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Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
1
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.
Bushido Blade
1
In a 1997 Dengeki PlayStation interview with the game's director Kunihiko Nakata, he mentioned that while they had a partial idea of what they wanted for the graphics, specific elements like the castle ruins map were conceptualized during the development process, and that the details of the world were worked out while they made it rather than being planned from the start.
Super Mario Bros. 3
1
Attachment In World 8, it's possible to bypass almost the entire battleship level by dropping into the water and swimming beneath the ship, jumping back on once the autoscroll reaches the vessel's stern. In the international version of the original NES release, one tile is removed from the rightmost portion of the ship in order to make the final jump easier.
person VinchVolt calendar_month August 15, 2024
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels
2
Attachment World 3-1's map data includes a Red Koopa Troopa inexplicably placed right above a pit, one space next to a ground tile. Because of its location, the enemy cannot be seen without the use of hacks or glitches, as the Koopa will have fallen into the pit by the time Mario reaches the spot where it spawns in. The enemy's unusual placement resulted in it going undiscovered until November 9, 2020, 34 years after the game's release.
person VinchVolt calendar_month August 8, 2024
Phantasy Star II
1
Attachment Sometime in 1987-88, Sega and the Japanese magazine "Beep!" held a "Story Recruitment Campaign" to let readers submit ideas to be considered for Phantasy Star II. This contest was held both to set a base for the start of development and to market the game to a wider audience on the name value of Phantasy Star, with the game being heavily advertised in Beep! thereafter. Despite the contest's name, Sega accepted any idea and gave out awards for scenario writing, illustrations, and game mechanics. Out of over 2000 entries, 29 were selected as winners and awarded with individually numbered "Associate Planner" certificates. They were also offered to meet with the game's developers for a planning meeting on March 20, 1988 at Sega's headquarters in Otorii, Tokyo, among other prizes. The events of the planning meeting and the top 7 winners were published in the June 1988 issue of Beep!, including a picture of the full roundtable. Producer/programmer Yuji Naka and artist Rieko Kodama were two of the developers in attendance.

Associate Planner No. 001, the Grand Prize winner, was Fumiko Sato. Of the 29 winners, three of them are known to have gone on to work in the video game industry and returned for work at Sega:

• No. 004 was 17-year old Masahiro Sakurai, who won the "Game System Award". Sakurai often recalled the contest without mentioning the game by name, claiming he came up with "something like the action-focused Active Time Battle system seen in JRPGs" before it existed. It's believed that this meeting was what prompted Sakurai to drop out of vocational school to pursue a full-time career in game design, using the award to advance his professional image until he was hired by HAL Laboratory after graduating high school in 1989. Sakurai became known for his work with them and Nintendo, creating the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series.

• No. 005 was Yukinobu Arikawa, who won the "Game System Special Award" for his entry titled "Those who inherit the legend". While it's not known if he attended the planning meeting, Arikawa would join Sega's AM2 team in 1990 and is still employed at Sega as of 2022. He became known for the comedic touches he adds to the games he works on, having worked as a game designer, writer, localizer and texture artist on different games in the Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Super Monkey Ball, Virtua Fighter, and Daytona USA series.

• No. 011 was middle schooler Keisuke Ōuchi, who described his proposal as being full of "middle school syndrome", but was unable to attend the planning meeting because he lived in the countryside at the time. Ōuchi worked on games as a character designer and graphics artist in various capacities, and created and directed the 1998 visual novel Ojou-sama Express, which similarly to Phantasy Star II held a long-term reader participation contest in the gaming magazine "Dengeki G's Magazine". He also works as a collectors' toy designer under the name Alan Moriguchi, specializing in mechs and robots.

It's unknown if or how any of the winners' ideas were used in the final game, as all of the developers used pseudonyms in the credits and no Associate Planners were credited.
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month July 31, 2024
Beep! - screenshots of March 1988 issue (in Japanese; it's believed that this issue is where the full list of winners were first published, but no full scan of the issue is available online):
https://retoge-mag.websa.jp/archives/215

Beep! - June 1988 issue (in Japanese; Page 86 in the magazine):
https://archive.org/details/beep-1988-06/page/86/mode/2up

Beep! - September 1989 issue translated developer interview:
https://shmuplations.com/psiirelease/

Masahiro Sakurai (No. 004) on Creating Games video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk8WsbCQXGc#t=194s

Sakurai translated magazine column on school/early work experience:
https://sourcegaming.info/2015/07/06/school-work-and-specialists-sakurais-famitsu-column-vol-3334/

Sakurai - The Guardian interview:
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/aug/08/super-smash-bros-ultimate-masahiro-sakurai-35-years-gaming-history-nintendo

A conversation between gamers and game journalists about the future of computer games, held on August 15, 1989 at Dempa Publications, Inc. (19-year old Sakurai partook in this, and is credited with winning the Game System Award in the Phantasy Star II contest) [published in "CHALLENGE!! Personal Computer AVG & RPG 5 JP Book"] (Pages 341-355 in the book, Sakurai only appears on page 348 and did not participate in the rest of the conversation):
https://retrocdn.net/images/d/d5/CHALLENGE%21%21_Personal_Computer_AVG_%26_RPG_5_JP_Book.pdf

Yukinobu Arikawa (No. 005) career history:
https://segaretro.org/Yukinobu_Arikawa
https://www.mobygames.com/person/69425/yukinobu-arikawa/credits/

Keisuke Ōuchi (No. 011) tweets:
https://x.com/AlanMoriguchi/status/1320302751096553472
https://x.com/AlanMoriguchi/status/1321068321450553347

Alan Moriguchi (Ōuchi) revealing his identity in 2014:
https://x.com/AlanMoriguchi/status/520581151493070849

Ōuchi MobyGames page:
https://www.mobygames.com/person/456584/keisuke-ouchi/

Dengeki G's Magazine - August 1998 issue (Pages 49-61 in the magazine):
https://archive.org/details/dengeki-gs-magazine-013-august-1998/page/48/mode/2up

Japanese Wikipedia article on Ojou-sama Express with magazine citations (including the above issue):
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/お嬢様特急

Sega Associate Planner No. 017 tweet:
https://x.com/suginov/status/1321062605033664513

Sega Associate Planner No. 019 tweet:
https://x.com/unlucky_numbers/status/1539132578120486912

1988 contest materials were reportedly republished in the reprint mook " Beep(ビープ) 復刻版―特別付録 音楽CD2枚組 ":
https://www.amazon.co.jp/Beep-%E5%BE%A9%E5%88%BB%E7%89%88%E2%80%95%E7%89%B9%E5%88%A5%E4%BB%98%E9%8C%B2-%E9%9F%B3%E6%A5%BDCD2%E6%9E%9A%E7%B5%84-Softbank-mook/dp/4797326239

Tweets that served as a starting point for researching this submission:
https://x.com/gosokkyu/status/1585114095329898496
https://x.com/gosokkyu/status/1705220228828045506
Yeah! You Want "Those Games", Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them!
4
This game, also referred to by the shorthand title "Those Games", is a parody of mobile game advertisements, specifically those that depict fake minigames that are not representative of the actual game once it is downloaded. The game's producer Maya Ito stated at its release that it was developed in just eight months, and came about about from her own desire to play those minigames "thoroughly and to my heart's content!" She described the process of balancing each minigame and trying to turn them into fully realized games as being particularly challenging, and felt that she "could've done some things a little differently" after noticing that players at launch had found many different ways to play the minigames.
Doodle Champion Island Games
0
The game originally began as a smaller interactive Google Doodle game to celebrate the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Tokyo, but after the events were delayed to 2021, Google were effectively given another year to expand it into a full-fledged video game with at least two and a half hours of content. This made it the largest interactive Google Doodle produced in the company's history. Their engineers were surprised at the large amount of side quests and dialogue they were able to fit into the game, but they struggled to get the game to run on mobile phones, tablets and desktop computers as it needed to be displayed on Google's front page. They managed to get the game to remember save data by saving it to users' local storage, so the game could be continued at any time. It is not fully known what the game's technological specs are, but the level design and sprite animations were created by Google in Adobe Animate, while the animated cutscenes were created by Japanese animation studio Studio 4°C in Toon Boom Harmony and Adobe After Effects.
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month June 20, 2024
Yume Nikki
1
Attachment In Version 0.04, Dense Woods A contained two jellyfish instead of just one, with the second being located by a lamppost near the center of the map; interacting with it only causes it to ring, without any additional results. In all recovered later builds, this jellyfish is moved out of bounds, well out of the camera's view; however, it can still be interacted with if the player uses cheats or glitches to access it. In Version 0.10, interacting with this jellyfish crashes the game due to its associated files being renamed: the jellyfish is programmed to call a file called イベント5, which was renamed to イベント_005 in Version 0.10.

Additionally, Dense Woods A's layout was redesigned in Version 0.07 to remove a gate that originally led to Mural World. Instead, the upper path is expanded to loop over to the western portion of the main road in Dense Woods A, and the remaining gate leading to Puddle World was redesigned.
person VinchVolt calendar_month June 17, 2024
The Cutting Room Floor article:
https://tcrf.net/Proto:Yume_Nikki/Map_and_Event_Differences/Minor_Maps#Dense_Woods_A

YouTube video showing the use of a noclip glitch to access the offscreen jellyfish in Version 0.10:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9gNNPmZxd8
Gex: Enter the Gecko
2
Attachment In the bonus level, "Chips and Dips", developer photos with humorous text can be found across the stage. A photo of producer Jeffrey Zwelling was found during gameplay by accident, and to date, the criteria to activate the picture is uncertain.
Yume Nikki
1
Attachment Prior to Version 0.07, the guillotine NPC that provides the Severed Head effect when interacted with was located in Block World rather than the Guillotine Room (the latter of which is commonly known as such due to the guillotine's presence there in later builds). Instead, the latter area only features the lunatic Toriningen and cupboards.

This early iteration consequently made Block World one of only two areas in the game that featured more than one effect (the second being the Hat & Scarf effect, which is obtainable from Block World in all known builds). From Version 0.07 onward, this distinction is only held by Mural World (which features both the Blonde and Long Hair effects).
person VinchVolt calendar_month June 15, 2024
Yume Nikki
1
Attachment Version 0.09 updated the Witch effect so that a unique sound plays when moving around while riding the broom, rather than simply reusing the regular footstep sounds. This is accomplished by giving every map two copies of the same tileset: one for regular mobility and one for the broom, with the game swapping between the two as needed. While this is retained in Version 0.10, the code is simplified in the later build so that a copy of the full string is not needed on every map.

However, three areas of the game were not properly accounted for during the conversion process: the second room in Neon Tile Path, the room full of beds in Number World, and the Pink Sea all play the regular footstep sound regardless of whether or not Madotsuki has the Witch effect equipped and active. Additionally, these areas still contain leftover event data from Version 0.09's method of swapping between the two tilesets. Because the indexes for the game's tiles were altered concurrently with the streamlining of the broom code, triggering these leftover events with cheats instead swaps out the maps' graphics with ones from other areas:

• The pyramids in the second room of Neon Tile Path are replaced with Henkei Shita heads from Footprint Path A, and sitting down changes the entire tileset to that of Snow World, with the background additionally changing from solid black to solid white. It reverts back to the mostly complete Neon Tile Path tileset when Madotsuki sits back up.
• The tileset for the room full of beds in Number World is replaced with that of Forest World, temporarily reverting back to the proper visuals whenever Madotsuki sits down. The background, however, is unaffected.
• The Pink Sea is completely blacked out, as the game attempts to call blank divider tiles when in this state.
person VinchVolt calendar_month June 9, 2024
Yume Nikki
1
Attachment The unpatched release of Version 0.10 contains unused data for an event on Mars called "階段←↓". Re-enabling this event opens an alternate, invisible entrance to the Martian underground, to the left of the hole that leads to it in the final game; however, the map's collision data prevents Madotsuki from actually using it without the aid of further cheats.

Furthermore, the game contains unused graphics for a stairway that matches the visuals of the Martian surface, and the Martian underground features several flights of stairs at the beginning. This indicates that the underground was originally meant to be accessed via the unused stairway rather than needing Madotsuki to activate the Midget effect, with the summit's layout being changed concurrently with the altered entrance. The Yumesyuusei Patch and all releases based on it (including the official English release) remove the data for 階段←↓, though the unused stair tiles are unaffected.

Additionally, the game's code contains tiles for doors on the walls of the Martian underground, indicating that the sub-area was originally planned to feature multiple rooms rather than just one. This, combined with the unused alternate entrance, implies that Kikiyama had to leave Mars incomplete for unknown reasons, polishing up what was already completed late into Version 0.10's development.
person VinchVolt calendar_month June 8, 2024
Yume Nikki
1
Attachment In all earlier builds of the game, Neon World featured a radically different layout, matching the open-world structure of the other "main" locations accessible from the Nexus. The sole relic of this in Version 0.10's segmented design is the room that Madotsuki starts in, which is much bigger and features a more spread-out tile pattern compared to the other rooms in Neon World.

One noteworthy casualty from the layout change is the removal of various head-like figures scattered across Neon World in Version 0.09. These figures are not seen anywhere in Version 0.10, making them the only documented "characters" that were outright removed (rather than relocated) in a later update.
Yume Nikki
1
Attachment Number World was not implemented until Version 0.08; in prior builds, the gray door in the Nexus with a large red circle on it instead lead to an early iteration of Lamp World. Of note is that the earlier version of Lamp World features an alcove full of beds and cupboards. A bloodstain is also present in the bottom-right corner of the room; in Version 0.07, this stain teleports Madotsuki to the Guillotine Room when stepped on. This alcove would be moved to the Number World in Version 0.08 onward, and the bloodstain would be replaced with a Zippertile spewing blood out of its mouth, still acting as a warp to the Guillotine Room.

Additionally, the early version of Lamp World featured background music that is not present anywhere in Version 0.08 onward; this track was also used for the Face Carpet area in Forest World before it was concurrently replaced in Version 0.08 with the background music for the hot springs building in the Wilderness, played at 70% speed.
Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned
1
The game is notable for two puzzles considered by fans and critics to respectively be one of the best and worst ever made for an adventure game.

The puzzle "Le Serpent Rouge" ("The Red Snake") involves decoding torn-up poem stanzas by hunting for information during the game and solving geometric mapping puzzles. This puzzle was widely praised for its overarching complexity and intriguing nature regardless of the player's interest in the real-life mysteries of Rennes-le-Château, a Southern French commune crucial to the game's plot that has been covered in various books and conspiracy theories. The poem was originally included in the "Secret Files of Henri Lobineau", a 1967 dossier about the fraternal organization the Priory of Sion, and was modified to make the puzzle solvable. Lead designer Jane Jensen named it her favorite and most challenging puzzle, designing it around the game's fully controllable 3D camera.

Meanwhile, a puzzle designed by producer Steven Hill was disliked internally and was meant to be replaced with a puzzle by Jensen, but they were forced to leave it in the game due to time constraints. It starts with Gabriel Knight finding that his friend Detective Mosely arrived in France the night before in a tour group and is scheduled to rent a motorcycle that day, so he goes to rent one himself. The nearsighted rental stand clerk requires a passport to confirm arrivals, revealing that the only rides he has left are a bike saved for Mosely and a cheap scooter. To get the bike, Knight plans to disguise as Mosely by Spoiler:stealing his coat and passport, and hiding his long blonde hair in a hat, despite putting it in a visible ponytail. He then draws a mustache on Mosely's passport photo to obscure their facial differences, goes to a shed, puts masking tape on a hole in the shed door, sprays a nearby cat with water causing it to run into the tape and stick fur to it, and applies it to his face with some maple syrup from breakfast to make a fake mustache. The disguise inexplicably works, and Knight gets the bike.

Moreso than Le Serpent Rouge was praised, the disguise puzzle was roundly criticized for its lack of hints, the impossibility of Knight convincingly impersonating Mosely, and the cartoonish roundabout way of Spoiler:making the mustache clashing with the game's serious tone. Critics felt that while it was not the most difficult puzzle, the solution was too absurd for the average player to think it would work. The most scathing review came from future Valve writer Eric Wolpaw, who blamed Jensen for the poor design (it was not known at the time that she did not design it), and called the process of Spoiler:making the mustache "deranged", controversially declaring it was proof that adventure games "committed suicide". While Jensen disliked the puzzle, she thought it being the death of adventure games was "kinda overblown", and the "length of the sequence and the lack of hints" was what made it bad.
person MehDeletingLater calendar_month June 5, 2024
Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned - Le Serpent Rouge poem and walkthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7b47CJrnyc
https://sierrachest.com/index.php?a=games&;id=39&title=gabriel-knight-3&fld=walkthrough&pid=101

Hunting Shadows: The Making of Gabriel Knight - Chapter 5:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200513021453/https://episodiccontentmag.com/2015/11/20/hunting-shadows-the-making-of-gabriel-knight-chapter-5-of-5/

Anastasia Salter - "Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects" (2017) - Influential Video Game Designers. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN 978-1501327452. (Pages 58-60):
https://books.google.com/books?id=cPEkDgAAQBAJ

Jane Jensen Adventure Gamers interview:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190715214638/https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/18170

Le Serpent Rouge real poem article:
https://www.renneslechateau.nl/2012/01/13/the-red-serpent/

Le Serpent Rouge puzzle miscellaneous Adventure Gamers acclaim:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210715000329/https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/18643/page/page4/page7/page10/N100/page15
https://web.archive.org/web/20170428013712/http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17459
https://web.archive.org/web/20170311222718/http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/18586

Computer Gaming World - Issue #179, June 1999 (Page 63 in magazine):
https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_179/page/n66/mode/1up?q=serpent

The Games Machine - No. 6, March 2008 (Page 68 in magazine):
https://archive.org/details/the-games-machine-italia-speciali-06/page/n67/mode/1up?q=serpent

Detective Mosely tour group context just before the puzzle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hjzZ0z4b5E

Disguise puzzle footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hpcmJLrseI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx3D9xb_sFg

Kotaku interview snippet:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200619041238/https://kotaku.com/how-we-survived-adventure-gamings-most-hair-tearingly-r-5903932

Computer Gaming World - Issue #189, April 2000 (Pages 74-75):
https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_189

Old Man Murray (Eric Wolpaw) - Death of Adventure Games:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200405052244/http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/79.html

Gamasutra interview mentioning impact of Old Man Murray blog post:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200618200402/https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134850/spyparty_and_the_indie_ethos_.php?page=3

GamesRadar+ article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200603224407/https://www.gamesradar.com/the-top-7-stupidest-puzzles/4/

InVisible Culture article (counterargument about the "death of adventure games"):
https://web.archive.org/web/20200622204402/http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/the-kinesthetic-index-video-games-and-the-body-of-motion-capture/
Freddy in Space 3: Chica in Space
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1
person Violett calendar_month April 21, 2024
The Witch and the Hundred Knight
1
Originally, Nippon Ichi Software considered making The Witch and the Hundred Knight an open-world game, but this was ultimately scrapped in favor of focusing on the game's 3D graphics technology.
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis
1
Attachment The design of this game's park entrance differs depending on what platform and also what graphics setting you're playing on. On the higher graphical settings on PC, it is modeled after the Visitor Center from the movie and also incorporates the traditional iconic Jurassic Park gate. On consoles and also on lower graphical settings on PC, it instead features a far smaller and compact building instead of the Visitor Center, and the Jurassic Park gate's design is modified to also include the Tyrannosaurus skeleton emblem iconic to the series, surrounded by a bundle of ferns.
Dark Souls
2
Lost Izalith was originally going to be a swampy area like the bottom of Blighttown. However, FromSoftware didn't want it to be a swamp and so it was redesigned to be a lava field, but the team couldn't completely redesign the place the way they wanted to due to time constraints.
Kingdom Hearts
1
In the Bizarre Room in Wonderland, the fireplace's flames can be "put out" if Sora attacks the fireplace's grated opening with a Blizzard spell, and it can be lit anew if the grated opening is hit with Fire magic instead. Being able to put out the fire makes the second phase of the Trickmaster Heartless boss fight even easier, as the frantic boss cannot light their juggling apparatuses and fling their own Fire at Sora. This is also possibly why the Cheshire Cat gifts Sora a Blizzard spell/upgrade when Sora obtains and shows him at least the Claw Marks piece of evidence during Alice's trail, and also why the grated opening itself is able to be locked onto.
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