Trivia / Smash TV

• Author's Saving Throw: The developers originally did not anticipate that anyone would be persistent enough to actually meet the conditions for the Pleasure Dome area that did not exist in the original version of the game, and so they added a taunting message about missing that secret area in the game's sole ending, only to be surprised when players started brute-forcing everything in the game to see if there was perhaps some super secret method to unlocking the Pleasure Dome, and then started levelling complaints against Williams for informing them of a nonexistent secret area for an equally nonexistent "good" ending. In direct response, Revision 8.00 introduces the "Outer Pleasure Dome Area" that can be reached when the keys for it are collected. From a Polygon interview with John Tobias and Mark Turmell:
  "You know, it’s funny because when I remember back to that period of time, I remember us thinking a lot of the time, 'Players will never get there,'" says Tobias. "'They won't play the game enough ... They'll never get there anyway so it doesn’t matter.' And players got there, and so that surprised us. We thought the same thing on [Mortal Kombat] about the fatalities: 'They'll never find these things.'"
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Xbox Live Arcade version was pulled from digital storefronts for unknown reasons.
• Technology Marches On:
  • VCRs are one of the prizes on offer in this game. In reality, VCR technology was receiving new competition with the DVD format; nearly 20 years later, production of VCRs would cease entirely.
  • One of the rooms is called "Film at 11", a phrase in news broadcasts that has fallen by the wayside due to news stations moving onto video camcorders with cassettes and later digital video.
• Trolling Creator: The insane, teeth-grinding difficulty of Smash TV and Total Carnage was totally intended by the programmers which means that part of their motivation for designing and making the games was malicious. So much so that they never even made a good ending for the original version of Smash TV. However, when they received complaints from professional players about getting snubbed by the game despite the fact that they achieved the impossible goal of getting enough keys to access the Pleasure Dome, they made a revised version of the game that included the Pleasure Dome as the final bonus level.