According to artist Chris Neuman's portfolio website, an MMO based on the MySims series (tentatively referred to as "MySims Online MMO") was in development in 2009, with Neuman having served as the lead artist on the project. Based on the art shown and the description provided, it would have had character customization, an art style that provided a more "vinyl" look for the series cast, assets converted from the various Wii games, new and returning locations (such as Gino's Pizzeria from MySims Agents), and different minigames such as one taking place on a dance floor. Additionally, one of the art pieces shared featured several characters from throughout the MySims series (specifically Madame Zoe, DJ Candy, Chef Gino, Skip Rogers, Zack and Sapphire), suggesting that pre-existing characters were planned to appear here.
In 2010, development began on a MySims game for the Nintendo 3DS titled "MySims Friends", being made by Behaviour Interactive, the developers behind MySims Racing and MySims SkyHeroes. It would have featured extensive customization options (most notably the ability to customize the environment around you) and would have been an online-only game, requiring features such as StreetPass and Nintendo connectivity. It was cancelled after EA decided to move the The Sims franchise into a new direction, one that did not include the MySims series. Years later, art director Xavier Garcia would release pieces of concept art for the game.
A sequel to MySims Agents called MySims Agents 2 was planned, but was ultimately shelved in Fall 2009. Years later on May 12, 2023, designer Brian Kaiser shared an old completed story outline for the game on his Twitter account. Based on the outline, the plot would have revolved around the player investigating a series of strange events involving an unknown energy source (later revealed to be seeping through portals from the Nightmare Realm), all while contending with the new S.P.A. director Morgan (a reworked version of the scrapped character Vice Admiral Morgan from MySims Kingdom) and her advisors Dragomir and Svetlana (reused from MySims SkyHeroes), who has shut down several branches of the agency as part of "restructuring" and captured Walker after he began to investigate them. Several characters from the original game would have returned, with Roxie Road, Jenny, Dr. F, Buddy, and Vic Vector all being part of the player's team as they solve cases all over the globe. While full gameplay details are unknown (aside from a new grapple hook mechanic), some pieces of concept art have been released since, such as designs for Morgan's various monster forms.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future was originally released as JoJo's Venture in December 1998. This version suffered from a rushed development, reflected by the abundance of unused assets in its code, including both finished and unfinished sprites for various attacks, cutscenes, and HUD elements. An updated version would come out eight months later, this time using the series' full title and adding the Heritage for the Future subtitle. A significant chunk of the unused assets in JoJo's Venture would be polished up and incorporated in this newer version.
Naughty Dog's name was inspired by their first company mascot Morgan, a Labrador/Rhodesian Ridgeback mix born in 1989 who was the pet dog of co-founder Jason Rubin starting with the development of Rings of Power. During the development of Way of the Warrior, Morgan lived with both Rubin and co-founder Andy Gavin in poor living conditions and she was often fed some of their meals from the fast food chain McDonald's. While she first appeared in a game as a Special Thanks credit in Rings of Power, Morgan technically became part of the company when she was given her own photo ID card after Naughty Dog moved onto the Universal Interactive Studios premises for the development of Crash Bandicoot. She was credited as a member of Naughty Dog on their four Crash Bandicoot games and Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. She died in 2002 at the age of 13 during the development of Jak II, and several tributes to her were put into Jak II and Jak 3.
Jak II's manual and end credits feature a standard In Memoriam dedication for Morgan, but there are two more hidden tributes in the game. There is a green neon sign spelling Morgan's name written in the Precurian language inside the Hip Hog Saloon located to the left from the door. Additionally, in the Power Station in New Haven City, a set of random scrolling Precurian messages can be found on the large computer monitor. Translating these to English will reveal the following:
• "Morgan I miss you" • "Morgan" • "Thirteen years hard time" • "There will never be another" • "Good dog" • "I will always love you"
Another message can be found on computer screens you can view at eye-level, which reads "Morgan is still missed even after a year has passed". These computer screen messages are re-used on the monitors in both the Power Station and the Freedom League buildings in Jak 3. Since Morgan's death, Naughty Dog have credited more pets as members of their team and/or company mascots, with the first successor being a Labrador puppy named Osiris who first appeared in the credits of the first Jak and Daxter game alongside Morgan.
To avoid loading everything in memory when the player visits the HQ, recruitable agents are given separate archives for their models. Several Sims who are not recruitable have separately stored models in addition to their regular map models, suggesting they were intended to be recruitable at some point. The Sims in question are Chef Gino, Ol' Gabby, Barney Cull, Dr. F, DJ Candy, Alexa Lexington, Chaz McFreely, Chef Watanabe, Justice, Tim (whose files were used in an earlier build of the game), and Proto-Makoto (a character who was scrapped from the game entirely).
Two songs carried over from The Sims 2's "Pets" expansion, specifically "Fruit A Topia" and "The Sum of Six Sims", appear in the game files for the Create-A-Sim mode, likely being used as placeholders.
The game's data contains an unused red version of the Squeaker enemy, which acts as a more mobile variant of the green Squeaker. These red Squeakers are present not only in isolation, but also in some of the game's similarly inaccessible debug rooms. Given that they are fully coded and that red Squeakers are only normally visible in the Squeak Squad's introductory cutscene and in the Smash Ride sub-game, this implies that they were removed from the main game's levels relatively late into development.
Originally, an island known as Shipwreck Cove (designed by producer Jason Kim) was going to appear in the game, with much of its data remaining in the game files. Despite how finished the remaining materials look, designer Brian Kaiser claimed that the developers did not get very far into production on it. The full level layout can be found in the unused data, meaning that the island can be stitched together using several models. Four NPCs were intended to appear on the island, those being Vice Admiral Morgan, Neema, Theodore, and Mira (who would later be reworked into Mira Cull, the daughter of series regular Barney Cull in MySims SkyHeroes; it's unknown if she was intended to be related to him in this game). Additionally, five music tracks related to the island are also in the game files, the names of which suggest that planned landmarks for the island include a Pirate Lighthouse, Mira's House, and Neema's Shack.
Early concept art for the game depicts three costumes for Plok that were never implemented in the final product. One depicts Plok as a superhero, the second as a robot, and the third as a ninja.
In 2008, an animated series based on the MySims series was announced as part of a deal between Electronic Arts and the United Talent Agency to turn their games into motions pictures and television shows, alongside a film based on the The Sims series announced the year prior. However, while The Sims film has since received numerous updates on its development, the MySims series has not been acknowledged since, suggesting it was eventually cancelled.
According to designer Shiro Maekawa, there were originally going to be six teams with very different line-ups. Two of the teams, Team Sonic and Team Chaotix, had the same members as they appear in the final game, but the four early teams include:
• Amy, Cream and Rouge • Chaos, E-102 Gamma and Big • Fang, Bean and Bark • Metal Sonic, Ray and Mighty
Due to time constraints and balancing purposes, the number of teams was reduced from six to four, and the members of Team Dark and Team Rose were swapped and adjusted after it was decided that Shadow Spoiler:would not be dead after the events of Sonic Adventure 2.
In a 2002 developer interview archived by the now-defunct blog GSLA, director Yoshiaki Koizumi revealed that the game's staff originally came up with ten different nozzles for FLUDD, devising new ones for each possible situation Mario might encounter. However, this was reduced to three to avoid similarities to the gameplay style of The Legend of Zelda series. Some remnants of this larger quantity can be found in the final game's data, which includes an unused model for a Yoshi head nozzle and parameters for a sniper nozzle. While the former's properties are unknown beyond its appearance (with its model lacking any associated animations), the latter would have been 100 times more powerful than the Squirt Nozzle and would've had a significantly larger hitbox. However, it also would've required Mario to charge it like the Rocket Nozzle and Turbo Nozzle.
In a 2002 staff interview with Nintendo Dream, director Yoshiaki Koizumi revealed that FLUDD was inspired by his memories of playing with water guns as a kid, an image that he recalled upon first using the analog L & R triggers on the GameCube's controller. Series creator Shigeru Miyamoto further explained that the concept behind FLUDD was controversial among Nintendo's staff due to Mario not being widely associated with these kinds of tools, though Luigi's use of the Poltergust in Luigi's Mansion ultimately served as a precedent in the concept's favor.
In the same interview, Takashi Tezuka stated that Nintendo went to great lengths to keep FLUDD from resembling a firearm, both due to Koizumi finding a water gun "too simple" and due to concerns that guns (or anything that audiences may interpret as such) would be inappropriate for the franchise's public image. The "weird backpack thing" that FLUDD ultimately ended up as addressed both concerns at once, with Koizumi likening it to firefighting equipment and "a [plastic] bottle water rocket toy."
The New World script seen throughout the game is a cipher for the Latin alphabet. While this is most visible with the subtitles for "Welcome to the New World", which are provided in both scripts, all other instances are just as easily translatable, producing coherent English-language messages.
In an interview for Nintendo's "Ask the Developers" column, series director Shinya Kumazaki and associate producer Kei Ninomiya revealed that they deliberately designed and utilized the New World script in a way that would allow players to translate it themselves, with Kumazaki describing it as a way to make the game more immersive for curious audiences.
While Grimace's Birthday seems to be a web-browser game mimicking the "retro" graphics of the Game Boy Color, it is actually a real Game Boy Color ROM being run in an emulator, and it's possible to extract the ROM and play it on a Game Boy Color or hardware that is compatible with its cartridges. Because the game was designed specifically for the system, its data includes an error screen typical of those found on other Game Boy Color titles that are incompatible with the original Game Boy. However, because Grimace's Birthday is intended to be played on McDonald's official website (which does not allow the player to switch between Game Boy and Game Boy Color mode), this screen is not viewable.
The title "Caladrius" was lifted from a legendary bird prominent in medieval European and Roman mythology that was thought to be a divine messenger of God. Caladrius would appear before those who were ill, and if there was a chance for recovery, it would fly away, carrying the illness with it. In a 2013 interview with the game's director Hitoshi Hoshino published in Shooting Gameside #7, he compared the design of the character ships to the bird's appearance, and added, "the title conveys that question: will there be any salvation or not?"
According to an Electronic Gaming Magazine interview (published in Issue #224, January 2008) with Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells and the game's director Amy Hennig, they were asked if they ever had plans for a different final boss battle after the interviewer expressed disappointment with it. Wells stated that the boss battle was designed to fit within the confines of the island and world they created, and that they could have made it more elaborate if they had a few extra weeks, but the overall direction remained consistent with their original plan. Hennig added that many games face the issue of jumping-the-shark at the end, as they need to escalate to a climax. She contrasted this with movies, which "get away with less" as they focus more on narrative and emotional experiences, and suggested that game design might benefit from shifting away from traditional boss battles to creating peaks in the overall experience.
Five Nights at Freddy's: Into the Pit was originally going to be a novelty 16-bit SNES-style cartridge game before slowly venturing out into a full-fledged modern PC and console game. Many of the early 16-bit sprites and animations can still be found in the game files.