Franchise: Dragon Ball

Similarly to Donkey Kong's origins as a Popeye game, Alex Kidd in Miracle World was originally intended as a Dragon Ball game. Alex's creator, Kotaro Hayashida, said in an interview:


A classic Dragon Ball influence can be observed in the final game, such as Alex's laser bracelet resembling a kamehameha and the use of Janken (Rock, Paper, Scissors) in boss battles, as well as certain character and object designs with resemblance to those from Dragon Ball, and shared influences from the public domain Japanese story Journey to the West.

Webfoot Technologies managed to get the licence for Dragon Ball games purely by their CEO being at the right place at the right time.

The first Legacy of Goku title had the same development time as its two sequels, but the game's quality is noticeably lacking compared to its sequels. This is because the only people on the development team were a handful of programmers and an intern. The rest of the team that worked on the entire trilogy weren't actually hired until halfway through development of the original Legacy of Goku. A lot of their time after being hired was spent cleaning up and fixing what they could before release.

Everything made for the games, content not from the manga or anime, all came from Webfoot Technologies. Though the design doc had to be approved by Atari (publisher), Toei (licensor), and Nintendo. Everything they did required approval from all of them.

The team originally gave the games different names as well, with the second and third games being titled "Legacy of Goku 2: Future Shock" and Legacy of Goku 3: Buu's Fury" instead of Dragon Ball Z: Legacy of Goku 2 and Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury.

The Dragon Ball Z: Collectible CD Picture Cards were a series of multimedia pocket CD-ROMs released exclusively in Australia in 2001 and were compatible with PC and Macintosh. Designed and produced by Streamedia Pty Ltd, there were 10 CDs to collect, each featuring a different character and were available randomly in packets and as a promotion given away with the purchase of Coca-Cola products. Each disc contained information on the respective character and each Dragon Ball Z saga up to the Cell Saga, information on merchandise and a "BattlePrint" activity mode. Despite saying "DBZ Set 1" on the packaging, no additional series were ever released.

Mr. Satan/Hercule is usually depicted in Dragon Ball video games as wearing a jetpack during gameplay despite not actually doing so in the anime or manga. This was done for player convenience so that he would be able to fight the other flight-capable characters.

In March 9, 2011, Toei Animation publicly recognized that the music composer Kenji Yamamoto had committed plagiarism in many of his works. As a result, each of his music tracks featured in any Dragon Ball game was replaced in every re-realease starting with Dragon Ball Z Budokai HD Collection.

One of Jeice's pre-battle voice clips in the first Budokai Tenkaichi is "Don't play stupid with me, wanker!" In both Budokai Tenkaichi 2 and 3, the word "wanker" was removed, but instead of re-recording the line, they edited the existing one. The "w" can clearly be heard spoken after he says "Don't play stupid with me!"

In the Budokai games, even if Cell has reached his Semi-Perfect, Perfect, and Super Perfect forms, whenever he receives a powerful hit and screams in pain, he sounds just like Imperfect Cell. This mistake continued on into the Budokai Tenkaichi series as well, as take-damage voice cuts were never recorded for those forms.

Many Dragon Ball Z games give Broly a form called "Legendary Super Saiyan 3", a form which never appeared in the show.