The Dragon Quest-esque overworld area, colloquially known as FC World, features a large island on the right-hand side of the map that is not accessible during the normal course of play despite taking up the majority of FC World's land mass. No events or exits are associated with this island, popularly known as FC World C, meaning that hacking the game to place Madotsuki there would prove fruitless.
Despite this, there is evidence that this area was meant to be explorable at one point in development. In the Version 0.09 build (the last one before the "final" Version 0.10 release in 2007), the Dense Woods and Windmill World areas feature the player character from the minigame NASU as an NPC; however, a flag is set to render it invisible (and therefore non-interactable). If the player uses RPG Maker 2003's debugging tools to render the character visible, interacting with it teleports Madotsuki to another unused area in FC World, a small island with four statues on it and an exit at the bottom. Going through this exit takes Madotsuki to FC World C.
While FC World C is still as barren as in other versions of the game, the unused chain of events leading up to it in Version 0.09 indicates that the area was intended to play some kind of role in the final game and that Kikiyama continued to try implementing it late into the game's update history.
The South Korean version of the game (released two years after the original Japanese edition) contains eleven unused maps not found in any other release, featuring fully 3D environments which do not line up with any locations present in the finished product. All assets related to these maps are dated after the game's Japanese release, with intervals ranging from five days to just over three months. Additionally, the maps' texture names are written in Romanized Japanese rather than Korean, indicating that they were not created by Nintendo of Korea.
Two of these maps, kri_04 and kri_05, additionally feature various cat NPCs, all drawn in substantially different art styles compared to not only each other, but also the final game. Each one is named after a developer from the Super Paper Mario staff: yamada_neko02 (Koichiro Yamada), koba_neko (Sayuri Kobayashi), tuka_neko (Naoko Tsukamoto), and kawa_neko (Chie Kawabe).
Of these four, kawa_neko is the most unique, and was apparently designed as a player character. Firstly, the cat's name is only given to its mesh, with its sprite instead being named bc_all.1. Additionally, kawa_neko features an animated tail and a mesh that is centered on the ground rather than the middle of the room. Furthermore, new_neko_18, a redesigned version of kawa_neko with white fur instead of black, can be found in kri_08, kri_09, and kri_10; new_neko_18's mesh is explicitly labeled "PLAYER" in the data for these maps.
Taken together, all of these elements imply that these early rooms were created as a proof-of-concept for an original project by Intelligent Systems that ended up cancelled for unknown reasons.
Certain in-game enemies are only able to be fought by Mario & Luigi or Bowser. Despite this, a few Bowser-oriented enemies have unique behaviors for Mario & Luigi, which can only be seen through hacking the game:
• All of Naplock's attacks can be dodged or countered by jumping, with its snot bubble attack also missing Mario & Luigi entirely even if nothing is done. • Dark Mechawful's punch attack can be countered with Mario & Luigi's hammers, while its countdown attack is replaced by the same star attack used by the Dark Mechawful head, which can fight Mario & Luigi in normal gameplay if Bowser inhales it. However, in a hacked Dark Mechawful fight, this attack progresses extremely slowly. • The smoke signals at the start of Choomba's charge attack are changed from fist and shell icons to "M" and "L" ones, indicating which brothers it will charge at and in which order; the attack can also be countered by hammering. • Dark Trashure's thrown items can be avoided or countered by jumping, similarly to its standard counterpart. However, the items move far faster than those thrown by a regular Trashure or a Dark Trashure fought by Bowser.
While most of these behaviors appear to be failsafes, Choomba is unique in that the "M" and "L" smoke signals are not present anywhere else in the game, indicating that at one point in development, Mario & Luigi would've been able to explore the Tunnel, where Choombas are fought.
Meanwhile, when hacking the game to allow Bowser to fight enemies that can only be encountered by Mario & Luigi, most of them will either crash the game, flee immediately, or display glitchy behavior. One unique case is Magifoofas, which can be inhaled by Bowser (despite the Vacuum Block not indicating this), indicating that the developers considered letting him encounter them in some form.
The source code for Doubutsu no Mori contains references to a variety of non-Nintendo Famicom ROMs that would not appear in the final game, including Arkanoid, F1 Circus, and most bizarrely, the bootleg port of Tekken 2 by Hummer Team.
In an interview with the developers at Blue Tongue, they mentioned several buildings they wanted to include in this game, but had to drop due to design decisions or memory constraints on home consoles:
•Hotels, which would provide extra accommodation for guests. •Dino-Vet Station, which would have been vital for keeping dinosaurs healthy. •Hunting Platforms, which would let visitors hunt down carnivores in the park from afar.
The Dino-Vet Station can be found in earlier promotional material for Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis and also within its game files. Likewise with the Hunting Platform, which also still has Audio, Ini and even Rig Files within the game.
In the source code for Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales, a string of text can be found reading "no smutty comments please", suggesting there were previously inappropriate developer comments in the code thet were deleted.
In the seventh episode of each course, the player is required to chase down and defeat Shadow Mario to obtain a Shine Sprite, which spawns from his dematerializing body as he teleports away. In actuality, the Shine Sprites are stored at fixed locations and are simply teleported to his location by the flag "appearShineFromKageMario". If the flag is replaced with "appearShineFromNPC", the Shine Sprites appear where they are stored, implying that these were their originally intended locations. The fixed points in "Shadow Mario Revisited", "Hold It, Shadow Mario!", and "Shadow Mario Runs Wild" also feature dedicated cameras for spawning cutscenes, corroborating the idea.
Of note is that the internal location for the Shine Sprite in "Shadow Mario Runs Wild" places it partially inside Pianta Village's golden mushroom, which further implies that this object had its height raised at some point during development.
Within the data for Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum is code to spawn in a Level 40 Darkrai as a roaming Pokémon, tying in with its nature as a malevolent counterpart to Cresselia (which similarly becomes a roaming Pokémon after meeting the player on Fullmoon Island). In the final game, Darkrai is instead encountered as a stationary opponent at Newmoon Island after obtaining the Member Card as a Mystery Gift item at select in-person events.
There are eight Titanite Demons in Dark Souls, but the one on the bridge connecting the Demon Ruins to Lost Izalith is the only one that respawns due to a typo in that Titanite Demon's event ID. However, it's unknown if this was an accident or a deliberate typo to remove a limit from upgrading weapons.
There are fully functional unused Diggin' Chuck, Bullet Bill, Fishbone, and Spiny enemies in the code of Hummer Team's Super Mario World, as well as sprites for crushers, Lakitu, and Clappin' Chuck without associated coding.
The Saturn release's demo, "Silhouette Mirage: Trial Version", normally ends after level two. However, hidden on the game's disc is an early pre-release build of the retail game, dated 1997-07-16, while the final game has a build date of 1997-07-30. The full game is inaccessible without modifying the data.
Within the Saturn port's data is an unused English language option, suggesting that the title may have been considered for a Western release. Fan translator Malenko made the discover before creating a patch to re-enable the option.
Atari 2600's Asteroids has an unused functionality for showing graphics of the spaceship as a life counter instead of the number, much like the arcade version. This was most likely changed for processing power reasons, as only six ships can be displayed at a time.
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Within the game files, some of the game makers vented their annoyance over the game development process:
"I hate this game's coding. I can't see jack or shit of what's in it! Stream %d has read %d more bytes than the file size. Please tell Keith. If possible, save your debug output and mail it to him......Please also note the level on which it happened, how long you were playing for and what if any dialogue was playing Serious Shit. SOUNDSYS thread does not work.....SOUNDSYS secondary thread has started...Serious Shit. Second thread does not work request to free %d bytes of spu ram failed !!!!...things are shit. memory allocated above 2mb."
In the files of the Donkey Kong Adventure expansion, there are unused files for Rambi the Rhino as a party member, including a model; menu icons; and skills. He would have taken up two spaces on the board and been able to charge through any destructible terrain that enemies are using as cover and destroy it instantly. In the final DLC, Rambi would not appear physically in any form, but would have a gun made in his image. Rambi's model looks closer to his appearance in Rare's Donkey Kong games than his appearance in the Paon and Retro Studios Donkey Kong games, a design change that would also be carried over to Super Nintendo World's iteration of the character after Donkey Kong Adventure's release.
The matching card game has an unused card called "MatchPointsSadChef". It does not have any attached graphics. While this card doesn't exist, the game does have a happy chef card, using the chef from Comfy Cakes.
While Super Donkey is thought to have ultimately evolved into Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, the project was likely tossed around as a Mario or Zelda game at various points in development.
Various development assets associated with Super Donkey, which were uncovered alongside the prototype in the 2020 Gigaleak, include sprites and animations for Link, Mario, and Donkey Kong; the animation files for Link are dated to fall 1990, while Mario's animation files are dated to winter of that year. Additional files for all three characters span overlapping periods in 1991. Link's sprites and animations indicate that Super Donkey was at one point planned to be a side-scrolling Zelda title similar to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, while Mario's animations imply that the iteration that starred him and Donkey Kong eventually morphed into the 1994 Game Boy title Donkey Kong.