According to designer Jens Bergensten, when Creepers were added in the game's alpha build, Notch may have given them their green skin color so they could be camouflaged and blend in with the grass.
In the 2004 art book "A Universe of Storyboards: Birth of an Image", the Kiri Matsuura section features concept art of an early design for Vibri that resembles a human more than a rabbit, having large beady eyes and eye lashes, hair, a more defined nose and mouth, and sketchy fingers.
During an interview with GamesHub, it was revealed that Stray Gods was inspired by the television series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", specifically the season six episode "Once More, With Feeling". While the episode's plot was standard for the show, it was notable for being one of the first "musical TV episodes", combining elements of the musical genre with heavy action and narrative storytelling. Liam Esler, the Managing Director of Summerfall Studios, stated that they wanted to replicate what TV musicals did for television but with video games.
According to one of several patents filed by producer Masaya Matsuura and programmer John Belmonte for Sony in October 1999, it seems the game was planned to have a split-screen multiplayer mode, with the goal possibly being to see who could get the most points.
According to a Q&A with producer Masaya Matsuura included in the game's European press kit, Vibri's voice was generated with a Speech Synthesizer developed by NTT Communications, and was used because it was capable of not only vocalizing speech, but also singing. He went on to explain the process:
"When a person speaks, the sound waves are transformed continuously. With NTT's system, each sound is picked up from the Database of tiny waves which [are] connected in order to vocalize. Therefore, the part that analyzes a sentence and puts the sounds together and the Database itself are all very complicated in structure. This system is a standard format in terms of sound synthesizing technology, but Vib-Ribbon successfully integrated this system into the game."
When the game was first announced, Nintendo did not reveal what company was developing the game, only stating that some former developers from AlphaDream, the company that developed all previous games in the series, were involved. It wouldn't be until the intellectual property notices were discovered that the developer was identified as Acquire, who were best known for developing the Tenchu, Way of the Samurai, and Octopath Traveler series.
In an interview with Nintendo Minute, ARMS producer Kosuke Yabuki revealed that some employees at Nintendo of America found the initial sketches of Lola Pop to be frightening. Since coulrophobia (the fear of clowns) was uncommon in Japan, Yabuki felt like he had "learned a weak point of Americans."
With the development of New Super Mario Bros. 2 and New Super Mario Bros. U happening simultaneously, Nintendo created a "Mario Cram School" to teach developers from outside the core Super Mario team how to design levels. Most of the core developers of New Super Mario Bros. 2 were "graduates" of this program, while New Super Mario Bros. U was developed by the same core team that made prior games in the series.
The character Marcas Brickley is played by Sean McLoughlin, better known as the YouTuber Jacksepticeye. During his playthrough of Chapter 2 where the videotape featuring Marcas appears, McLoughlin revealed various details about getting into the character and recording his part. The video was recorded months before the chapter's release and required him to record in a place that resembled an office, something that took him "ages" to find and required audio treatment due to the room not having sound padding. To match the color scheme of Playtime Co., McLoughlin was required to wear a yellow shirt, with the lanyard the character wears being made from scratch by combining a lanyard, a piece of paper printed with a fake barcode, his character's name, and the Playtime Co. logo, which he found on Poppy Playtime's merchandise website. Additionally, at the end of the video tape, Leith Pierre asks Marcas to bring him a cup of coffee; while unconfirmed, this may be a reference to McLoughlin's coffee company, Top of the Mornin' Coffee. During his playthrough of Chapter 3, McLoughlin revealed that he had been asked to reprise his role, but was unable to due to scheduling conflicts.
The Sega Saturn and PlayStation ports of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition feature no credits. Decades later, interviews with Iguana Entertainment employees confirmed that these ports were mostly co-developed by Darren Tunnicliff and Chris Kirby respectively at the studio's UK branch. The two ports shared much of the same C code translated from the arcade version's assembly code, despite being released on competing hardware.
When localizing the game into English, Xseed Games' editors found themselves challenged by the game's script, which has approximately 1.5 million Japanese characters in it. According to lead editor Jessica Chavez, many other companies had been put off localizing it specifically because of its length, and during the process she had "worked from home 11-14hrs a day, 6 days/week, lost 7lbs, cut off 18inches of my hair and used the XSEED twitter account to further the cause of bacon on more than one occasion". Ultimately, the company had to employ three translators, two editors (one of whom was brought on to help finish chapter 4 of the game), and "one or two other helpful Sora no Kiseki experts that didn’t mind spontaneous Instant Messages asking about whether or not certain characters would be at home saying things like, 'Lo! I am hoist with my own petard!'".
Some players and game journalists have persistently accused the game's developers HoYoverse of perceived cultural appropriation and discriminating against people with dark skin colors through the game's character designs. This started in April 2021, when it was noted how the only dark-skinned playable characters at the time, Xinyan and Kaeya, were described in-game as "exotic" and "scary" respectively. The release of version 3.0 in August 2022 introduced the Sumeru region, which while being based on cultures from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, depicted many playable characters and NPCs from the region as being light-skinned. In March 2023, the character Dehya was released; while hailing from Sumeru and being one of the few dark-skinned playable characters in the game, she faced similar accusations due to some fans perceiving her abilities as underpowered and dysfunctional. In July 2024, HoYoverse released a trailer announcing they would be adding a new region to the game named Natlan, which was inspired by pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, Africa and Polynesia. The character designs used for Natlan were once again criticized due to the majority of the characters being depicted with light skin despite the darker-skinned native races of its inspirations. The difference this time was that seven of the game's voice actors also joined in the criticism, including Khoi Dao (Albedo), Zeno Robinson (Sethos), Valeria Rodriguez (Sucrose), Jenny Yokobori (Yoimiya), Alejandro Saeb (Cyno), Allegra Clark (Beidou), and Anne Yatco (Raiden Shogun).
In 2020, Gangs of London was adapted into a television series by Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery. In an interview with Sky News about the show, Evans revealed that he was originally hired to make a film franchise based on the game, but felt that if they went this route then they would have "two-thirds of our running time focused purely on our central characters, and then only a third left to explore the side characters that populate that world". Feeling this wouldn't be able to do justice to the diverse cultures and ethnicities that make up London, Evans proposed making it a TV show instead because "you can afford to go off and detour for 10 to 15 minutes and spend time with other characters, and learn about them in more detail."
Due to its poor reception and short lifespan, over 60 Sega 32X games are known to have been cancelled. As the 32X only received 40 official releases worldwide, this makes it unusual in that it had more cancellations than actual game releases. Many of the cancelled 32X games would eventually be ported to other platforms to commercial and/or critical success, including Daytona USA, Die Hard Trilogy, and Rayman.
EVA's English voice actress in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was credited under the name Suzetta Miñet. Fans widely assumed that this was a pseudonym as she had no other credits in anything, which sparked years of speculation as to who she could be. One of the most leading theories was that EVA was voiced by Debi Mae West, the voice of Meryl in Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. However, while West acknowledged that the characters sounded similar, she denied she was the voice of EVA in 2015. Konami would eventually confirm in a 2024 behind-the-scenes video promoting Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater that the pseudonym belonged to Jodi Benson, who was best known for voicing Ariel in Disney's 1989 adaptation of "The Little Mermaid". Benson explained that she used the pseudonym at the recommendation of the game's English voice director Kris Zimmerman Salter, because of her association with Disney and other family-friendly roles aimed towards younger audiences at the time. The name itself was based on a pet dog Benson owned in her childhood named "Suzette Monet".
Originally, the South Asian area of the game was specified to be Bangladesh, but this was changed due to a complaint from the Bangladeshi government regarding the portrayal of the region, with a Sony spokesperson stating:
"The SOCOM franchise has never depicted any government or country as a terrorist operation, and any depiction of independent terrorist groups is purely from a fictional standpoint. Within the storyline of SOCOM 3, there has never been any reference to Bangladesh supporting, or harboring terrorists and/or other criminal activities."
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.
Concept art for the game suggests that there were plans to include V.I.P. Bots based on Sweet Tooth from the Twisted Metal series and Princess Plump from the Fat Princess series at some point in development, but were ultimately scrapped.
Unlike the development of the first game, series creators John Garvin and Richard Ham both had a complete vision of what Syphon Filter 2 would be like prior to development, with Garvin stating in an interview with PlayStation Blog:
"The entire team was given a week off and [Richard Ham] and I were sent off to write up a script for Syphon Filter 2. I think I spent a weekend and wrote the entire screenplay. Rich and I got together and he helped revise the second half of the game, introducing all the Moscow stuff, making the end of the story more espionage-like and exciting. When the team came back, we spent the next year building exactly what we had written. That was the first time that we had a vision up front, which we followed until the end."
Maxis Studio One began life as a group of college friends working on a fan project called "SimBots", which would have allowed players to turn cities created in SimCity 2000 into arenas for mecha battles. Maxis caught wind of this project and hired the team, but cancelled the SimBots project. The team was instead tasked with developing the Sega Saturn port of SimCity 2000, starting in June 1994, at which point no development hardware was actually available until October. A single "Sophia" development kit was obtained in December, and development lasted until August 1995, with the port releasing in Autumn.
The Saturn port has a few technical oddities as a result of its short development time. For example, saving a single city required 461 blocks of memory (about 32 kilobytes), equivalent to virtually all of the Saturn's internal storage. Although the Saturn featured dual-CPU architecture, only a single CPU was used, causing the game to run very slowly with more complex cities.
In the 2004 art book "A Universe of Storyboards: Birth of an Image", the Kiri Matsuura section features concept art of an early design for Vibri that resembles a human more than a rabbit, having large beady eyes and eye lashes, hair, a more defined nose and mouth, and sketchy fingers.
According to one of several patents filed by producer Masaya Matsuura and programmer John Belmonte for Sony in October 1999, it seems the game was planned to have a split-screen multiplayer mode, with the goal possibly being to see who could get the most points.
The character Marcas Brickley is played by Sean McLoughlin, better known as the YouTuber Jacksepticeye. During his playthrough of Chapter 2 where the videotape featuring Marcas appears, McLoughlin revealed various details about getting into the character and recording his part. The video was recorded months before the chapter's release and required him to record in a place that resembled an office, something that took him "ages" to find and required audio treatment due to the room not having sound padding. To match the color scheme of Playtime Co., McLoughlin was required to wear a yellow shirt, with the lanyard the character wears being made from scratch by combining a lanyard, a piece of paper printed with a fake barcode, his character's name, and the Playtime Co. logo, which he found on Poppy Playtime's merchandise website. Additionally, at the end of the video tape, Leith Pierre asks Marcas to bring him a cup of coffee; while unconfirmed, this may be a reference to McLoughlin's coffee company, Top of the Mornin' Coffee. During his playthrough of Chapter 3, McLoughlin revealed that he had been asked to reprise his role, but was unable to due to scheduling conflicts.
Concept art for the game suggests that there were plans to include V.I.P. Bots based on Sweet Tooth from the Twisted Metal series and Princess Plump from the Fat Princess series at some point in development, but were ultimately scrapped.
