The Pokemon Audino's design was created for the Pokemon Anime first and foremost. Artist Ken Sugimori stated he wanted a Pokémon that would look good alongside the series' Nurse Joy just like Chansey did, as he knew the Anime would go the same route as Black and White, and would feature an entirely new roster of Pokemon.
Scorpia is the pseudonym of a video game journalist who was most active from the early 1980's through 2009 and was known for writing controversial and harsh reviews of adventure and RPG games published in Computer Gaming World magazine. One of her most notable reviews was a lukewarm review of Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World that supposedly angered the game's designer, Jon Van Caneghem, so much he wrote a lengthy response defending the game and lambasting the review that was also published in the magazine. He then named an enemy after Scorpia in the game's sequel, Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra. In a 2019 interview with Kotaku UK, Scorpia stated there was never any true bad blood between her and Caneghem, but expressed disappointment that he didn't make the monster she was named after "big and nasty".
The original arcade release of The Idolmaster had several bad endings that were allegedly received by the first location play-testers so negatively that they were immediately taken out of the game. These endings are referred to as Death endings or "Z-ENDs" which can only be seen by earning a Z grade in the evaluation of an idol's performance, and involve the idols having a final meeting with the player to tell them they are giving up. The tone of each conversation varies with some idols frustratingly yelling at the player, while others will appear severely depressed.
The existence of these endings were considered an urban legend among the game's fans until 2014, when a volunteer for the now defunct fan localization website TLWiki found all of the intact Z-ENDs hidden in the data of the game's PlayStation Portable port The Idolmaster SP, and were later uploaded to Niconico. These endings were uploaded without an English translation, though archived text translations of every Z-END by TLWiki are available and included in the self-source tab.
In an interview with LEGO Island's creative director Wes Jenkins from around 2013, he revealed that Mindscape fired the game's entire development team the day before the game was released in order to avoid paying promised bonuses:
"Long story but basically – the industry tradition (back then) was that you will receive product bonuses if you stay to the day of product release. The best solution for them (administrators) at the time was to fire everybody the day before release. There's bigger profits and then [sic] could get their investment money back before the product sells… if you don't have to pay bonuses or continued salaries. They also sold [Mindscape] eventually to bigger companies, which ended up in some legal complications… It was explained to me later when we won best of the show at E3 later that year, that "it wasn't personal – it was just business"."
The version of GoldenEye 007 that was released was technically a ROM hack of the version submitted to Nintendo for final certification. While the game was undergoing said last-minute testing, an issue was discovered with the game's memory that caused glitches in the textures featured in the Frigate level. To combat this, programmer Mark Edmonds wrote a tool to extract the game's code and data from the ROM, adjusted the hex values in the game's memory to improve the performance in the level, recompressed it, and directly added it back into the ROM image without recompiling. This version was sent back to Nintendo and certified for release as the final version of the game.
Due to lacking the sufficient budget needed to hire actors, the staff, interns and associates of Remedy Entertainment ended up lending themselves to the likenesses of many of the game's characters. Most notably creative director Sam Lake provided the face model for Max Payne, and many of his relatives ended up being part of the game's cast, including his parents who posed in multiple shots as Nicole Horne and Alfred Woden.
The development of the first Donkey Kong game was outsourced by Nintendo to Ikegami Tsushinki, a company who is believed but not confirmed to have previously worked with Nintendo on several of their early ventures into arcade games. They produced and sold to Nintendo somewhere between 8,000 and 20,000 printed circuit boards for Donkey Kong, and it is believed that Nintendo went on to copy an additional 80,000 boards from this batch without Ikegami's permission. Despite the sale, because no formal contract was known to have been signed between the two companies, Ikegami owned the source code to Donkey Kong as they had created it, and never sent it over to Nintendo.
In order to create a sequel on the coattails of the success of the first game, Nintendo employed subcontractor Iwasaki Giken to reverse-engineer Donkey Kong so Nintendo’s staff could develop the game's sequel, Donkey Kong Jr. Should this narrative be verifiably true, this would make Donkey Kong Jr. Nintendo's first "in-house" video game created by themselves without any assistance from outside development companies. Ikegami viewed this use of the source code as blatant copyright infringement, and sued Nintendo in 1983 for ¥580,000,000 (around $91,935,800). A trial in 1990 ruled that Nintendo did not own the source code to the original Donkey Kong, and the parties settled out of court the same year for an undisclosed amount.
The game's antagonist General RAAM was a last-minute addition to the game, and due to time constraints and looming production deadlines, his backstory and related context in Act 5 were not included in the original Xbox 360 release of Gears of War, but would be included in all of its future releases.
RAAM was also named after the owner of a local Indian restaurant that Epic Games' staff frequented during development.
The Sega VR is an unreleased virtual reality headset prototype add-on for the Sega Genesis announced and worked on primarily by Sega of America throughout 1991-1994. Its release was ultimately cancelled due to development issues and younger users inducing motion sickness and severe headaches from use.
Only 5 games were known to have been announced or in development before its cancellation: •Nuclear Rush: A simulation in which users pilot a hovercraft in a futuristic war. •Iron Hammer: A shoot 'em up piloting a helicopter gunship inspired by EA's Strike series. •Matrix Runner: Reportedly a cyberpunk adventure game inspired by Konami's Snatcher. •Outlaw Racing: A vehicle racing and combat game. •Virtua Racing: A port of Sega's 1992 Formula One racing arcade game announced as a launch title for the Sega VR. It's unknown how far this port made it into development, but Virtua Racing would later be released for the standalone Sega Genesis in 1994.
In November 2020, the Video Game History Foundation announced that they had successfully emulated the Sega VR's original hardware through HTC Vive with the help of fellow preservation website Gaming Alexandria by using parts of the source code of Nuclear Rush, as well as insight on the hardware and inner-workings of the cancelled games from some of their lead programmers.
Golf was never planned to be in the game. However, Shigeru Miyamoto incorrectly stated in an interview that golf was in the game, so Nintendo felt they had to put it in.
According to Director Takayuki Shimamura: "Right after getting back to Japan, he suddenly said: "You know we're including golf now." Apparently he'd stated in an interview that this time round golf shots would be determined by the backswing, even though at that time a golf game didn't exist in any shape or form!"
In an interview with DMA Design creative director Gary Penn in 2011, he revealed that the police in the game turned out the way they did because of a supposed bug where police cars in pursuit tried to ram through the center of the player's car rather than a specific side, causing their driving to become extremely aggressive and seemingly insane. Penn cited this as the point in Grand Theft Auto's development where it stopped being boring to the developers and became more "dramatic", and they started to focus on general play and "being able to piss around" more than the game's missions.
In the Broken Steel DLC, in the cutscene used for when the player character travels on the Presidential metro, the moving train is not a separate entity programmed to move on its own due to limitations with the Gamebryo engine. Instead, when the player goes on the metro, a script is triggered that equips an NPC underneath the train with a glove that turns its right hand invisible and produces the model for the Presidential metro car on top of it appearing like a giant hat. This then triggers an animation of the NPC's model sitting down and gliding along the ground in an arc that simulates the metro riding along the subway tracks.
Rivet City's Abraham Washington is the name of this NPC and is a reference to two former United States Presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
According to reports, the original script of the game gave the twin protagonists equal screen time, but the developers were asked to alter the script to include Jacob more than Evie.
The Sage Job introduced in the Endwalker expansion pack had its icon changed prior to the expansion's release due to player feedback. Originally it featured holes in the nouliths represented on the icon, however due to concern from players who suffer from trypophobia, a phobia towards clusters of small holes or bumps, the game's director Naoki Yoshida felt compelled to have the holes filled to ensure all players felt comfortable in the game.
Within the debug menu of T.H.U.G 2, there is an option to instantly grant the player a score of five million points.
When this debug function is activated, the text near the bottom of the screen in which the name of a trick performed during a combo would appear, instead the phrase, "You cheat like Kurt" fills in.
References to "Kurt" are a running inside joke within Neversoft, with numerous respective instances occurring in both Tony Hawk's Underground 1 as well as Underground 2 as Easter Eggs.
A spin-off for the Nintendo DS titled Mass Effect: Corsair was in early development but ultimately cancelled. The reason for its cancellation was due to high production costs for the DS game cartridge, according to ex-BioWare producer Mark Darrah. EA predicted the game would only sell 50,000 units with each cartridge costing $10.50 USD to produce.
Corsair would've been a combination of the games Privateer and Star Control set "in a part of the galaxy that was more piratey and not really fully explored". You'd play as an independent character exploring, collecting cargo, and selling information to the Human alliance. The development team had already started working on the flight controls and overall story before it was cancelled.
The game's data contains a different tune of the Himalayas theme, which starts off with a high pitched string instrument, rather then the style used in the final version of the game.
After the cancellation of Omega Labyrinth Z's North American localization in 2018, work began on Omega Labyrinth Life for the Nintendo Switch. In May 2019, it was announced that D3 was also working on a censored version for the Playstation 4. Despite the PS4 version being cheaper, the Switch version sold three times as many copies.
The Pokemon Audino's design was created for the Pokemon Anime first and foremost. Artist Ken Sugimori stated he wanted a Pokémon that would look good alongside the series' Nurse Joy just like Chansey did, as he knew the Anime would go the same route as Black and White, and would feature an entirely new roster of Pokemon.
Scorpia is the pseudonym of a video game journalist who was most active from the early 1980's through 2009 and was known for writing controversial and harsh reviews of adventure and RPG games published in Computer Gaming World magazine. One of her most notable reviews was a lukewarm review of Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World that supposedly angered the game's designer, Jon Van Caneghem, so much he wrote a lengthy response defending the game and lambasting the review that was also published in the magazine. He then named an enemy after Scorpia in the game's sequel, Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra. In a 2019 interview with Kotaku UK, Scorpia stated there was never any true bad blood between her and Caneghem, but expressed disappointment that he didn't make the monster she was named after "big and nasty".
The Sega VR is an unreleased virtual reality headset prototype add-on for the Sega Genesis announced and worked on primarily by Sega of America throughout 1991-1994. Its release was ultimately cancelled due to development issues and younger users inducing motion sickness and severe headaches from use.
In the Broken Steel DLC, in the cutscene used for when the player character travels on the Presidential metro, the moving train is not a separate entity programmed to move on its own due to limitations with the Gamebryo engine. Instead, when the player goes on the metro, a script is triggered that equips an NPC underneath the train with a glove that turns its right hand invisible and produces the model for the Presidential metro car on top of it appearing like a giant hat. This then triggers an animation of the NPC's model sitting down and gliding along the ground in an arc that simulates the metro riding along the subway tracks.
The Sage Job introduced in the Endwalker expansion pack had its icon changed prior to the expansion's release due to player feedback. Originally it featured holes in the nouliths represented on the icon, however due to concern from players who suffer from trypophobia, a phobia towards clusters of small holes or bumps, the game's director Naoki Yoshida felt compelled to have the holes filled to ensure all players felt comfortable in the game.
Within the debug menu of T.H.U.G 2, there is an option to instantly grant the player a score of five million points. 
The game's data contains a different tune of the Himalayas theme, which starts off with a high pitched string instrument, rather then the style used in the final version of the game.
