When assets from Star Fox 2 were leaked in the 2020 Nintendo Gigaleak, one character that caught people's attention was what appeared to be a human woman. Some fans and news outlets assumed the character to be black based on her frilly hair and large lips, but palettes were eventually discovered that revealed her to be fair-skinned. The human woman's sprites have the same filename as Miyu and Fay's in the final game, and her two sprites' facial structures resemble Miyu and Fay's prototype sprites (the latter being a sheep instead of a poodle), suggesting she was simply a placeholder meant to give a human reference for Miyu and Fay's anthropomorphic expressions.
Behind-the-scenes pictures from the game's development show that former wrestler Jeff Jarrett did green screen capture work for appearing in the game as a playable character. However, due to his departure from the WWF (now known as the WWE) in 1995 regarding a contractual dispute before the game's release, he was subsequently removed from the roster.
The Dragon Quest-esque overworld area, colloquially known as FC World, features a large island on the right-hand side of the map that is not accessible during the normal course of play despite taking up the majority of FC World's land mass. No events or exits are associated with this island, popularly known as FC World C, meaning that hacking the game to place Madotsuki there would prove fruitless.
Despite this, there is evidence that this area was meant to be explorable at one point in development. In the Version 0.09 build (the last one before the "final" Version 0.10 release in 2007), the Dense Woods and Windmill World areas feature the player character from the minigame NASU as an NPC; however, a flag is set to render it invisible (and therefore non-interactable). If the player uses RPG Maker 2003's debugging tools to render the character visible, interacting with it teleports Madotsuki to another unused area in FC World, a small island with four statues on it and an exit at the bottom. Going through this exit takes Madotsuki to FC World C.
While FC World C is still as barren as in other versions of the game, the unused chain of events leading up to it in Version 0.09 indicates that the area was intended to play some kind of role in the final game and that Kikiyama continued to try implementing it late into the game's update history.
Dance Dance Revolution II is the only DDR game released on the Wii to feature a 1-20 difficulty scale (introduced in Dance Dance Revolution X), Doubles Charts, and Challenge Charts. However, due to the game lacking Shock Arrows, any Challenge Charts containing them are omitted.
In a pre-release gameplay video from 2018, at the end of a tour of the Home Base, a light-up sign of the logo for the pizza restaurant chain Domino's can be seen hanging on a wall near the refrigerator. This sign would be removed in the final game, but within the game's files are several voice lines spoken by the main cast (Coco, Davis, Eva, Io, Jack, Louis, Mia, Rin and Yakumo) talking about eating freshly delivered pizza in an unusually glorifying manner without mentioning the company by name. It's unclear how these voice clips would have been used in the game, but when taken with the unused Domino's sign, it's believed that this was all part of a planned promotional tie-in that fell through when the game was delayed to 2019, where Domino's would have somehow survived the apocalypse in the game's story and adapted to the Revenants and the Lost.
In the "3rd Mix PLUS!" variant of this game, there is unused data for the song "TOTAL RECALL" by ULTIMATE HEIGHTS. This includes unused graphics, step charts and lyrics for the song.
In PAL releases of the PlayStation 2 version, the player is normally only able to access the tutorial in English, French, Italian, Castilian, and Dutch. Despite this, versions in the other supported languages (German, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, and Portuguese) are present in the game's data and can be accessed either through hacking the game or selecting a supported language and switching to an unsupported one with debug features just before the screen fades to black. It is unknown why these six variants of the tutorial were made inaccessible in the final game, given that they are fully translated.
The South Korean version of the game (released two years after the original Japanese edition) contains eleven unused maps not found in any other release, featuring fully 3D environments which do not line up with any locations present in the finished product. All assets related to these maps are dated after the game's Japanese release, with intervals ranging from five days to just over three months. Additionally, the maps' texture names are written in Romanized Japanese rather than Korean, indicating that they were not created by Nintendo of Korea.
Two of these maps, kri_04 and kri_05, additionally feature various cat NPCs, all drawn in substantially different art styles compared to not only each other, but also the final game. Each one is named after a developer from the Super Paper Mario staff: yamada_neko02 (Koichiro Yamada), koba_neko (Sayuri Kobayashi), tuka_neko (Naoko Tsukamoto), and kawa_neko (Chie Kawabe).
Of these four, kawa_neko is the most unique, and was apparently designed as a player character. Firstly, the cat's name is only given to its mesh, with its sprite instead being named bc_all.1. Additionally, kawa_neko features an animated tail and a mesh that is centered on the ground rather than the middle of the room. Furthermore, new_neko_18, a redesigned version of kawa_neko with white fur instead of black, can be found in kri_08, kri_09, and kri_10; new_neko_18's mesh is explicitly labeled "PLAYER" in the data for these maps.
Taken together, all of these elements imply that these early rooms were created as a proof-of-concept for an original project by Intelligent Systems that ended up cancelled for unknown reasons.
Throughout development of Shipwrecked 64, Squeaks D'Corgeh would make references to a non-existent character in the game named "Duncan Dolphin". This even included a fake death animation for a character named "Drake Dulfin" (likely intended to be the Spoiler:Starling counterpart of Duncan) being shot in the face by Spoiler:Brandon Lester in his Bucky Beaver costume in what appeared to be a Wild West-esque setting. This continued after the game's release, where one of the patch notes for the Hotfix 2 update stated "Removed Duncan Dolphin", likely as a reference to the "Removed Herobrine" gag seen in updates to Minecraft.
However, on April 1st, 2024, an April Fools update was released that added Duncan to the game as a New Game+ bonus. If the game's True Ending has been reached, he will appear in The Theater at Midnight and ask Bucky for help activating his "New. Radical. Mechanism!!" due to losing the trinkets needed to make it work. This will take the player to a new area called "Garten of Duncan", a recreation of the Testing Sector from Garten of Banban made using assets from The Plaza. Clearing the map will take the player to a previously unused location called "Layer 4 Elevator", where an audio tape reveals that the player can input console commands to access other unused locations as part of the update. Entering the door will take the player to another new area, known simply as "Sample Area", but only a few seconds after entering the player will be kicked out to the encounter with the Spoiler:Studiogrounds Husk at the end of the game.
Notably, in the "Layer 4 Elevator" area, Chief Wulf can be seen on top of the tallest building in the area. If the player uses console commands to reach him, he can be spoken to, revealing that Spoiler:he has relived the same days over and over again, watched Stumbler O'Hare die over and over as part of that, and believes that he will be forgotten after his death.
Wuhu Island was originally created for Wii Sports before its debut appearance in Wii Fit. An early version of the island can be seen in a leaked development image for Wii Sports, and in footage of the unused Airplane sport in the E3 2006 demo for the game. The leaked image also indicates that the Airplane sport would have also given you the option to fly around the island with a Rocket Belt, an idea that would later be reused in Pilotwings Resort.
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.
Felix the Cat, the new playable character announced alongside the Kickstarter campaign for the game's story mode DLC RULE of Inverse Ninjas, was decided through a Twitter poll. The other three characters on the poll were The Continental Op (a private investigator character created by Dashiell Hammett in 1923 whose copyright expired in 2019), Gnorm Gnat (an insect character created by Jim Davis prior to Garfield who entered the public domain as a result of his original comics not having a copyright notice), and Tarcis the Lover (a joke slot seemingly originating from a dating simulator made by this game's co-developer Trainwreck Studios, and that voting for was actively discouraged by the developers).
In an interview with the developers at Blue Tongue, they mentioned several buildings they wanted to include in this game, but had to drop due to design decisions or memory constraints on home consoles:
•Hotels, which would provide extra accommodation for guests. •Dino-Vet Station, which would have been vital for keeping dinosaurs healthy. •Hunting Platforms, which would let visitors hunt down carnivores in the park from afar.
The Dino-Vet Station can be found in earlier promotional material for Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis and also within its game files. Likewise with the Hunting Platform, which also still has Audio, Ini and even Rig Files within the game.
At the time of its release, Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis had managed to include nearly every on-screen prehistoric species found in the movies released up to that point ("Jurassic Park", "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III"), with only three notable exceptions:
•Pteranodon (featured in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III") •Compsognathus (featured in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic Park III") •Mamenchisaurus (featured in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park")
Interestingly, out of this batch, the Iquanodon is the only dinosaur to have any more data pertaining to it with its own "Iguan.ini" file, which makes it the only cut species with a known Length (Aprox. 9 Meters Long), Health (500), Life Span (4 Years and 6 Months), and Herd Size (1-15 Individuals). It also had a known attack damage (150), which would have it made it the strongest Ornithopod in the game had it been included.
There is an unused death cutscene in the files of Bubsy 3D of Bubsy falling through a floor. This may have been an animation for falling through pits, or suggest that fall-damage was at one point going to return as a mechanic from Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind.
Within the 2023 Insomniac Games ransomware leak, a PC developer build of the game was found to include several unused Symbiote bosses, including Riot, Lasher, Agony, and Phage. These characters were intended to appear as a team alongside the main antagonist, Venom. However, during development, the game’s story likely underwent changes and the focus shifted to other characters, such as Kraven and Venom. As a result, the Symbiotes besides Venom, Scream, and Anti-Venom were abandoned.
An unused cutscene in the game has the character Stumbler O'Hare openly mock Harley Mullins (the wife of Mark Mullins) and her situation. This was scrapped both for being "WAY too on the nose", and because Stumbler's personality was altered during development. The cutscene would be replaced with a YouTube video titled "How to say Goodbye", in which Stumbler, despite knowing about Mark's crimes, tries to help him grieve over the loss of Harley. Despite the cutscene's removal, Stumbler's statue in The Dam still has him wearing a nurse's cap like in the cutscene.
There are unused files in the original version of Shipwrecked 64 that suggest that the character Olive Otter was originally planned to be playable, but was scrapped.
Yo! Noid 2's hub world, the Noid Void, was originally going to be a tower that the player ascends, similarly to the Assassin's Creed series, where the Noid would see a set of Domino's franchises in the sky.
When assets from Star Fox 2 were leaked in the 2020 Nintendo Gigaleak, one character that caught people's attention was what appeared to be a human woman. Some fans and news outlets assumed the character to be black based on her frilly hair and large lips, but palettes were eventually discovered that revealed her to be fair-skinned. The human woman's sprites have the same filename as Miyu and Fay's in the final game, and her two sprites' facial structures resemble Miyu and Fay's prototype sprites (the latter being a sheep instead of a poodle), suggesting she was simply a placeholder meant to give a human reference for Miyu and Fay's anthropomorphic expressions.
The Dragon Quest-esque overworld area, colloquially known as FC World, features a large island on the right-hand side of the map that is not accessible during the normal course of play despite taking up the majority of FC World's land mass. No events or exits are associated with this island, popularly known as FC World C, meaning that hacking the game to place Madotsuki there would prove fruitless.
In a pre-release gameplay video from 2018, at the end of a tour of the Home Base, a light-up sign of the logo for the pizza restaurant chain Domino's can be seen hanging on a wall near the refrigerator. This sign would be removed in the final game, but within the game's files are several voice lines spoken by the main cast (Coco, Davis, Eva, Io, Jack, Louis, Mia, Rin and Yakumo) talking about eating freshly delivered pizza in an unusually glorifying manner without mentioning the company by name. It's unclear how these voice clips would have been used in the game, but when taken with the unused Domino's sign, it's believed that this was all part of a planned promotional tie-in that fell through when the game was delayed to 2019, where Domino's would have somehow survived the apocalypse in the game's story and adapted to the Revenants and the Lost.
In the "3rd Mix PLUS!" variant of this game, there is unused data for the song "TOTAL RECALL" by ULTIMATE HEIGHTS. This includes unused graphics, step charts and lyrics for the song.
The South Korean version of the game (released two years after the original Japanese edition) contains eleven unused maps not found in any other release, featuring fully 3D environments which do not line up with any locations present in the finished product. All assets related to these maps are dated after the game's Japanese release, with intervals ranging from five days to just over three months. Additionally, the maps' texture names are written in Romanized Japanese rather than Korean, indicating that they were not created by Nintendo of Korea.
Wuhu Island was originally created for Wii Sports before its debut appearance in Wii Fit. An early version of the island can be seen in a leaked development image for Wii Sports, and in footage of the unused Airplane sport in the E3 2006 demo for the game. The leaked image also indicates that the Airplane sport would have also given you the option to fly around the island with a Rocket Belt, an idea that would later be reused in Pilotwings Resort.
In an interview with the developers at Blue Tongue, they mentioned several buildings they wanted to include in this game, but had to drop due to design decisions or memory constraints on home consoles:
