits from Mordred/Binary Bard, artist traits from Black Widow, and pirate traits from Captain Crawfish), as well as what appears to be traits reminiscent of a cowboy. This, combined with an earlier Daily Pop post titled "Perchance to Dream" that suggested the Dream Machine was originally going to have five containment units instead of four, has lead some fans to believe that El Mustachio Grande (the main antagonist of Wild West Island) was originally going to appear alongside the former four as one of the main villains. While this has never been confirmed, it's worth noting that El Mustachio Grande appeared as one of the answers to the Pop Quiz question "Who is your favorite Poptropica villain?" alongside the four. Additionally, while he does not play a role in the story of Super Villain Island, he does still make a cameo during the elevator sequence alongside various other Poptropica villains.
In 2013, around the launch of Disney Infinity, Disney merchandise artist Jim Valeri posted a set of images to his portfolio of angular figures, resembling the character models from Disney Infinity, of Muppets Kermit, Gonzo, Miss Piggy, Animal, Beaker, and Fozzie Bear, mentioning that they were made a year ago and he had no clue what they were for or if they would be released. While not explicitly stated, it seems heavily likely from the timing and aesthetic that these were intended as characters for Disney Infinity who never saw the light of day, possibly due to the financial failure of the 2014 film Muppets Most Wanted.
In the files of Donkey Kong's NES port are 4 unused Pauline items: early versions of the hat and parasol, the hat from the arcade version that does not appear in the NES release, and an all-new item: a bouquet of flowers.
In the Wii version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, Heather is seen holding a croquet mallet at all times - this appears to be a reference to the musical Heathers, where the 3 main characters are all named Heather and play croquet. Early concept art of the character by Ken Capelli shows that she originally had a design more closely resembling costumes from the musical and was named "Heathers". This version of Heather has long, spiky hair that is half ginger and half shadow, split down the middle. She still has her mallet, but her early design wears a green sweater instead of a green dress.
During the height of Super Mario 64 DS' popularity, a popular rumor was that Waluigi was hidden as an unlockable character - this rumor was inspired both by the presence of Wario and Luigi without their combined counterpart, and a set of coincidences within the game and its supplementary material:
The Chex Warrior in Chex Quest's original design was an anthropomorphic Chex rather than a humanoid in Chex armor - this was redesigned for looking too close to the M&M's mascots. The final design was influenced by Buzz Lightyear, as Toy Story had come out one year prior.
Whenever a character speaks during a mission in Star Fox: Assault, their name appears above the message box. Curiously, when viewing the graphic with the full list of names found within the game files, Tricky is included despite him only being present during the end cutscene of the Sauria mission where there are subtitles instead. 
Some of the characters during Star Fox Assault's briefing cutscenes feature details in the back that are typically unseen by the player, since the models are normally only viewed from the front. The only way around this is to move the camera using an emulator.
Unusued icons found within Star Fox Command curiously show ROB 64 with the original Great Fox as it appeared in previous installments such as Star Fox 64 and Star Fox: Assault. This is odd, because the Great Fox was already shown to be completely destroyed in the climax for the previous game, Star Fox: Assault, which is why it was replaced with a small space carrier in the final version of Command. 
Leaked development files for Yoshi's Island show graphics of a razor blade hazard or weapon, possibly intended to be thrown by an enemy. This was likely removed from the game over concerns of violence and/or imitability.
Across PaRappa the Rapper, you can you posters of a human pop star named "Pony Pony" - this character was originally supposed to be a member of PaRappa's friend group, but never properly appeared.
Adding "FryFox=BurnBabyBurn" to the game's configuration file will unlock a special in-joke cutscene. By clicking the electric chair in Napoleon's lab, Spy Fox will be sit down and be electrocuted into a pile of dust, before respawning through a tribute to the death animations in Dragon's Lair.