In a 2024 GameRant interview with the game's director and designer Jens Andersson, he went into detail about Bethesda collaborating with Lucasfilm Games, what input they had on the game, and how much creative freedom Bethesda were given. Bethesda director Todd Howard originally came up with the idea of making a game about the Great Circle, but the game's story was entirely devised by Andersson and his team after the first two months of development. Lucasfilm Games gave feedback on the story, and Bethesda cooperated because they were fans of the franchise and felt Lucasfilm Games were on the same page in regards to their goals. They trusted Lucasfilm as a whole to know how the Indiana Jones character and IP should be treated in order to create "something that felt like an Indiana Jones experience".
In the files for Star Fox 64 found in the 2020 Nintendo Gigaleak are references and assets for what appears to be a scrapped level named "Battleship". The string fox_map.c interchangeably calls it "Battleship", "Giant Battleship", and "Ground Ship"; it's possible that the latter could be a mistranslation of "Grand Ship", as they're spelled the same way in Japanese. The stage used a full 3D model, like Area 6 and Bolse, as its icon on the map selection screen. Its intended location was where Sector Y currently sits on the Lylat map selection screen, which is the hard path taken from Corneria, and its two branching pathways were known to be Zoness on the hard route and "Fortuna" (Fichina) on the normal route. According to the string fox_play.h, it was an all-range mode stage, and the audio_game.h string makes it appear that it was going to reuse Bolse's theme for its background music, implying that there would have been multiple phases for the level. This stage also had its own enemy data file, implying that it would have featured other enemy ships of some sort.
In October 2024, a group of modders and hackers responsible for the Star Fox 64 Decompilation Project were able to recreate this discarded stage via a fanmade patch.
Mouthwashing uses a visual style inspired by games released on the original PlayStation, with low-poly visuals and a retro style. The game's art designer Johanna Kasurinen was introduced to this style by Puppet Combo, an indie developer that frequently uses it for their games as far back as their debut title Babysitter Bloodbath. While not promoted as "PS1-style", this visual style gained traction over time, with Kasurinan stating:
"I think people may be surprised by how long this [horror] subgenre has been going on, but part of why it is so popular and enduring is the community. I would never have been able to learn how to recreate this style of graphics if it wasn't for many artists before me making videos and tutorials explaining the process."
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.
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In a developer Q&A posted on the game's Steam community page, the staff at Wrong Organ revealed that Jimmy was named after a person repeatedly mentioned in the 2023 song "A&W" by American alternative pop singer Lana Del Rey. In addition to inspiring Jimmy's name, the song may also serve as the basis for Spoiler:Jimmy's role in the game as Anya's implied rapist, given that "A&W" describes "the experience of bein' an American whore" and features multiple passages where Del Rey repeats the line "Jimmy only love me when he wanna get high."
Based on a pre-release screenshot used as a preview in other JumpStart products, the menu interface originally had a different appearance. Specifically, the toolbar was a simple black bar that took up the full width of the screen, the icons used different colors and designs, and the background of a scene in which Ruby talks to Frankie in the backyard was much simpler and missing several elements present in the final game (i.e. the red wheel to the right of Frankie).
During the September 2020 Game Boy lot check leak, it was discovered that Magnetic Soccer was at one point planned to have a Japanese release under the name "Kick Attack!!". As part of this, alternate versions of the game's title and sound test screens were found: along with the logo and copyright changes, the colors of the player's skin and outfit were swapped (a change that applies to both screens), the ball uses different shading, and the player shouts "Fight!!" and "Go! Go!" in text form, something that does not happen in the European version.
Skyla was originally conceived as a Dragon-type gym leader, while Iris was conceived as a Flying-type one. These attributes were swapped relatively early into development: examining character pitches for both gym leaders found in the Teraleak (a large-scale breach of internal server data from Game Freak in 2024), the earliest recovered revisions are the only ones which describe them with their initial type specializations. From the second revision of the documents onward, they bear the same types seen in the final game.
Of note is that Iris' later pitches describe her Dragon-type specialization as stemming from a connection that she felt since birth. Given that these subsequent drafts change her ethnicity from "indigenous" (likely Mesoamerican given her use of "Aztec-style" hair decorations) to "Middle Eastern," these traits imply that she is intended to be multiethnic (as within Middle Eastern cultures, dragons are found in Canaanite, Mesopotamian, and Persian mythology, while her outfit, a galabeya, is generally associated with rural Egyptians).
In an interview with the game's designer and writer Yuji Horii published in the 1987 GSLA, he discussed the memory limitations that his team faced during the development of the Famicom version of Dragon Quest II, leading them to remove some elements from the final game, including:
• Large, kamishibai-esque pictures meant for cutscenes. Horii noted that one of these images was quietly preserved in the story section of the Dragon Quest II instruction manual, appearing in black and white instead of color. • An expanded scenario involving a full-size image of Rhone’s landscape, visible from the top of a lighthouse. This image would have featured a single sparkling point of light in the sea, marking the location of the sunken treasure required to get the Echo Flute. However, due to memory constraints, the image had to be cut, and the scenario was subsequently changed. • A more humorous idea they had to abandon was the "Abunai Mizugi" (Scandalous Swimsuit). This piece of armor, intended to be as strong as the Mink Coat and extremely expensive, would have caused the Princess of Moonbrooke's character sprite to change to reflect her wearing it. While it was cut from the Famicom version of the game, it was included as equippable armor for the Princess in the MSX version. It was slightly modified from the original idea, where every enemy has a 1/8th chance to be stunned by her beauty while she wears it.
Several costumes featured in the game's announcement trailer have different names than they do in the final game: • Tornado Wolf was "Whirling Wolf". • Inky Blaster was "Cephalopainter". • Water Blaster was "Super Streamer".
According to designer Ste Pickford, the reason Nintendo hired Software Creations to make Tin Star was as a form of compensation for not assigning them to do a follow-up to Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball despite them developing the original, with the sequel instead being developed by Rare as Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run.
There are three unused graphics in the game: a simplistic graphic listing off the game's three activities (with the unnamed crate-stacking activity referred to as "Hanoi Tower"), an alternate version of the dungeon's background with different lighting and design for the door, and the background for the credits screen from JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain, which was unused due to the credit sequence being stored on a video file and was likely just a placeholder until the new credits sequence was developed.
According to two interviews with Famitsu in 1998, Shigeru Miyamoto cited Rare's exceptional graphical and technical work on Banjo-Kazooie as a factor for why The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was delayed, as Miyamoto and his team felt they needed to compete with it. He thought a 3D action platformer of its kind running that well on Nintendo 64 hardware was "so amazing that we don't want to be outdone", and "if Mario's a makunouchi bento, Banjo's a deluxe makunouchi bento." Some reviews of Ocarina of Time at its release compared its graphics, frame rate and textures with Banjo-Kazooie's, and felt Ocarina of Time did not perform as well in that field.
According to designer and writer Yuji Horii in a 1987 interview, Dragon Quest III first began development at a big company retreat in the town of Hakone in January of that year.
In a 1989 interview with designer and writer Yuji Horii and director Koichi Nakamura, they discussed their focus on enhancing the player’s experience in combat and storytelling. Nakamura explained that they wanted to make battles more enjoyable and less repetitive, moving away from the grind-heavy nature of older RPGs. He highlighted that the team worked to ensure each battle felt engaging, and tried to prevent the common tendency of players to run from strong enemies due to the monotony of repeated encounters.
They also discussed the expanded battle options in Dragon Quest III, including a greater variety of spells, the ability to attack party members, and character positioning in the lineup having an effect on battles. They emphasized that even support spells, which were often underutilized in previous games, had been made more "effective in their own right". They believed every spell in the game now served a meaningful purpose, adding depth to combat, and contributing to their goal of creating an experience where players would be curious and eager to experiment with different strategies.
In August 2024, it was revealed that Concord would serve as the basis for an episode of "Secret Level", an animated video game anthology series released on Amazon Prime Video. However, the servers for Concord were shut down on September 6th, just two weeks after launch and much earlier than the show's planned release on December 10th. Despite this, it was confirmed the day before Concord was taken offline that the episode would remain in the show's lineup.
The game was directed by Eliot Nelson, a former reporter for the Huffington Post who began developing it in 2018 after leaving the company. Although based on his experiences as a journalist, Nelson also drew inspiration from various other video games, namely sports titles such as NBA 2K and Madden NFL as well as other simulation games like SimCity. One particular inspiration was The Oregon Trail, specifically in regards to its structure, with Nelson stating:
"It's that simple formula that we're trying to recreate with Political Arena, Oregon Trail never had any lessons in it. You never just stop and answer a quiz. It was a fun and immersive and - dare I even say? - addictive game that has did [sic] such a successful job of familiarizing tens of millions of people with its relatively arcade corner of American history."
There are unused voice lines within the game's files for male V that pertain to the Judy romance, which are normally exclusive to female V. According to CD Projekt Red, this is because all of V's dialogue, regardless of whether it was intended for male or female V, was recorded by both voice actors to "avoid missing something by mistake that would require future recordings."
Unlike the Persona series, which was made by the same team as Metaphor: ReFantazio, the player is not given the ability to romance their party members. According to director Katsura Hashino, this is because the player character Will is more focused on his relationship with the people and trying to become king than starting a romantic relationship like the player characters in Persona games, and that they wanted to maintain a respective sense of realism between Metaphor and Persona's different settings:
"A lot of our games are based around the idea of teenagers living their lives. What teenager doesn't want to have romance in their life? It's part of the realism of the setting. We know people really like this system and it's really popular, but for [Metaphor] specifically, it's not about teenagers. It's about a person trying to become the ruler of the land."
In a conversation with EIP Gaming writer Dylan Graves, producer Kai Moore cited horror films such as Alien, Event Horizon, Sunshine, The Thing, and Pandorum as influences on the game's bleak, paranoid tone and isolated setting. However, Moore also countered the association of these kinds of horror stories with monsters, stating that he sought to make the player question the definition of "monster," particularly in the context of Jimmy's statement at the start of the game claiming that Curly willingly crashed the Tulpar.
In the files for Star Fox 64 found in the 2020 Nintendo Gigaleak are references and assets for what appears to be a scrapped level named "Battleship". The string fox_map.c interchangeably calls it "Battleship", "Giant Battleship", and "Ground Ship"; it's possible that the latter could be a mistranslation of "Grand Ship", as they're spelled the same way in Japanese. The stage used a full 3D model, like Area 6 and Bolse, as its icon on the map selection screen. Its intended location was where Sector Y currently sits on the Lylat map selection screen, which is the hard path taken from Corneria, and its two branching pathways were known to be Zoness on the hard route and "Fortuna" (Fichina) on the normal route. According to the string fox_play.h, it was an all-range mode stage, and the audio_game.h string makes it appear that it was going to reuse Bolse's theme for its background music, implying that there would have been multiple phases for the level. This stage also had its own enemy data file, implying that it would have featured other enemy ships of some sort. 
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. 
Based on a pre-release screenshot used as a preview in other JumpStart products, the menu interface originally had a different appearance. Specifically, the toolbar was a simple black bar that took up the full width of the screen, the icons used different colors and designs, and the background of a scene in which Ruby talks to Frankie in the backyard was much simpler and missing several elements present in the final game (i.e. the red wheel to the right of Frankie).
In an interview with the game's designer and writer Yuji Horii published in the 1987 GSLA, he discussed the memory limitations that his team faced during the development of the Famicom version of Dragon Quest II, leading them to remove some elements from the final game, including:
Several costumes featured in the game's announcement trailer have different names than they do in the final game:
