On May 15, 2025, a graphic artist named Antireal accused Bungie of stealing digital artwork originally uploaded to her Twitter account in 2017 for use in Marathon, posting three comparison images including an in-game texture featuring a partly erased artist signature. This, coming after multiple plagiarism controversies in Destiny 2 and Bungie's ineffectiveness in addressing the practice, drew widespread criticism from players. The same day, the game's development team issued a response confirming that a former Bungie employee included the designs on a texture sheet, and that they had reached out to Antireal to negotiate how to resolve the controversy. During a livestream the following day, game director Joe Ziegler and art director Joseph Cross asserted that the plagiarism was only restricted to certain in-game assets, and that they were conducting a full review to determine if any more were used without credit. It was pointed out that Cross and other Bungie employees had followed her Twitter account for "a few years" before this controversy; Antireal claimed she had no prior communication with them. Around the same time, a 2024 tweet was rediscovered where she revealed that she had hidden references to "Loss", a 2007 four-panel strip from the webcomic "Ctrl+Alt+Del" that became a meme, in her illustrations as early as 2018. Another user replied with an in-game Marathon screenshot of a whiteboard and a Loss meme drawn in marker, but Antireal did not bring this up in her original accusations and has yet to confirm or deny that this version of Loss was the one she used.

Although the DK Spaceport course is primarily based on the original arcade version of Donkey Kong, there are also a few elements of the course taken from the Game & Watch version of the game. Specifically, the starting banner is modelled after the Donkey Kong Game & Watch unit, and iconography based on the directional pad can be seen throughout the course.

According to director kyp, the game's narrative was based on the web novel series "Another Scary Fairy Tale" by Shizue Fueti on the Japanese fetish website G-Fork, which followed the daily life of a 13-year old girl junior high school student named Saeko, who shrinks and kidnaps her classmates. Having read the novel in junior high school during the 2010's, kyp contacted Fueti to ask if he could create a game based on it, and was granted permission to do so. Unlike the source material, the game depicts Saeko as a university student, and does not feature explicit sexual content.

Found in the game's files are unused, fully completed animated narrative transitions containing thematically appropriate quotes from the Lewis Carroll novel "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". While some of these were used in the final game, not all of them were.

Of note is that the unused quote pertaining to the "bottle" utilizes a subliminal-style visual effect with the quote which was recycled in the final game. The words "Drink Me" briefly flicker in order to state "Fuck Me", and when the narrative card cuts (as if to finish loading back into gameplay) it will very quickly flash into the words, "Kill You". The entire sequence would chronologically state: "Fuck Me, Drink Me, Kill You", foreshadowing the events of the "Join Citra" ending. In the retail version, the final quote transition used in the game states, "There is always a moral, if only you can find it." in which case, again, the word "find" will flicker into the word, "fuck", also foreshadowing that ending.

Evidently, the foreshadowing of Far Cry 3's "Bad Ending" was recycled in the retail version, possibly because of the original vision both being more direct and elaborate, as well as theoretically occurring much earlier in the story if implemented as is.

Fantasy Life Online was originally announced in April 2015 as "Fantasy Life 2: Two Moons and the Village of God". However, the game suffered numerous delays, eventually being released as Fantasy Life Online in 2018. According to a statement from Level-5, the reason why the name was changed was so that new players could view the game as a new title in the series rather than as a sequel to the first game.

Club Penguin and its developer were purchased by The Walt Disney Company in August 2007, but three months beforehand, reports had circulated that AOL and Sony were also competing to acquire them. Around the same time in June, the game held its first cross-promotional event with the Sony animated film Surf's Up, which also featured penguins. The content added was a surfing minigame and generic beach-themed areas and items that for the most part were already being planned as is, and did not implement Surf's Up characters into the game world. This came in stark contrast to the "takeovers" the game would do following the Disney buyout, which would often introduce non-penguin characters from other Disney properties into the game world. At the time of the Surf's Up promotion, the development team was apprehensive about crossover content, as they felt it would break the immersion of the game. A shell necklace was added as a wearable item during the promotion as an indirect reference to the necklace given to Cody by his idol Big Z in the film, but the team was adamant that it should be a generic item and not have not have the "Z" etched onto it.

In the files of Drill Dozer, a sprite can be found of an "S button", a button that has never existed on Nintendo platforms. It was most likely an attempt at creating a shorthand for Start or Select, as the circular shape of the button resembles the Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Advance SP, and Nintendo GameCube's Start buttons, and the written S was reused for the final game's Start button sprite seen when cracking locks. However, it does not resemble either the Game Boy Micro nor Nintendo DS' Start buttons, both of which were available by the time Drill Dozer released, which alongside "S" being shared as two button's acronyms likely led to the sprite being replaced with one that reads out the entire name of the button and resembles the Start and Select buttons seen on the Micro and DS.

The game's creator Colin McIsaac has stated that it was inspired by his childhood experience reading the trophy gallery in the Super Smash Bros. series and going down various Wikipedia "rabbit holes" related to games and television series he enjoyed. He also wanted to pass on that experience through more easily accessible source material rather than the games featured in the Super Smash Bros. series:

After the literary character Sherlock Holmes entered the public domain in 1981, the estate of author Arthur Conan Doyle staunchly protected the remaining copyrights for the character until 2023, on the basis of infringing works using human emotions or opinions not shown in earlier stories (i.e. respecting women, liking dogs, a warmer relationship with his partner Watson). Royalty Free-for-All was originally going to feature Sherlock Holmes as a robotic character to poke fun at these restrictions while playing by them, but it was later decided that another literary character, the murderous barber Sweeney Todd, was a better fit for a robot and could be depicted as electronic shaving equipment. This decision was also motivated by Conan Doyle's final Sherlock Holmes stories having gone into the public domain by the time the game was revealed, making the original joke outdated.

Both Menace Beach and its Christian-themed reskin Sunday Funday: The Ride contain a hidden developer message that can be seen by holding Down, Left, and Select when the text "PRESS A TO REPLAY SCREEN, PRESS START TO RESTART GAME" appears during the ending. After doing so, a series of beeps will play, followed by the game bringing up the developer message, a special thanks blurb.

The bit Generations series was intended to be released in North America under the title "Digiluxe", as shown by assorted ESRB ratings for the games Boundish, Dotstream, Soundvoyager, and Coloris, the latter going by the localized name Chromatron. The Digiluxe name was used for the bit Generations stickers in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and due to the lack of information given in the ESRB ratings, Coloris can only be singled out as the identity of Chromatron with the name given to the sticker in Brawl.

Unlike in the 1940 Disney film where he goes unpunished for his crimes, the Coachman receives his comeuppance in the 1995/1996 game adaptation of the film, where Pinocchio kicks him off of a seaside cliff at the end of the game's fourth level.

According to then-studio head of Backbone Entertainment Mike Mika, the Game Boy Advance release of Charlotte's Web was referred to internally as "Pig of Persia" during development, as the game design was "absurdly" based on Prince of Persia.

Gran Turismo was the first PlayStation game released that was designed to fully support an iteration of the DualShock controller.

Gradius began development as a sequel to Konami's 1981 shoot 'em up Scramble under the name Scramble 2. According to director Hiroyasu Machiguchi, the decision to make it a horizontal shoot 'em up game was because they wanted to reuse as much of the materials for Scramble as possible during development.

The Namco Gallery versions of Mappy and Family Tennis are outliers among Super Game Boy enhanced games, as they decrease the amount of fine details as opposed to adding them. Mappy removing shading and outlines from sprites, while Family Tennis removes patterns from the court floor. Both of these were likely done to more faithfully capture the multi-color original games compared to the monochrome versions.

The idea of Mario Kart characters eating various foods and transforming into different costumes originally started as two different ideas. According to Mario Kart 7 and Mario Kart 8 director Kosuke Yabuki, the team almost considered having players buy costumes for specific characters using in-game coins (similar to the way players buy alternate-costumed characters in Mario Kart Tour), with players having to drive to a clothing store rather than the "Yoshi's" fast-food restaurant.

Additionally, the idea of characters eating food was already considered at the very beginning of development, but was nearly removed. According to general game designer Shintaro Jikumaru:

The Game Boy version of Mappy released as part of Namco Gallery Vol. 1 had trouble communicating the color-coded trampoline cycle from the original game through the console's monochrome palette. Typically, color-coded elements are replaced with patterns (such as in Dr. Mario and Zoop), but since the Mappy trampolines are too thin to apply a pattern to, they are instead black and become thinner as a workaround. The Super Game Boy version makes them white instead, as it has a black background replicating the original game.

Development on Mario Kart World started as far back as when Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was just wrapping up production, and official work started at the end of 2017 as a title for the original Nintendo Switch. From the very beginning, the game started off as an open-world experience, which is why the game is called Mario Kart World instead of Mario Kart 9. Because of this, having 24 racers in a single game rather than 12, like in 8 Deluxe, was already in consideration.

Technical limitations of the original Nintendo Switch console made development very difficult, and the team shifted to the then-upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 in 2020. Because of the longer-than-anticipated development, the team released the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass to fill the void while Nintendo was still working on Mario Kart World.

The plot of DmC: Devil May Cry was written by director Tameem Antoniades, while film director and writer Alex Garland is credited as a story supervisor. Although he worked extensively with Antoniades on the writing and design of Ninja Theory's previous game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, he had very little known involvement with the development of DmC: Devil May Cry. Antoniades claimed that Garland warned him to be prepared for death threats over the game's drastic changes from the rest of the series, and that "although I'm writing I'm still under his consultation." Conversely, when asked about his involvement in a 2025 GQ interview, Garland only replied with: "Yeah, no, I did fuck all on that."