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Company: iQue
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Originally, iQue was founded as a joint venture between Nintendo and Taiwanese-American technologist Wei Yen as a Chinese video game console manufacturing company. However, by 2013 the company became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nintendo, and in 2019 they began hiring for developers, programmers and testers, indicating that they were transitioning into a development company to support games made by Nintendo EPD.
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Acquisition, Corporate Affairs, General, Real Life
person chocolatejr9 calendar_month October 16, 2023
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Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 (2023)
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Despite many of the more unusual character picks in the first Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl being noted as characters the development team had to push Nickelodeon into allowing them to use, Grandma Gertie in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 was actually pitched by Nickelodeon corporate, something community manager Thaddeus Crews has stated to be akin to "selling blood to a vampire".
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Corporate Affairs, Development
person Rocko & Heffer calendar_month September 26, 2023
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Company: Interplay
subdirectory_arrow_right ClayFighter (Collection)
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In 2015, internet artists Chris O'Neil, Zach Hadel and Mick Lauer were commissioned to make a trailer for a cancelled reboot of ClayFighter. They made a commercial actively mocking Interplay and the ClayFighter brand, showing quotes from negative reviews, referring to low-quality Interplay games, bait-and-switching an Earthworm Jim reboot, and having Lauer narrate the trailer in a disappointed tone of voice when he discovers that he is announcing a ClayFighter reboot. According to Hadel, the CEO of Interplay was "braindead" and did not pick up on the self-deprecation.
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Advertisement/Commercial, Artwork/Illustration, Cancelled Release, Corporate Affairs, Meme, Teaser
person Rocko & Heffer calendar_month September 23, 2023
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Battle Chess
Battle Chess (1988)
subdirectory_arrow_right Interplay (Company)
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Interplay producers were known to unnecessarily modify games for the simple reason of wanting to prove value. The artist for the Queen in Battle Chess worked around this by drawing a pet duck following the Queen on all of her animations to bait the producers into removing the duck instead of content the team wanted to keep.
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Corporate Affairs, Development, Real Life, Unused Character, Unused Graphic
person Rocko & Heffer calendar_month September 23, 2023
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McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure
McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure (1993)
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Attachment 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.
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Censorship, Corporate Affairs, Development, Early Idea, Prototype, Real Life, Removed Feature, Unused Graphic, Unused Items
person Rocko & Heffer calendar_month September 18, 2023
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Franchise: Sonic The Hedgehog
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Ryan Drummond (voice of Sonic the Hedgehog from 1999 to 2004) revealed that during Sega's recasting of the Sonic the Hedgehog cast in 2010, he had auditioned for the role and had actually won. However, Sega requested Drummond to leave his union, so Drummond ultimately declined the offer.
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Corporate Affairs, Voice Acting
person SOGESNAKE calendar_month September 15, 2023
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Gungrave
Gungrave (2002)
subdirectory_arrow_right Red Entertainment (Company)
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Attachment At Sega's Game Jam II showcase in March 2002, Red Entertainment announced two new PlayStation 2 games in collaboration with mangaka Yasuhiro Nightow that would be published by Sega, who announced that they acquired a 67% stake in Red Entertainment moments prior. The first game announced was Gungrave, which was released in Japan in July of that year. The second game announced was a game based on Nightow's 1995 manga "Trigun" entitled "Trigun: The Planet Gunsmoke", with a short 20-second teaser trailer being revealed featuring silhouettes of multiple characters from the series before ending on Nicholas punching the screen and revealing the game's logo.

Since then, the game has become vaporware as no other updates on it have been released from either Red Entertainment, Nightow, or Sega since its announcement, with the exception of an official statement from Sega in 2002 that gave no comment on its development. Fans speculated that Gungrave was actually a modified version of Trigun: The Planet Gunsmoke citing its similar storylines and character designs to that of Trigun, but considering that both games were first shown off at the same time and Gungrave was released in Japan only four months later, this is not the case.
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Cancelled Release, Corporate Affairs, Development, Misconception, Teaser
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month October 5, 2021
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Video on Trigun: The Planet Gunsmoke's development:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHPHHzXpb-Q

Trigun: The Planet Gunsmoke teaser trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVGjnYuWa-4

IGN article on Sega's Game Jam II showcase:
https://www.ign.com/articles/2002/04/03/segas-jamming-game-show
LEGO Island
LEGO Island (1997)
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In an interview with LEGO Island's creative director Wes Jenkins from around 2013, he revealed that Mindscape fired the game's entire development team the day before the game was released in order to avoid paying promised bonuses:

"Long story but basically – the industry tradition (back then) was that you will receive product bonuses if you stay to the day of product release. The best solution for them (administrators) at the time was to fire everybody the day before release. There's bigger profits and then [sic] could get their investment money back before the product sells… if you don't have to pay bonuses or continued salaries. They also sold [Mindscape] eventually to bigger companies, which ended up in some legal complications… It was explained to me later when we won best of the show at E3 later that year, that "it wasn't personal – it was just business"."
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Complaint, Corporate Affairs, Development, Financial Affairs, General, Real Life
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month August 25, 2021
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Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy (1987)
subdirectory_arrow_right Final Fantasy (Franchise)
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The Final Fantasy series' title was long rumored to stem from the idea that it would've been Square and series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi's final game if it didn't perform well. According to these claims, Square was in dire financial straits in 1987, with Sakaguchi planning to quit the gaming industry and return to university studies. These claims appeared to be further corroborated when series composer Nobuo Uematsu affirmed them in a 2009 interview with Wired, claiming that Square's financial position was the main inspiration for the Final Fantasy name.

However, Sakaguchi debunked the rumors in a 2015 keynote address. In reality, Square always intended to give the first game in the series a name whose initials were "FF," as the Japanese pronunciation, エフ・エフ ("efu efu"), was considered pleasing to the ears. The developers' initial pick was Fighting Fantasy; however, it turned out that this name was already taken by a tabletop RPG series. Consequently, the title was changed to Final Fantasy. According to Sakaguchi, while Square indeed had their "backs to the wall" during development, "anything that started with an F would have been fine for the title."
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Corporate Affairs, Development, Early Idea, Inspiration, Legal Affairs, Misconception, Rumor, Title
person KnowledgeBase calendar_month May 28, 2015
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Seaman
Seaman (1999)
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Attachment Seaman's face is actually that of the game's producer and creator, Yoot Saito. Saito also acts as Seaman's Japanese voice actor. During development, Sega had requested that a celebrity be used if possible to voice Seaman, but Saito was hesitant. He later said in a 2020 interview that the fact that he played the role himself was "the key to success", because it gave him the advantage of being able to rerecord lines as many times as he wanted, so it was no longer a question of money.
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Cameo, Corporate Affairs, Development, Easter Egg, Voice Acting
person KnowledgeBase calendar_month January 12, 2015
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Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures
Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures (2013)
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Attachment In early builds of the game, Guitar Guy's sprites were designed after his actor in the web series, Kyle Justin, complete with dialogue referencing his appearances as a guest reviewer. However, the final game redesigns his sprites to depict him as a skeleton, referencing a gag in the Ikari Wars review where the Nerd discovers that Guitar Guy died and decomposed behind his couch before reviving him with a cheat code from the NES game. Likewise, each of Guitar Guy's lines is replaced with an ellipsis.

In a post on the game's Steam Community page, BlackFlag, one of the developers, stated that the redesign was mutually agreed upon following discussions between Justin and the development staff.
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Character Design, Corporate Affairs, Development, Early Build, Early Idea, Real Life, Sprite/Graphical Animation
person BolbiusMaximus calendar_month October 5, 2013
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Company: Sony Computer Entertainment
subdirectory_arrow_right Square Enix (Company)
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In October 2001, Sony Computer Entertainment purchased an 18.6% stake in the financially struggling Squaresoft after they requested a capital injection from Sony. After the 2003 Square Enix merger, this stake eventually decreased to 8.25% by 2012. Sony later sold off all of its Square Enix shares in April 2014.
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Corporate Affairs, Financial Affairs, General
person Stryker94 calendar_month September 25, 2013
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Ares Rising
Ares Rising (1998)
subdirectory_arrow_right Blue Heat: The Case of the Cover Girl Murders (Game), Cyberdreams (Company)
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Cyberdreams was originally going to publish Ares Rising and Blue Heat: The Case of the Cover Girl Murders. When the company folded in 1997, the games managed to be completed and published under different companies: Imagine Studios for Ares Rising and Orion Interactive for Blue Heat.
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Corporate Affairs, Development, General
person Antwan calendar_month May 30, 2013
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Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong (1981)
subdirectory_arrow_right Popeye (Franchise)
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Attachment Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi originally envisioned Donkey Kong as a Popeye game, specifically based on the 1934 cartoon "A Dream Walking", where Popeye and Bluto fight over Olive Oyl as she sleepwalks through a construction site. However, the game was retooled into an original IP due to technical limitations. Yokoi explained during the 1983 court case Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd. that "In those days we could not depict or draw the character of Popeye using the circuit in those days [sic] properly."

Following the removal of Popeye iconography, Miyamoto used the franchise's characters as inspirations for their replacements. Mario took the role of the titular sailor, Pauline filled in for Olive Oyl, and Donkey Kong stood in for Bluto. Nintendo would eventually release a Popeye game a year after Donkey Kong in 1982.
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Character Design, Corporate Affairs, Development, Early Idea, Inspiration, Reference, Similarities, Theory, Unused Character
person Bean101 calendar_month March 24, 2013
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Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (1995)
subdirectory_arrow_right Donkey Kong Country (Game)
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In May 1995, an interview with series creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Rare co-founder Tim Stamper about the development of Donkey Kong Country (DKC) was published in the magazine Electronic Games, conducted by game journalist Steven L. Kent. Kent later claimed on an episode of G4's docuseries "Icons" that Miyamoto was angry during this interview, channelling it into bitter criticisms of DKC's gameplay and the Western market's praise of its pre-rendered graphics, and that Stamper "sat there and took it, even though really the anger wasn't meant to be at Stamper". Miyamoto clarified in a 2010 interview with IGN that he did like the game despite these rumored criticisms, and that he worked closely with Rare and Stamper during development.

Years after the interview's publication, Kent would print an alleged portion of a later interview with Miyamoto in his 2001 book "The Ultimate History of Video Games", claiming that the anger had stemmed from "touchy" internal discussions regarding Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The hand-drawn crayon art style of that game was said to be a result of the alleged anger over DKC's graphics causing him to rebel against Nintendo's internal evaluation committee, who wanted Yoshi's Island to use pre-rendered graphics. Part of the Miyamoto quote reads:

"In comparison with the graphics of [DKC], there was not enough punch to Yoshi's Island. That was what I was told by the marketing people. I intensified my hand-drawn touch on Yoshi's Island from the initial part of the program. Everybody else was saying that they wanted better hardware and more beautiful graphics instead of this art."

Yoshi's Island director Takashi Tezuka would deliver a less angered statement that may be related to these claims in a September 1995 interview with the magazine Dengeki Super Famicom. He claimed that the choice in art style was done for sentimental reasons, as the developers believed that all video games from that point on would likely utilize 3D graphics, and wanted Yoshi's Island to be a bow-out for 2D graphics:

"We deliberately chose not to go for realistic graphics like [DKC]: we wanted take a chance and do the opposite. Probably every game from here on out is going to look more like [DKC]… that being the case, we decided to go against the trend one last time and make something with a heartwarming, handmade visual style."
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Artwork/Illustration, Complaint, Corporate Affairs, Development, Inspiration, Magazine, Rumor, Sprite/Graphical Animation, Suggested, Theory
person DidYouKnowGaming calendar_month February 25, 2013
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Electronic Games Issue #32 (Volume 3, Issue #8) - May 1995 (pages 48-52 in the magazine):
https://archive.org/details/electronic-games-1995-05/page/48/mode/1up

G4 "Icons" (Season 3, Episode 8) on Donkey Kong:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2EOpDWKOrI#t=819s

"The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon–The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World" by Steven L. Kent (page 518 in the book):
https://retrocdn.net/images/9/9c/UltimateHistoryofVideoGames_Book_US.pdf

Dengeki Super Famicom 09/1995 developer interview [link and info provided by Rocko & Heffer]:
https://shmuplations.com/yoshi/

Original DidYouKnowGaming blog post:
http://didyouknowgaming.com/post/41895525229/yoshis-island-and-donkey-kong-country-source
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