According to former Capcom illustrator Akira "Akiman" Yasuda, one of the game's promotional illustrations depicting Chun-Li performing her Spinning Bird Kick move was based on the first pencil drawing of the move made for the game.

There's a sprite of popular anime character Doraemon hidden in the background of Gill's stage. To actually see the sprite in-game, first the player has to perform a glitch to get Alex and Chun-Li onto Gill's stage. Right after that they have to do several glitches including one involving Alex and Chun-Li's throws to get the latter at an unnaturally high point. If Chun-Li stomps on Alex she will fly up into the air and the background will eventually loop vertically, revealing the Doraemon sprite.

Urien's ending in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike was going to be somewhat different, as seen in early storyboards.

The storyboards show that the building of the secret society was going to be a modern skyscraper in the middle of a city while the final game shows a building similar to the Tower of Babel in the desert.

Additionally, the ending featured a giant sphere containing the brains of past Illuminati leaders. This was replaced in the final game with tubes containing the bodies.

One of Elena's rotoscoped animations in 3rd Strike was modeled after an actress in the music video to David Lee Roth's cover of "Just a Gigolo / I Ain't Got Nobody".

During the development of the game, Twelve was originally going to morph into Abigail from the Final Fight series when using X.C.O.P.Y against Hugo.

One of Chun-Li's win quotes in the game is "Hey leave me alone. I'm a fighter, not a news reporter." This may refer to the Street Fighter live-action movie, where Chun-Li was portrayed as a news reporter.

Checking in the sound test reveals that all of the Super Art moves for each character have the garbling effect (used when the character Twelve transforms via X.C.O.P.Y) recorded for them, even though the use of the Super Gauge as a timer means that Twelve cannot use any of his opponent's Super Arts in-game. This possibly indicates that Twelve was going to be able to use Super Arts from his opponents at one point.

In the Japanese version of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike and 2nd Impact: Giant Attack, when Urien loses to his opponent by time out, he squeezes his arm, which spurts out blood. The blood was removed in the International version.

When a character obtains a full bar of their super meter in 3rd Strike, the phrase "Let's Go!" can be heard. This is actually a sample from the 1960s Batman TV show; specifically the line "To the Batmobile! Let's Go!"