Trivia / Scribblenauts

• Development Gag: "Scribblenaut" spawns the original concept for the protagonist before he was changed to Maxwell. Your reward for 100% Completion of the first game is the ability to play as that character.
• Dummied Out:
  • There's an unused, unfinished stadium level that was also used by the developers as a test level. It can be briefly seen on the PC version by using the "—autoloader" command line parameter. If you want to actually play in it, however, memory hacking is needed.
  • The original game's manual mentioned you could buy 30 extra levels from the ollars store. The levels were never implemented, and instead of just removing the section where you're supposed to buy them, the button to get to it was made invisible. Trying to access it makes the game freeze.
  • There's a number of items in Unlimited that can only be accessed by using a glitch that exploits the object editor, some of which imply this. Among the more interesting ones are two rays, one which switches the gender of whoever is shot and one that turns whoever is shot into a random "monster" out of a rather large list.
• Follow the Leader: Before the game even came out (in fact, only a few days before), a web game called The Wizard's Notebook borrowed the game's central concept but with a much smaller dictionary.
• Franchise Killer: After a five year long Sequel Gap came along Scribblenauts Showdown, which thanks to its dismal reviews and sales likely spelled doom for any future games Scribblenauts was going to have save for a Compilation Re-release.
• Killer App: Even before its release, thousands of DS units were sold just for the first game.
• Manual Misprint: The manual for the first game mentions that you can buy levels from the Ollar shop, but this feature was axed from the final game and only exists in the form of an invisible button that causes the game to crash.
• No Export for You:
  • Scribblenauts Unlimited, Unmasked and Showdown have never been released in Japan, unlike their predecessors.
  • The Nintendo 3DS and Wii U versions of Scribblenauts Unmasked have not been released in Europe.
• Pre-Order Bonus:
  • Maxwell's hat was an extra that came with pre-orders of the first game.
  • Pre-ordering the sequel came with you get some nice plush headphones. They come in grey, polka-dot, and the pictured camouflage.
  • Pre-ordering Scribblenauts Unlimited got you your choice of revamped versions of◊ either Maxwell's, his sister's, or his Doppleganger's hat.
  • Pre-ordering Unlimited on Steam got you Maxwell's rooster hat in Team Fortress 2. It's been dubbed The "Cockfighter"◊.
• Recursive Adaptation: Unmasked contained a tie-in comic as a pre-order bonus. Said comic has since spun off into its own eight-part comic mini-series.
• Science Marches On: Chilantaisaurus summons a spinosaurid in both games, although it apparently belongs to a group that wasn't recognized until after the first edition was released.
• Throw It In!: Whenever someone actually succeeded at "Stump The Dictionary" at E3 (like with "plumbob"), the devs made a note to add the word before release. They also threw in references to Feep's famous post.
• Tyop on the Cover: In Unlimited, on the WB Games logo screen before the main menu shows up, it reads "Copyright © 1007-2012 RAD Game Tools, Inc".
• Word of God: In the first game, writing "Sambo", an offensive term for black people, would spawn a watermelon, which is stereotypically associated with black people. The creators pointed out that the reason for this was that there is a fruit called "sambo" that looks like a watermelon, and that they had no idea Sambo was an offensive term.