The Saturn port of Virtua Racing was outsourced by Sega to the publisher Time Warner Interactive. However, Sega did not provide the developers with the source code for the game or initially a Saturn development kit, instead only giving a single arcade cabinet and some model data. The developers were thus forced to reverse engineer Virtua Racing to the best of their abilities. As a result, the game handles significantly differently from any other version of the game.
Despite a troubled development, Time Warner added a significant amount of extra content to the game, including a Grand Prix mode and increasing the 1 vehicle and 3 tracks to 5 vehicles and 10 tracks. As of 2024, this makes the Saturn version to most content-rich version of Virtua Racing.
Hidden in the files for Star Fox 64 are what seem to be remnants of an unused first-person turret mode. Several files reference a stage with the initials "SB", with its header file, fox_sb_poly.h, being titled "スター ブレード 擬き" (Sutā burēdo ki). This translates to "Star Blade Imitation", named after the 1991 on-rails space shooter by Namco, where the ship's guns can only be used in first-person. Dylan Cuthbert and other developers of the original Star Fox admitted to being heavily inspired by Star Blade, claiming that one of their main goals was to recreate the experience of the game.
The file, fox_play.h, defines 3 scroll types of levels: corridor, all-range mode, and "JYUZA", or "銃座モード" (Jūza mōdo), which translates to "Gun turret mode". This file also defines five player modes: ARWING, TANK, SUB, HUMAN, and P_JYUZA, While the SB stage is listed with the other corridor stages, it still specifies that it's in the "JYUZA" category. The SB stage itself appears to be a shortened copy of the Area 6 stage devoid of any content except for one Moras enemy, suggesting that it and other stages were meant to be played in the turret mode during development.
In the game's source code, stages such as "SB", "CL" or "Colony", and Area 6 are subtitled "Great Fox", suggesting that the Great Fox mothership was also intended to use the turret mode. It would likely have been about firing lasers and guns from the ship while trying not to take damage, as there is a string for the ship's health bar named gfox_life. The game's levels, such as the Landmaster stages, are organized into overlay groups to save on memory; Area 6 strangely isn't grouped within the turret mode stages, but Sector Y is.
This unused game mode was restored via a fanmade patch on October 30, 2024, taking a few liberties to make up for the missing code and assets.
Within leaked source code for Pokémon Black and White uncovered by the Teraleak (a large-scale breach of internal server data from Game Freak in 2024) is an unreleased Nintendo DS remake of Yoshi, which according to the commit notes was intended to test multiboot functions for the two games. Various traits in the remake suggest that it was ported from a prior attempt at a Super Nintendo Entertainment System version instead of being made with the DS in mind: its name on the title screen is Super Yoshi no Tamago, while its copyright notice is listed as 1995 and credits Ape Inc., which had shut down in the same year. Furthermore, gameplay takes place exclusively on the bottom screen, and there are no touch control features present.
The remake only has one stage, an underwater level. Mario uses Jill's voice lines from Drill Dozer while Yoshi retains his modern voice. The game is also riddled with bugs, featuring corrupted title screen graphics, a nonfunctional mode selection screen, and a glitch where the game may lock up if certain button combinations are pressed. Due to the Teraleak only containing fragments of the Pokémon Black & White source code, it is unknown if these bugs reflect the state that Super Yoshi no Tamago was in when it was abandoned.
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In October 2024, Game Freak suffered a security breach when one terabyte of internal data including over 2,600 employee records were leaked to the public, an event that Pokémon fans referred to as the "Teraleak". The initially released contents of the leak included old builds and sprites for past Pokémon games, codenames for new games, the codename "Ounce" for the Nintendo Switch successor, concepts for a sequel to the Detective Pikachu film, details on the then-unreleased Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the codename "Gaia" for the next Pokémon generation, and details regarding a pitched Pokémon MMO codenamed "Rodeo".
The most widely publicized contents of the leak were scrapped early drafts for the Sinnoh myths from the Generation IV games that were loosely inspired by folklore from different countries. These generated controversy for inserting several Pokémon into violent and sexually deviant scenarios, such as Typhlosion in the Canadian indigenous myth of the Bear Mother, and Octillery and Ursaring in a twist on the Japanese erotic woodblock art The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, of which the latter story seems to have been partially reworked into Veilstone's Myth in the final games. Game Freak would later address the leaks, stating that they had originally been breached in August of that year seemingly through a phishing attack. This statement did not acknowledge any of the leaked development material, but apologized to employees that had been put at risk by the incident.
The source code for Doubutsu no Mori contains references to a variety of non-Nintendo Famicom ROMs that would not appear in the final game, including Arkanoid, F1 Circus, and most bizarrely, the bootleg port of Tekken 2 by Hummer Team.
In the source code for Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales, a string of text can be found reading "no smutty comments please", suggesting there were previously inappropriate developer comments in the code thet were deleted.
Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales was originally intended to be a straight port of Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind to the Atari Jaguar, owing to the Jaguar's hardware similarities to the Sega Genesis. It was ultimately decided that, due to the age of Claws Encounters at the time, it would instead be a new game built off of the older game's engine. Accolade were not able to provide source code for Bubsy 2 due to it not having been completed at the time.
Some gameplay ideas used in Resident Evil - such as an action-puzzle-action-puzzle structure, and a restricted inventory system - were first explored in the very tonally opposite SNES cartoon adaptation Disney's Goof Troop, which was designed by Resident Evil's director Shinji Mikami. One rumor, originally claimed online in a Kotaku article by Tim Rogers, who claimed to have been informed of the connection by an unspecified "tech genius" friend, suggests that Resident Evil is built off of Goof Troop's source code.
As admitted by Mitsuhiro Takano (the original script writer for Star Fox 64) in an issue of Iwata Asks regarding Star Fox 64 3D, the development team had initially planned on including more aquatic stages based around the Blue Marine in the original game, but these were removed because they felt they dragged down the pace too much. In the Japanese version of the Aquas stage in Star Fox 64, Falco says:
こんな物 後にも先にも１回きりだぜ！(This is like the only time in our life we'll ever use this thing!)
English SF64's equivalent to this is "This thing will never hold together."
Apparently, this was the result of Takano feeling bad about there only being one underwater stage in all of SF64's single-player mode.
Going by files pertaining to Star Fox 64 found within the Nintendo Gigaleak, it seems one of these cut Blue Marine stages was known as カトレア (Katorea), which properly translates into Cattleya. Cattleya is a genus of orchids, which adds more credence that this was planned to be a beautiful water planet. The planet's initials (CL) show up in many other other source files, which gives clue to what it would've been like; for example, fox_edisplay references CL_SHIP0, CL_SHIP1, and fish00, whereas fox_boss.h refers to CL's boss as 鯖/saba, or "mackerel.” fox_jyuza.o meanwhile refers to a "saba snake", which heavily implies that the stage's boss would have been a giant fish creature or an eel of some kind.
On December 12, 2023, a ransomware gang named Rhysida announced they they had hacked internal servers at Insomniac Games and stole upwards of 1.67 terabytes of data, including unreleased screenshots and concept art of the then-upcoming game Marvel's Wolverine, a timeline of upcoming Insomniac releases, as well as HR documents, emails, tax forms, internal conversations, and passports relating to current and former Insomniac employees, with the group posting a selection of this data as evidence of the theft. The group claimed it only took them 20-25 minutes to access the company's domain server and their motive was to publicly hold the stolen data for ransom. They offered to auction it off to anyone for 50 bitcoin, or $2 million USD, so long as the data was not resold by the new owners, with the deadline being a week from then. Reportedly 2% of the stolen data was purchased by unknown parties, but Insomniac did not purchase any of it back, leading Rhysida to release the remainder of the stolen data to the public.
Fichina, the ice planet that was introduced in Star Fox 64, is infamously erroneously called Fortuna in the English version of the game. Fortuna was previously the name of the jungle planet from Star Fox on SNES filled with monstrous and primordial creatures. It was also infamously dubbed "the Dinosaur Planet", years before the Star Fox series would incorporate another Dinosaur Planet with Star Fox Adventures.
However, looking through leaked SF64 files from the Gigaleak, there does seem to be evidence that Nintendo dubbed Fichina as Fortuna for most of SF64's development, only to change the name to Fichina at the tail end of it. Almost all of the source code refers to it as Fortuna, and the internal file system has “FO” appended to all of the stage’s assets. The image file Nintendo provided for the stage name to be translated is also labeled FO_E_FO. With the decision to rename it to Fichina seemingly being a last minute one, it's possible Nintendo of America were not brought up to speed by Nintendo's Japanese branch of this lore change when they were originally localizing SF64.
Nonetheless, Nintendo has since firmly established Fichina and Fortuna (as it was in the SNES game) as being their own distinct planets, with both appearing together in Star Fox: Assault and Star Fox Zero. Strangely, in the former game, Fortuna's Japanese name フォーチュナ (Fōchuna) was slightly modified to フォーチュナー (Fōchunā), which would translate into "Fortuner" in English.
In the castle courtyard in Super Mario 64, there is a plaque to a power star with an illegible name written below, often interpreted as either "Eternal Star" or "L is Real 2401" - with the latter being more popular for how it could be seen as a cryptic hint towards unlocking Luigi.
A "2.0" version of SkiFree was in development in 1993, which would've had online multiplayer; improved physics; AI opponents; and sound, however the physics ended up being corrupted and the source code was lost, so it could not be finished. SkiFree creator Chris Pirih's website has voice clips of the game's sasquatch that may have originated from this version.
A fully functional version of Windows 3.1's Reversi game exists within the source code for Windows XP. The original graphics still work, but for unknown reasons the game forces itself to be monochrome.
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The source code for Gremlins Unleashed contains several hidden messages, including pictures of Gremlins characters, a shoutout to Subito Pizza and Pizza Hut from the graphists, and several profane rants.
One of the messages, resembling the Windows Blue Screen of Death, can also be found in Kirikou, another title developed by Planet Interactive.
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, no formal contract was known to have been signed between the two companies, meaning 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 that year for an undisclosed amount.
Hidden in the files for Star Fox 64 are what seem to be remnants of an unused first-person turret mode. Several files reference a stage with the initials "SB", with its header file, fox_sb_poly.h, being titled "スター ブレード 擬き" (Sutā burēdo ki). This translates to "Star Blade Imitation", named after the 1991 on-rails space shooter by Namco, where the ship's guns can only be used in first-person. Dylan Cuthbert and other developers of the original Star Fox admitted to being heavily inspired by Star Blade, claiming that one of their main goals was to recreate the experience of the game. 
Within leaked source code for Pokémon Black and White uncovered by the Teraleak (a large-scale breach of internal server data from Game Freak in 2024) is an unreleased Nintendo DS remake of Yoshi, which according to the commit notes was intended to test multiboot functions for the two games. Various traits in the remake suggest that it was ported from a prior attempt at a Super Nintendo Entertainment System version instead of being made with the DS in mind: its name on the title screen is Super Yoshi no Tamago, while its copyright notice is listed as 1995 and credits Ape Inc., which had shut down in the same year. Furthermore, gameplay takes place exclusively on the bottom screen, and there are no touch control features present.
As admitted by Mitsuhiro Takano (the original script writer for Star Fox 64) in an issue of Iwata Asks regarding Star Fox 64 3D, the development team had initially planned on including more aquatic stages based around the Blue Marine in the original game, but these were removed because they felt they dragged down the pace too much. In the Japanese version of the Aquas stage in Star Fox 64, Falco says:
Fichina, the ice planet that was introduced in Star Fox 64, is infamously erroneously called Fortuna in the English version of the game. Fortuna was previously the name of the jungle planet from Star Fox on SNES filled with monstrous and primordial creatures. It was also infamously dubbed "the Dinosaur Planet", years before the Star Fox series would incorporate another Dinosaur Planet with Star Fox Adventures. 
In the castle courtyard in Super Mario 64, there is a plaque to a power star with an illegible name written below, often interpreted as either "Eternal Star" or "L is Real 2401" - with the latter being more popular for how it could be seen as a cryptic hint towards unlocking Luigi. 
A "2.0" version of SkiFree was in development in 1993, which would've had online multiplayer; improved physics; AI opponents; and sound, however the physics ended up being corrupted and the source code was lost, so it could not be finished. SkiFree creator Chris Pirih's website has voice clips of the game's sasquatch that may have originated from this version.
A fully functional version of Windows 3.1's Reversi game exists within the source code for Windows XP. The original graphics still work, but for unknown reasons the game forces itself to be monochrome.
