The initial release of the arcade version features unused character biographies for the game's playable cast. These biographies are facetious in nature, for instance claiming that Shinnok was an ex-model for the Bicycle brand of playing cards and that Scorpion's mission in life is to scold a friend for punching him when he was a child. The joking nature of these biographies likely contributed to their disabling in the original build and outright removal from the game's code in subsequent updates. Examining the biographies through hacking the game shows that two of them are unfinished. Fujin is referred to as "Windgod" and Noob Saibot's biography is mostly recycled from Raiden's, with the only original portion being the cut-off opening line.
Pizza Tower first saw attention with the demo released in the fan-run Sonic Amateur Game Expo (SAGE) 2018. To coincide with the expo being themed around Sonic the Hedgehog, a temporary joke character named "Snick the Porcupine" was added, with a backstory detailing how Peppino (dressed in blue like Sonic) had intended to go to SAGE, but ended up at the "Snick Amateur Games Expo" and instead made do with Snick's games (Pizza Tower levels). Upon clearing the SAGE demo, Snick will then turn into "Snick.EXE", a parody of the Sonic.exe creepypasta, starting an exclusive mode called "The Snick Challenge" where Peppino must evade Snick.EXE while playing through all 3 stages in the demo in order. The completion reward is a fully playable Snick with a unique moveset and animations, with taunts referencing a set of YouTube Poop music videos by user iteachvader that were based on the animated series Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.
Snick would later make a cameo in the SAGE 2020 demo for Antonball Deluxe - a game with connections to Pizza Tower - bringing back the same setting, playable Snick, and The Snick Challenge, but with Snick.EXE instead chasing the player through the regular demo playthrough and the requirement to collect "Ruckus Rubies" to unlock Snick. Since Snick was also not meant to appear in the final release, the Ruckus Rubies use directly-ripped sound effects from the Sonic series.
Despite his removal, Snick still makes many cameos in the final version of Pizza Tower. The tiles for the Slum hub area feature a Missing poster inquiring about Snick's whereabouts, the Refridgerator-Refridgerator-Freezerator stage features a similar Wanted poster on the side of a milk carton, one of Gustavo and Brick's taunts has Brick turn into Snick, and the Pizzaboy's Wash N' Clean area has Snick covered in a freshly-washed blanket, making him appear like a ghost. Peppino's blue outfit also returned under the name "Sage Blue", which can be unlocked by clearing Floor 1 in less than an hour.
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After getting Whisper's Love, a Rumrom called the Haunted Stone can be found in the Haunted House cellar. Its description refers to flying the Rocket to the Moon, but it's engraved with pictures of four arches leading up towards the Dragon. This depicts a cut area called "Dragon's Tail" that would have been used in a dream sequence triggered by Florence in the middle of the game, and revisited in a cut ending by reflecting two mirrors at a gate to create a tunnel to it. The area can be accessed through the debug menu, and was not removed before release as the developers never expected players to find it. They considered adding it to the 2019 rerelease in either a reworked form or as a DLC ending, but decided against it.
Designer Yoshiro Kimura and artist Kazuyuki Kurashima envisioned it as a purgatory where souls from real life and the game world meet before going to Heaven or Hell. It was inspired by books Kimura read that made him feel there were "other layers to humanity than what we normally experience in reality", as well as a one-man stage play he put on while working at Squaresoft called "Mononoke", about a bullied boy who enters a similar purgatory. Dragon's Tail was cut when Kimura designed the Monster Catch system and thought the ideas that came from it were more interesting and fitting with the game's themes, and because he found the area too similar to a chapter from the Osamu Tezuka manga "Phoenix". He recalled this as a stressful change as all the assets for the new ending had to be built out of clay and then imported into the game.
Dragon's Tail adds more backstory to a minor item in the final game called the White-Feathered Arrow. By interacting with Bilby, the Minister, and two papers in his bedroom, it's learned that this item Spoiler:was shot in the air as a ritual to randomly select a citizen to seal inside the cursed armor of the Hero and slay the Dragon. That person will endlessly chase and fight monsters until they die of old age. Since the game parodies contemporary RPGs like Dragon Quest, it's theorized that the White-Feathered Arrow is based on the cursor used to name player characters in that series. In the dream sequence, the Boy finds a crying naked boy who will follow him through the arches into a house at the end of the area. Inside is Spoiler:Gramby, where it's revealed that the naked boy is not only Gramby's presumed dead grandson, but also the Hero chosen by the White-Feathered Arrow who is destined to atone for killing monsters by healing them all. A long line of monsters and people from across history forms outside; talking to Florence and Tao at the end of the line will end the dream. In unused cutscenes and the cut ending, Spoiler:the naked boy evolves into the Dragon as he heals more monsters, and is eventually killed by the Hero, who he acknowledges is himself.
The game contains data for an unused saber-tooth cat enemy. It has idle, turning, walking, and running animations, as well as hurt and dying animations.
There are four unused music tracks in the game. Two of them were planned to be character themes for Makoto and T.O.B.O.R., and the other two were planned to be racetrack themes for Pinball Canyon and Dr. F's Daredevil Drive.
There are two unused pieces of headgear in the files of the original Nintendogs games: a chonmage wig (a Japanese male ponytail haircut worn by samurais in the Edo period to hold their helmets in place), and an afro wig. The chonmage has an unused description found in the Japanese version of the games and had all of its assets in the international releases replaced with the data for the Rainbow Wig. The afro on the other hand was finished enough that you can use cheat codes to make a dog wear it, but it does not have any leftover text or item attributes that let it be obtained as an item. It may have been cut from the games late into development due to concerns over racial offense and replaced with the Rainbow Wig, which has a very similar appearance to the afro, but with a rainbow-colored texture instead of one resembling black hair.
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.
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).
Faith Connors from Mirror's Edge and Natasha Volkova from Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 were planned to appear in the game as guest characters, but were both scrapped for unknown reasons. Despite this, Faith makes a cameo as a picture on the wall of Gal Force 4's base, and Natasha has leftover files in the game, suggesting that she was cut late in development. Additionally, artwork exists of an old man character who would have appeared in the game as a member of Crescent Moon, but was also scrapped.
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.
The Flame Shield was originally intended to appear alongside the Aqua and Thunder Shields, but it was removed due to it being too similar to the Thunder Shield.
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.
The Dark Eternal Champion has unused frames of animation left over in the game's files. It is unknown if these were meant for an alternate victory animation or a scrapped special move.
According to the game's director, John Johanas, Chai's hospital gown from Track 1 was meant to be an unlockable costume. However, the physics of the costume didn't respond well to Chai's moves and thus got scrapped.
According to developer Peter Molyneux in a 2019 interview, the different speed stats for the game's vehicles are entirely for show, and they all drive at the same speed. The lack of different vehicle speeds was due to time constraints stemming from a roughly six and a half week development period, but just seeing supposedly different speed stats when selecting a vehicle seemed to fool critics and players into thinking they were different at the time. Molyneux credits this concession for allowing Bullfrog Productions to focus more time into developing Dungeon Keeper, which would not release until nearly two years after Hi-Octane came out. It's rumored that early builds of Hi-Octane did have different vehicle speeds that were slowly worked on by the development team in their downtime as a side project. Molyneux claimed that this rumor was likely true, but that due to the same time constraints, they could not have made enough progress for the vehicle changes to be implemented into the final game.
Several additional characters were planned to appear in the game, but were scrapped in order to keep the game's plot easier to understand. This includes the presence of a "Space Broadcasting Censorship Bureau", who would interrupt broadcasts that were deemed unsuitable (and whom Pine was originally going to be a member of alongside her backups Sexy 1 and 2, taking issue with Ulala's exposing outfit), a narcissistic reporter from Channel 777 named "Gold Kinpicano", and a different main antagonist tentatively referred to as the "Dark Dancing Demon Lord", whose goal was to invade the entire universe with dance.
Before the Earth was implemented as a level selection screen, levels in Tornado Outbreak were originally displayed on a 2D world map and rendered entirely with Adobe Flash.
There is an unused title screen in the Metal Slug bootleg game Terrifying 9/11 that suggests it was originally going to be released as a straightforward bootleg version of Metal Slug instead of a bad-taste cash-in on the September 11th attacks.
The initial release of the arcade version features unused character biographies for the game's playable cast. These biographies are facetious in nature, for instance claiming that Shinnok was an ex-model for the Bicycle brand of playing cards and that Scorpion's mission in life is to scold a friend for punching him when he was a child. The joking nature of these biographies likely contributed to their disabling in the original build and outright removal from the game's code in subsequent updates. Examining the biographies through hacking the game shows that two of them are unfinished. Fujin is referred to as "Windgod" and Noob Saibot's biography is mostly recycled from Raiden's, with the only original portion being the cut-off opening line.
Pizza Tower first saw attention with the demo released in the fan-run Sonic Amateur Game Expo (SAGE) 2018. To coincide with the expo being themed around Sonic the Hedgehog, a temporary joke character named "Snick the Porcupine" was added, with a backstory detailing how Peppino (dressed in blue like Sonic) had intended to go to SAGE, but ended up at the "Snick Amateur Games Expo" and instead made do with Snick's games (Pizza Tower levels). Upon clearing the SAGE demo, Snick will then turn into "Snick.EXE", a parody of the Sonic.exe creepypasta, starting an exclusive mode called "The Snick Challenge" where Peppino must evade Snick.EXE while playing through all 3 stages in the demo in order. The completion reward is a fully playable Snick with a unique moveset and animations, with taunts referencing a set of YouTube Poop music videos by user iteachvader that were based on the animated series Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.
The game contains data for an unused saber-tooth cat enemy. It has idle, turning, walking, and running animations, as well as hurt and dying animations.
There are two unused pieces of headgear in the files of the original Nintendogs games: a chonmage wig (a Japanese male ponytail haircut worn by samurais in the Edo period to hold their helmets in place), and an afro wig. The chonmage has an unused description found in the Japanese version of the games and had all of its assets in the international releases replaced with the data for the Rainbow Wig. The afro on the other hand was finished enough that you can use cheat codes to make a dog wear it, but it does not have any leftover text or item attributes that let it be obtained as an item. It may have been cut from the games late into development due to concerns over racial offense and replaced with the Rainbow Wig, which has a very similar appearance to the afro, but with a rainbow-colored texture instead of one resembling black hair.
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.
The Flame Shield was originally intended to appear alongside the Aqua and Thunder Shields, but it was removed due to it being too similar to the Thunder Shield.
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.
The Dark Eternal Champion has unused frames of animation left over in the game's files. It is unknown if these were meant for an alternate victory animation or a scrapped special move.
Before the Earth was implemented as a level selection screen, levels in Tornado Outbreak were originally displayed on a 2D world map and rendered entirely with Adobe Flash.
There is an unused title screen in the Metal Slug bootleg game Terrifying 9/11 that suggests it was originally going to be released as a straightforward bootleg version of Metal Slug instead of a bad-taste cash-in on the September 11th attacks.