Cheap Cheap the Cooking Chicken has unused front-facing sprites. It is not known what these are for, but it's been speculated that she was going to use them inside the TV and then switch to her used in-profile sprite when PaRappa gets a Bad rating and she comes out of the TV to scold him.
Inside the files of Wii Fit is an early model for the trainer who less resembles a mannequin and moreso appears to be distinctly white with blonde hair and almost fully realistic. The exceptions to this being her feet which have no toes, and her clothes that - while roughly the same color as the final character - are textureless (note that the attached image appears to be wearing a white onesie due to a rendering error). Based on the structure of the model and the full version of her body texture, it is apparent that the model was originally nude and the developers simply retextured parts of her body to create her clothing. The clothing meshes have their UV data removed, making them unable to use the body texture. The trainer also has a few unused animations of some warm-up stretches and yoga poses, but her shoulders get distorted and inverted due to how they are rigged. Additionally, while the warm-up poses flow together, the yoga poses (different steps of the Tree pose) are almost completely still and have no transition between them.
Offroad Thunder has some humorous unused graphics, such as a "Winners don't use drugs" parody that says "Most winners don't use drugs", a satirical tip screen that says "use the steering wheel to steer!", someone's hand grasping a rubber chicken, and an image of a monkey with the caption "Look at the Funny[sic], DISTRACTING Monkey!!"
According to the British magazine Nintendo Magazine System, before settling on Yoshi's Island characters for Tetris Attack, Nintendo reportedly asked Rare to replace Panel de Pon's fairies with characters from the Killer Instinct series.
During development of QuackShot, a level was implemented where Donald Duck could club baby seals as enemies. This horrified producers from the Disney side of development, who demanded Sega remove the stage from the final game.
In the Japanese version, and prototype US builds, of DuckTales, the ending line of the game was the grammatically incorrect, and arguably out-of-character, Scrooge line "There really is more important treasure than this, that is... dream and friends", which was changed to "I couldn't have done it without you. I really am the richest duck in the world." for the US release. Darlene Lacey, a producer on the Disney side of DuckTales would say of the partially unused line in a Kotaku interview:
"It seemed so earnest and dramatic, I was so tempted to leave it as is, but I knew I couldn’t. So, I changed it to the more polished, but forgettable ‘Right, lads! I couldn’t have done it without you. I really am the richest duck in the world.’ I love that fans found out about the original ending. It was the better line!"
In 2023, a set of extremely early Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl screenshots were shared through Discord by a developer, showing an aesthetic closer to Slap City and early versions of SpongeBob, Oblina, Leonardo, The Dump, Jellyfish Fields, and - most notably - Rooftop Rumble, based on Shredder's lair from the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show instead of the 80s TMNT (despite the 80s turtles having already been decided on this point). Also among the images was Hardcore Chores, Rocko's DLC stage, suggesting that a Rocko's Modern Life character may have been intended for base game.
A Twitter post made on the Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl Twitter upon the release of the Garfield DLC shows that his bib alternate costume was originally supposed to be plain white with stains of lasagna tomato sauce instead of clean with red checkers.
Slap City was originally envisioned as a mini-game in Ittle Dew 2 before being reworked into a full title. The scrapped mini-game had intentionally poor presentation, being locked to 30FPS with interlacing, something that was not retained in Slap City given it's focus on competitive play, and a low-poly style inspired by the original Super Smash Bros. The polygonal alternate form of Fluffy Fields, where the Clone Team is fought in arcade mode, is based on this version of the game.
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, led 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.
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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.
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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.
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."