Simon Belmont was originally slated to be revealed for Super Smash Flash 2 on August 10th, 2018 during that year's Super Smash Con event. Coincidentially, Simon would be announced for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate two days later in an August 8th Nintendo Direct. The trailer for Super Smash Flash 2 would poke fun at the timing of the two announcements.
Eddy Gordo's last name of "Gordo" translates to "fat" in Portuguese. This is especially unfortunate since Eddy comes from Brazil where Portuguese is the majority language.
The Tsukimono area in Yakuza 5 features an ice sculpture of Hatsune Miku, a virtual idol likeness owned by Crypton Future Media and licensed out to Sega for video game appearences. Although this might be coincidental rather than an intentional reference, Crypton is located in Sapporo, the same city as Tsukimono.
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In the Switch version of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, there exists a glitch where Rocko's winning animation will show a giant black texture in an unfortunate spot, resembling a vertical censor bar. This has a coincidental resemblance to a running gag from Rocko's Modern Life, where a horizontal censor bar will cover up Rocko's bottom half whenever he is shirtless, despite him usually being able to go pantsless without issue, being a cartoon animal. This has yet to be patched.
In 1982, 7 Up licensed out Pac-Man for a commercial, depicting the game's yellow hero turning red like the 7 Up spot and consuming both 7 Up and its lemon and lime ingredients after being made thirsty by pizza. Mistakenly, the opening of the commercial depicts Pinky (or Speedy) as being orange and, as a result, identical to Clyde, as well as Pac-Man being misnamed "Pacman"; while the ending of the commercial shows Inky, two Blinkies, and a green ghost resembling Funky from Pac-Mania, which would not be released for another 5 years.
The Japanese localisation of Spot: The Video Game changes sprites of the NES and its controller into a Famicom - unusually, the Famicom has a golden color palette as if it had yellowed from overuse. Due to the image of a circuit board on the settings screen sharing a palette, this results in the circuit board also appearing yellowed. This also gives it an unintentional resemblance to the Shonen Jump 50th Anniversary Famicom Mini, released 26 years after Spot released in Japan.
Kratos appears in actual Greek mythology as a Daimon or lesser god of strength. He is most notable for being the brother of Nike. Besides the coincidence of their name, this character bears no actual resemblance to the protagonist of the God of War series.
In the E3 2019 Nintendo Direct presentation, the new CEO of Nintendo of America, Doug Bowser, was introduced with a joke comparing his last name to the antagonist of the Mario series, Bowser. However, in Japanese, the character’s name is “Koopa”, so in the Japanese broadcast of the Nintendo Direct, they clarified the joke with subtitles explaining that his name is Bowser in English-language releases.
During the height of Super Mario 64 DS' popularity, a popular rumor was that Waluigi was hidden as an unlockable character - this rumor was inspired both by the presence of Wario and Luigi without their combined counterpart, and a set of coincidences within the game and its supplementary material:
• The character switching room having 4 doors, one for Mario; one for Luigi; and one for Wario, along with a final, empty room (this room actually contained a Power Star). • 4 bunnies existing in the game: a yellow bunny who appears when playing as Yoshi, a pink bunny who appears when playing as Mario, a green bunny who appears when playing as Luigi, and an orange bunny who appears when playing as Wario. The manual's page on the mini-games that bunnies are used to unlock shows a purple bunny that doesn't appear in the game. • The title screen and floor of the Rec Room having a colour scheme based on yellow (Wario's color), green (Luigi and Yoshi's color), red (Mario's color), and purple (Waluigi's color). • The image of Peach's Castle on the file select screen having what appears to be an open window that does not exist in the game, which many assume is where Waluigi would be hiding.
The popularity of these theories would birth an infamous hoax known as "Purple Prizes", a graphic created by Andrew Brown of Nintendo World Report in an attempt to rebirth the mystery he felt as a child from trying to find Luigi in the original Super Mario 64 for the younger Nintendo DS generation, and posted it to DeviantArt and a set of gaming forums under the false pretense of being a scan from an unnamed magazine. Although he clarified that the picture was fake a mere 2 days later, the image still spread online like wildfire, and was misreported as originating from Nintendo Power or IGN. Brown noted that some attempts to debunk flaws in the image were not based on the actual and plentiful flaws he acknowledged the image as having, but rather misconceptions such as Waluigi's yellow gamma being a C or accusing certain images of being based on the original Nintendo 64 game instead of the DS remake.
When Super Mario Bros. 35 and Super Mario 3D All-Stars were released, they were criticized for being preemptively planned to be pulled from digital storefronts on March 31, 2021. This, along with the DIC Mario cartoons coincidentally being moved from Netflix to Paramount+ on the same day, spawned an internet meme depicting Mario as receiving a medieval public execution by Nintendo on that date.
Pit was first depicted with blue eyes and a laurel crown in promotional artwork for Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, which was not released in Japan until 2012. If the eye color and crown of Pit's design in 2008's Super Smash Bros. Brawl was influenced by Of Myths and Monsters and wasn't simply a coincidence, that would make it the first and so far only instance of Super Smash Bros. referencing content from a game without any kind of Japanese release at the time within gameplay, and shared with a sticker originating from Of Myths and Monsters as the first representation of a game without a Japanese release whatsoever outside of the Chronicle (which is also technically tied with trophies in the same game from Elite Beat Agents, a heavily modified localization of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan).
Whether intentional or coincidental, Luigi’s updated sprites in the Super Mario All-Stars re-release of Super Mario World reference two common misconceptions about Mario’s sprites from the original Super Mario Bros.: spitting fireballs from his mouth and hitting blocks with his head.
Prior to Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2's announcement, a convincing image "leaked" showing El Tigre in the game, which would be shared by a variety of sources including Jorge R. Gutierrez, the creator of El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera. It would later be confirmed by a moderator on the official NASB Discord (who has no involvement in the game's development) that the image was actually an art test from another Discord server and not intended to be spread as a leak. Despite this, El Tigre would still appear as playable character in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, a rather lucky coincidence given the cartoon's obscurity.
The antagonist of the original Yakuza was voiced by Kazuhiro Nakaya, who later went on to voice Ichiban Kasuga, the protagonist of Yakuza: Like A Dragon. The two characters also have the same koi tattoo, leading fans to speculate on the parallels between both characters, but aside from their voice actors and tattoos, there are only surface-level parallels.
In a prototype version of M.C. Kids, an unused sprite can be found of the Hamburglar where he appears to have a beard. At that point, the Hamburglar had never been portrayed with a beard - though, in 2015, a new iteration of the Hamburglar, portrayed without a mascot head and aimed at an older demographic, would be introduced, and he would have a beard.
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.
In Japan, Slippy Toad's father, Beltino, is called ベルツィーノ(Berutsīno) which comes from ベルツノガエル (Berutsunogaeru), meaning Bert's frog or Belted frog. This is also the Japanese name for the Argentine horned frog, better known as a Pacman frog. Funny enough, after being alluded to on the Japanese Star Fox 64 website, Beltino would go on to have a major role in Star Fox: Assault, which was developed by Namco, the creators of Pac-Man.
In July 1999, the industrial metal band Powerman 5000 wrote and released the single "When Worlds Collide", which would become one of their signature songs.
On February 23, 2016, patch version 3.2 of the "Heavensward" expansion for Final Fantasy XIV Online would be released, entitled "The Gears of Change". During the Containment Bay S1T7 trial, there is a boss fight against Sephirot, the Fiend, in two phases. The first phase's music is a rearranged version of "Battle to the Death", a boss theme originating from Final Fantasy VI where Fiend first appeared, while the second phase's music was an original song entitled "Fiend", composed and arranged by Masayoshi Soken with lyrics by Michael-Christopher Koji Fox.
The same day, a thread was made on Square Enix's forums noting the similarities between "Fiend" and "When Worlds Collide". Powerman 5000 were somehow informed of this and took to Facebook on February 24 to accuse the game's developers of ripping off "When Worlds Collide" while writing "Fiend". They claimed they were only making these allegations because the song was used in a video game, stating "If it was a song made by a fan, we wouldn't care." After the story gained traction and several mixed responses were put against Square Enix and Powerman 5000, the band's frontman Spider One made another Facebook post on February 25 revealing that the band would not be taking legal action against Square Enix, while emphasizing that their original post was "Just an observation" about "a piece of music that was way too similar to be coincidence" and there was "no cry for attention or publicity", before briefly advertising their upcoming tour dates in March and April.
In response to the controversy, the game's producer/director Naoki Yoshida released a statement in the original forum thread that spurred the controversy explaining how they created "Fiend", and stated that Soken claimed to him he was unaware of "When Worlds Collide" when writing the song:
"Building upon the motif of Sephirot as a representation of the World Tree, to create ["Fiend"], we further incorporated story-driven themes of death and a warped obsession with life, all while utilizing [industrial rock,] which we believed would provide substantial emphasis to the message."
When the silhouette of the Avatar in Sonic Forces was first revealed in a Nintendo Direct, many Sonic fans joked that the silhouette belonged to Bubsy, an infamous Sonic-inspired character from the 1990s. Almost a month after the Avatar was confirmed as the identity of the mystery character, Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back would be officially announced.
Though Donkey Kong's neutral special Giant Punch has no specific origin, Donkey Kong performs a similar wind-up punch in "Bad Hair Day", the first episode of the 1997 animated series "Donkey Kong Country", which first aired 17 months prior to the Japanese release of Super Smash Bros.
In 1982, 7 Up licensed out Pac-Man for a commercial, depicting the game's yellow hero turning red like the 7 Up spot and consuming both 7 Up and its lemon and lime ingredients after being made thirsty by pizza. Mistakenly, the opening of the commercial depicts Pinky (or Speedy) as being orange and, as a result, identical to Clyde, as well as Pac-Man being misnamed "Pacman"; while the ending of the commercial shows Inky, two Blinkies, and a green ghost resembling Funky from Pac-Mania, which would not be released for another 5 years.
The Japanese localisation of Spot: The Video Game changes sprites of the NES and its controller into a Famicom - unusually, the Famicom has a golden color palette as if it had yellowed from overuse. Due to the image of a circuit board on the settings screen sharing a palette, this results in the circuit board also appearing yellowed. This also gives it an unintentional resemblance to the Shonen Jump 50th Anniversary Famicom Mini, released 26 years after Spot released in Japan.
During the height of Super Mario 64 DS' popularity, a popular rumor was that Waluigi was hidden as an unlockable character - this rumor was inspired both by the presence of Wario and Luigi without their combined counterpart, and a set of coincidences within the game and its supplementary material:
When Super Mario Bros. 35 and Super Mario 3D All-Stars were released, they were criticized for being preemptively planned to be pulled from digital storefronts on March 31, 2021. This, along with the DIC Mario cartoons coincidentally being moved from Netflix to Paramount+ on the same day, spawned an internet meme depicting Mario as receiving a medieval public execution by Nintendo on that date.
Whether intentional or coincidental, Luigi’s updated sprites in the Super Mario All-Stars re-release of Super Mario World reference two common misconceptions about Mario’s sprites from the original Super Mario Bros.: spitting fireballs from his mouth and hitting blocks with his head.
Prior to Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2's announcement, a convincing image "leaked" showing El Tigre in the game, which would be shared by a variety of sources including Jorge R. Gutierrez, the creator of El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera. It would later be confirmed by a moderator on the official NASB Discord (who has no involvement in the game's development) that the image was actually an art test from another Discord server and not intended to be spread as a leak. Despite this, El Tigre would still appear as playable character in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, a rather lucky coincidence given the cartoon's obscurity.
The antagonist of the original Yakuza was voiced by Kazuhiro Nakaya, who later went on to voice Ichiban Kasuga, the protagonist of Yakuza: Like A Dragon. The two characters also have the same koi tattoo, leading fans to speculate on the parallels between both characters, but aside from their voice actors and tattoos, there are only surface-level parallels.
In a prototype version of M.C. Kids, an unused sprite can be found of the Hamburglar where he appears to have a beard. At that point, the Hamburglar had never been portrayed with a beard - though, in 2015, a new iteration of the Hamburglar, portrayed without a mascot head and aimed at an older demographic, would be introduced, and he would have a beard.
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. 
In Japan, Slippy Toad's father, Beltino, is called ベルツィーノ(Berutsīno) which comes from ベルツノガエル (Berutsunogaeru), meaning Bert's frog or Belted frog. This is also the Japanese name for the Argentine horned frog, better known as a Pacman frog. Funny enough, after being alluded to on the Japanese Star Fox 64 website, Beltino would go on to have a major role in Star Fox: Assault, which was developed by Namco, the creators of Pac-Man.
In July 1999, the industrial metal band Powerman 5000 wrote and released the single "When Worlds Collide", which would become one of their signature songs.
When the silhouette of the Avatar in Sonic Forces was first revealed in a Nintendo Direct, many Sonic fans joked that the silhouette belonged to Bubsy, an infamous Sonic-inspired character from the 1990s. Almost a month after the Avatar was confirmed as the identity of the mystery character, Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back would be officially announced.
Though Donkey Kong's neutral special Giant Punch has no specific origin, Donkey Kong performs a similar wind-up punch in "Bad Hair Day", the first episode of the 1997 animated series "Donkey Kong Country", which first aired 17 months prior to the Japanese release of Super Smash Bros.