Bio Force Ape is a game that was never released - it did, before it's cancellation, get a spotlight in Nintendo Power, creating a level of curiosity surrounding it within NES fan communities. Capitalizing off of this curiosity, a post would be made on the Digital Press forum in 2005 claiming to show screenshots of a leaked prototype. While the first post appeared legitimate, the hoax would eventually be unraveled starting with a screenshot of a glitched super move that was "so powerful [that] it messes up the game's graphics", which humorously made it appear that Bio Force Ape was unleashing a powerful fart attack, as a set of glitched graphics appeared next to a crouching animation. The poster, going under the username PaulB812, would refuse to dump the game and refer to anybody who asked for it to be released as either "communists" or "butter-slathered... hoarding fatties", before finally unveiling the prank with a game screenshot of a cutscene where a fat butter monster points out that the ape is "worth 2K monies[sic]", before the ape punches him while saying "EAT COMMUNISM!" A real prototype would be leaked in 2010.
The reptilian puffs of smoke that emerge when Mario ground pounds inside a giant Goomba Shoe in the Super Mario Bros. 3 style of the Super Mario Maker series are updated sprites from an unreleased and highly experimental SNES prototype known as Super Donkey.
Unusually, the 3DS version of Donkey Kong: Original Edition was originally released with an unfinished ROM predating the hack's previous Wii release. The only change in the unfinished version was that the copyright assigned the game as a 2008 release instead of 2010, suggesting that it was originally intended to be released for the 25th anniversary of Donkey Kong's Famicom port and delayed for Super Mario Bros.' anniversary. The game would soon be patched the use the Wii ROM instead.
On the HUD of Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt!, there is a portrait of Awesome that will go from happy to agitated as he takes more damage - in prototype versions of the game, this instead has Awesome's skin slowly chip off to reveal his skull. Additionally, after dying in the prototype, he will turn into a skeleton, and when his last life is lost the screen will cut to red instead of teal. The final game's Game Over screen, which shows unspecified tombstones covered in trash and rats, could be considered a leftover from this darker direction for the game.
Instead of a chicken who gets pushed backwards when run over, Freeway was originally going to feature a human protagonist who turns into a splatter of blood when killed. This version of the game is referred to by fans as Bloody Human Freeway.
Among the material uncovered in the 2020 Gigaleak, a large-scale data leak from Nintendo's internal servers, was a series of documents surrounding Project INDY, an early iteration of the Nintendo Switch co-developed with ST Microelectronics. Project INDY was envisioned as a successor to the Nintendo 3DS and was halfway between it and the Wii U in terms of processing power.
The system would've carried over many of the 3DS' features, including dual-screen functionality, touch controls, stereoscopic 3D, motion sensors, augmented reality functionality, and StreetPass support. The system also would've featured backwards compatibility with 3DS game cards, Bluetooth connectivity (including support for wireless speakers and headsets), GPS functionality, a videotelephony app, the ability to wirelessly project games to a TV screen via Miracast, and support to quickly convert a commercially released unit into a developer system, easing development costs for independent studios. Many of these features would be carried over to the Switch in modified forms.
Technical documents for Project INDY show that while prototype software was developed for the system, Nintendo were unsure about its specifications and came up with various alternative options, such as support for 120 fps video, an 800p display, and a design with a single, oblong touchscreen that spans the full face of the device save for two joysticks near each end. The latter design was the final iteration that Nintendo came up with before ceasing work with ST Microelectronics in late 2014. By this point, Nintendo had devised the Switch's final name, listing it on the design's blueprints.
An earlier iteration of this oblong design would also become the basis for a hoax image created in the interim between Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's announcement of the Switch's development in March 2015 and the company's first public reveal of the device in October 2016. The image is a 3D-printed mockup of the Switch based on a patent filed earlier in 2014, which itself reveals that Nintendo was still considering stereoscopic 3D, backwards compatibility with 3DS games, and videotelephony support.
The Zero Wing parody image in Invasion of the Yokel-Snatchers was originally going to be a Simpsonized version of CATS, rather than Kang and Kodos dressed as CATS.
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 "Mine 2.6" prototype of the 1990 Windows Minesweeper has a custom cursor depicting a foot that, when a mine is unveiled, explodes and exposes a bone.
In the weeks prior to Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2's release, a near-complete prototype build of the game leaked online. The Twitter account for the game's main developer, Fair Play Labs, accidentally retweeted a GIF of SpongeBob dancing from an unrevealed sound test mode and promptly deleted it. Community manager Thaddeus Crews expressed that, while he didn't have a particular moral problem with fans playing the leaked build, he advised against competitive players using it for practice due to how outdated it is.
A prototype build for PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale shows an early character select screen with a set of unused characters:
•Chop Chop Master Onion from the PaRappa the Rapper series •Captain Blasto from Blasto •Buzz from the Buzz! series •A Big Kulche from the LocoRoco series •Dr. Nefarious from the Ratchet & Clank series •A Eucadian Soldier from Warhawk •A knight from Fat Princess •Um Jammer Lammy from the PaRappa the Rapper series
Notably, Dr. Nefarious is featured in the roster without Ratchet or Clank. PaRappa the Rapper is the most represented series in this roster, and has more characters than any one series would get in the final game including DLC. The knight would appear in Fat Princess' moveset, LocoRoco and Buzz! would be represented through stages, and Blasto would be absent completely.
The game was originally intended to be the fifth installment of the Super Mario Bros. series, with two leaked prototypes from December 1994 featuring a title screen with the logo Super Mario Bros. 5: Yoshi's Island. Come the final release, and the prefix would be shortened to Super Mario. This explains why the international release was titled Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, as the original Super Mario World was subtitled Super Mario Bros. 4 in Japan.
Additionally, the later of the two prototypes features a radically different design for the logo, using a much sleeker and blockier font. The final release would revert to the earlier logo, barring the aforementioned truncated prefix.
Inside the prototype Xbox version of Pac-Man World Rally, files pertaining to Snoopy from Peanuts and a vehicle for him can be found. While the initial discovery of these files left a lot of mystery over whether they were leftovers from another project or a scrapped crossover, a concept image from World Rally would emerge shortly after revealing Snoopy was indeed planned as a crossover racer.
Smart Bomb Interactive, the developers of Pac-Man World Rally, worked on the game Snoopy vs. the Red Baron around the same time, and a few shared files from that game including placeholder cutscene dialogue can also be found in Pac-Man World Rally's data.
On December 24, 2022, an anonymous user on the Internet Archive uploaded the source code for Rayman 4, the original prototype for what would later become Rayman Raving Rabbids. The Rayman 4 prototype, which was known to be a 3D Platform game with beat'em up elements that involved the Rabbids as the game's antagonists, showcases several interesting features. Some of the content featured in the E3 2006 trailer can be found in the prototype such as rideable animal companions, interchangeable costumes, combat gameplay, and explorable settings such as a forest, cave, & gear temple.
Some newer never-before-seen content includes: • Early unfinished cutscenes some featuring a witch doctor from Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc. • Explorable Rabbid bases/lairs with programmed Rabbid enemies. • Rayman utilizing several projectile weapons. • Other explorable worlds such as a village setting and a sphincter-inspired level. • Rayman controlling Rabbid vehicles such as a hovercraft and large robots. • When receiving damage, Rayman loses his clothing except for a leaf covering. This costume was repurposed as the Rayomz skin in Rayman Legends seven years later.
In prototype versions of McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure, the shops were McDonald's restaurants, and all the meters and power-ups in the game were McDonald's products. McDonald's burgers as health items in a game could be seen as endorsing them as a healthy food, so it was likely changed for the final game to avoid this perception, and while at the time Ronald McDonald was still seen holding or eating McDonald's in advertising, in later years he would be mandated against doing either. Additionally, a developer from the game has claimed that McDonald's were opposed to the collectibles because they didn't want hamburgers being left on the ground.
At Spaceworld 2000, Shigeru Miyamoto showed off a prototype for the GameCube controller. The most glaring difference between this controller and the final design are the color and shape of three buttons: • The A button being blue, like the Z button rather than green, but keeping it's circular shape. • The B button being green, like the final A button rather than red, and bean shaped like the X and Y buttons rather than circular. • The start button being red like the final B button as well as being bulbous and protruding as compared to the final start button being flat, grey, and made of rubber.
An accompanying tech demo used assets from Luigi's Mansion including one of the basic ghosts which reacted differently depending on what button was used: • Using the A, B, X, and Y buttons made it spit out the corresponding letter • Stretching for the L button and squishing for the R button • Emitting a slower version of Boo's laugh for the Z button • Emitting a normal ghost noise for the control stick • Changing orientation for the C-stick • Emitting sounds similar to that of Pikmin for any of the D-pad directions
The inclusion of the Pikmin noises makes sense as Luigi's Mansion contained a trailer for Pikmin upon release.
In a prototype version of the game, the Underground theme was originally meant to be an updated version of the Underground theme from Super Mario Bros. with added kick percussion, but this was scrapped in the final release. A similar-sounding Underground theme would end up being used in Super Mario Bros. 3.
Rayman Legends was first made known through a leaked trailer in late April 2012 that showed off early stage designs and suggested it would feature special Near-Field Communication functionality on the Wii U, allowing new gameplay opportunities by placing certain objects on the controller. This was demonstrated using figurines of a Heart, Globox, a Rabbid, and Ezio from the Assassin's Creed series. Ubisoft later confirmed that this trailer was merely demonstrative and consisted of prototype material intended only for their internal production teams, and did not represent what features the final game would have.
YouTuber Jon Jafari (also known as JonTron) voiced the Jazzy Penguin in the game's prototype. He was originally asked to voice a different character, but the developers thought his voice didn't match the proposed character, and instead made him the voice of the Jazzy Penguin. However, Jafari's lines as the Jazzy Penguin were scrapped at some point during development, and he instead voiced the secretary of Dead Bird Studio in the final game.
Inside Banjo's house is a portrait of Banjo & Kazooie walking through a forest. While commonly believed to be an early screenshot of the level Fungi Forest which would later appear in Donkey Kong 64, this is actually a screenshot from an early build of Banjo-Kazooie's prototype Dream: Land of Giants, after the original protagonist was replaced by Banjo.
Bio Force Ape is a game that was never released - it did, before it's cancellation, get a spotlight in Nintendo Power, creating a level of curiosity surrounding it within NES fan communities. Capitalizing off of this curiosity, a post would be made on the Digital Press forum in 2005 claiming to show screenshots of a leaked prototype. While the first post appeared legitimate, the hoax would eventually be unraveled starting with a screenshot of a glitched super move that was "so powerful [that] it messes up the game's graphics", which humorously made it appear that Bio Force Ape was unleashing a powerful fart attack, as a set of glitched graphics appeared next to a crouching animation. The poster, going under the username PaulB812, would refuse to dump the game and refer to anybody who asked for it to be released as either "communists" or "butter-slathered... hoarding fatties", before finally unveiling the prank with a game screenshot of a cutscene where a fat butter monster points out that the ape is "worth 2K monies[sic]", before the ape punches him while saying "EAT COMMUNISM!" A real prototype would be leaked in 2010.
The reptilian puffs of smoke that emerge when Mario ground pounds inside a giant Goomba Shoe in the Super Mario Bros. 3 style of the Super Mario Maker series are updated sprites from an unreleased and highly experimental SNES prototype known as Super Donkey.
Unusually, the 3DS version of Donkey Kong: Original Edition was originally released with an unfinished ROM predating the hack's previous Wii release. The only change in the unfinished version was that the copyright assigned the game as a 2008 release instead of 2010, suggesting that it was originally intended to be released for the 25th anniversary of Donkey Kong's Famicom port and delayed for Super Mario Bros.' anniversary. The game would soon be patched the use the Wii ROM instead.
On the HUD of Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt!, there is a portrait of Awesome that will go from happy to agitated as he takes more damage - in prototype versions of the game, this instead has Awesome's skin slowly chip off to reveal his skull. Additionally, after dying in the prototype, he will turn into a skeleton, and when his last life is lost the screen will cut to red instead of teal. The final game's Game Over screen, which shows unspecified tombstones covered in trash and rats, could be considered a leftover from this darker direction for the game.
Among the material uncovered in the 2020 Gigaleak, a large-scale data leak from Nintendo's internal servers, was a series of documents surrounding Project INDY, an early iteration of the Nintendo Switch co-developed with ST Microelectronics. Project INDY was envisioned as a successor to the Nintendo 3DS and was halfway between it and the Wii U in terms of processing power.
The Zero Wing parody image in Invasion of the Yokel-Snatchers was originally going to be a Simpsonized version of CATS, rather than Kang and Kodos dressed as CATS.
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.
In the weeks prior to Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2's release, a near-complete prototype build of the game leaked online. The Twitter account for the game's main developer, Fair Play Labs, accidentally retweeted a GIF of SpongeBob dancing from an unrevealed sound test mode and promptly deleted it. Community manager Thaddeus Crews expressed that, while he didn't have a particular moral problem with fans playing the leaked build, he advised against competitive players using it for practice due to how outdated it is.
A prototype build for PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale shows an early character select screen with a set of unused characters:
The game was originally intended to be the fifth installment of the Super Mario Bros. series, with two leaked prototypes from December 1994 featuring a title screen with the logo Super Mario Bros. 5: Yoshi's Island. Come the final release, and the prefix would be shortened to Super Mario. This explains why the international release was titled Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, as the original Super Mario World was subtitled Super Mario Bros. 4 in Japan.
Inside the prototype Xbox version of Pac-Man World Rally, files pertaining to Snoopy from Peanuts and a vehicle for him can be found. While the initial discovery of these files left a lot of mystery over whether they were leftovers from another project or a scrapped crossover, a concept image from World Rally would emerge shortly after revealing Snoopy was indeed planned as a crossover racer.
In prototype versions of McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure, the shops were McDonald's restaurants, and all the meters and power-ups in the game were McDonald's products. McDonald's burgers as health items in a game could be seen as endorsing them as a healthy food, so it was likely changed for the final game to avoid this perception, and while at the time Ronald McDonald was still seen holding or eating McDonald's in advertising, in later years he would be mandated against doing either. Additionally, a developer from the game has claimed that McDonald's were opposed to the collectibles because they didn't want hamburgers being left on the ground.
At Spaceworld 2000, Shigeru Miyamoto showed off a prototype for the GameCube controller. The most glaring difference between this controller and the final design are the color and shape of three buttons:
Rayman Legends was first made known through a leaked trailer in late April 2012 that showed off early stage designs and suggested it would feature special Near-Field Communication functionality on the Wii U, allowing new gameplay opportunities by placing certain objects on the controller. This was demonstrated using figurines of a Heart, Globox, a Rabbid, and Ezio from the Assassin's Creed series. Ubisoft later confirmed that this trailer was merely demonstrative and consisted of prototype material intended only for their internal production teams, and did not represent what features the final game would have.
YouTuber Jon Jafari (also known as JonTron) voiced the Jazzy Penguin in the game's prototype. He was originally asked to voice a different character, but the developers thought his voice didn't match the proposed character, and instead made him the voice of the Jazzy Penguin. However, Jafari's lines as the Jazzy Penguin were scrapped at some point during development, and he instead voiced the secretary of Dead Bird Studio in the final game.
Inside Banjo's house is a portrait of Banjo & Kazooie walking through a forest. While commonly believed to be an early screenshot of the level Fungi Forest which would later appear in Donkey Kong 64, this is actually a screenshot from an early build of Banjo-Kazooie's prototype Dream: Land of Giants, after the original protagonist was replaced by Banjo.