What Could Have Been / Video Games N to S

What Could Have Been Video Games index
A-F | G-M | N-S | T-Z | Systems and Peripherals

• The Atari game Name This Game And Win $10,000 was going to have a contest to give the game a name. The winner would get ten thousand dollars. The company went bankrupt before the contest could be held.
• Neverwinter Nights: The Premium Modules Witch's Wake and Shadowguard were planned as mini-series, but both ended with a cliffhanger and never got a proper conclusion. Other modules cancelled by Atari were Tyrants of the Moonsea and Darkness over Daggerford. Both were however released for free by the developers.
• Neverwinter Nights 2 had a few examples.
  • In the first campaign, at Crossroad Keep there's a sidequest from Elanee to plant a garden that was cut. The PC could've also set up a gambling den, and been given control of their faction's operations on the docks in a section similar to managing Crossroad Keep. The structure that would have been your base is still in the game next to the Sunken Flagon. Quite a bit of dialog in Act 1 and early in Act 2 still references your character as being in charge of a faction there, even though you never have any authority in the final version.
  • Neeshka and Bishop were originally meant to be fully fledged romances. They're still there to an extent but trail off without true resolution.
• Newer Super Mario Bros. Wii was originally going to have hand-drawn cutscenes, Bowser Jr. was in the game, the hot air ballons were originally shot down in the intro and the world map was meant to be in 3d.
• NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams was originally going to be called Air NiGHTS, and was going to use a motion controller for the Saturn. Then the project was moved to the Dreamcast, but never got past the prototype stage. Then it was going to be for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, until it was switched to the Wii, without any extension on development time or budget.
• Ninjabread Man (yes, THAT Ninjabread Man) started life as a reboot of the Zool franchise, with Zoo Digital Publishing granting the license to Data Design Interactive. However, Zoo eventually pulled out after seeing the direction the game was going, prompting Data Design to retool it ^readchanging the design of the player character and almost nothing else into the infamously bad game it became.
• Nintendogs originally began as a pet simulator named Cabbage for the 64DD which was slated for a 1998 release. After the add-on was discontinued they decided to move the game to the Gamecube, and ultimately to the Nintendo DS to make use of its touch screen, microphone and wi-fi. Miyamoto added dogs to the game after his family adopted a dog. They also wanted to incorporate realistic fur animations in the game but they could not due to technical limitations. Iwata also presented the idea of 15 different versions of the game, one for each available dog breed. The game's original US title was going to be Puppy Life.
• In No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, Henry was going to be playable in at least two more stages, but he's in only one due to time constraints.
• No One Lives Forever and its sequel could have been re-released on online services like Steam and GOG.com, but Night Dive Studios was denied the license to re-release the games, due to the complicated legal arrangement regarding who actually owns the rights to the series (Activision, Fox and Warner Bros. all have potential claim to them; none of them are interested in confirming since the records of who owns it predate any of their digital archives, but they were still perfectly willing to sue if Night Dive did anything with the series).
• The ObsCure series:
  • The data files for the first game reveal that Dan was intended to play a much larger role than he actually did. Instead of serving as a Red Shirt who gets killed off in the prologue, he was supposed to have been one of the main characters, taking the place of Kenny, who was originally the one who got killed. Indeed, the end of the game's trailer shows Kenny getting killed and dragged off by a monster, which obviously wasn't in the final game.
  • As seen here, Final Exam, a Divorced Installment of the series, went through multiple incarnations and quite a bit of Development Hell before it was released.
    • The first incarnation, ObsCure: Dark Aura, was to have been a budget title released for the PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS, taking place right after the end of the second game with Shannon as the main character. It was scrapped, with elements from it being used for...
    • ObsCure D, which was to have been an interquel to the two ObsCure games. It would have been about a group of people, led by a teenage girl named Liddyah (the younger sister of Ashley, one of the first game's protagonists), searching for Josh and Ashley a few days before the events of the second game. It was here that the more exaggerated, Lighter and Softer art style of what became Final Exam is first known to have showed up, as well as the 2½D gameplay and four-player co-op. That version was canceled after Hydravision, the developer of the series, went out of business.
    • After the project was resurrected by Mighty Rocket (a studio formed by ex-Hydravision devs), it was intended as a Continuity Reboot of the series, but fan backlash over the game's radically different gameplay, art style, and story forced the developers to retool it into a non-canon spinoff.
• Octopath Traveler was never planned to be the game's final title, given that the title of the game during development was Project: Octopath Traveler. But it stuck and became the game's final title anyway due to how unique and catchy it is.
• Oddworld:
  • A reward for saving all 99 Mudokans in Abe's Oddysee is a bizarre cutscene called "Guardian Angel," where a robotic monstrosity with a chilling voice, a luminescent halo, and an overabundance of cutting implements taunts and corners Abe, claiming he has to "look inside if he wants to be free." Apparently, this "Guardian Angel" was supposed to be a boss until the game's producers realized children were interested in buying the game. Although the rest of the blood and nightmare fuel remains, they cut this boss for being exceptionally creepy. It still appears as a cameo; the television screen that serves as its face can faintly be seen in the background of Zulag 3.
• Odyssey was a title being developed by Blizzard Entertainment, beginning in 2017, being informally announced via job listings in 2022 as an "Unannounced Survival Game", before being officially cancelled in 2024 following restructuring and layoffs from Activision Blizzard being acquired by Microsoft. The game was set to be first new Blizzard IP since 2016's Overwatch, and gameplay was to feature large maps of up to 100 players at once, but it ended up experiencing production issues due to significant shifts in game engines. Nevertheless, it had reportedly been in a playable state by the time of its announcement, had received positive feedback from playtesters, and was set for a 2026 release (though some devs reported feeling this was overly optimistic), but the project was ultimately binned.
• Odin Sphere: A recent interview with Kentaro Onishi, a Vanillaware employee and the director of "Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir", reveals that there were multiple add-ons that didn't make it into the final game.
  • There was an idea for an online multiplayer minigame called Erion Wars. They didn't have the time and couldn't get George Kamitani's approval.
  • There are also apparently a lot of missing story cutscenes such as those detailing King Odin's past. They considered making a separate library with new cutscenes showing these missing events, but time restraints and story consistency meant it wasn't possible.
  • Remember how there's a lot of missing story regarding Ingway and some of what he was up to during the events of the main story? They actually considered giving him his own chapter, but it was difficult to angle the story from his point of view and his lack of a Psypher meant that his gameplay wouldn't match up with the main system anyway.
• Ōkami was originally going to use a standard realistic 3D style before the designers realized sumi-e would be a lot more fitting. Ammy's original realistic design can be seen in the video gallery unlocked by beating the game, as well as an alternate skin. In addition, the video and art gallery showcases an absolutely insane amount of content (locations, characters, monsters) that didn't make it into the final game. If it had, the game probably would have been twice as long. Also, the creators revealed in the artbook that they originally wanted to make the game about dinosaurs.
• Jonochrome has stated that he wants to do nothing more with the One Night at Flumpty's series, including the cancellation of the follow-up One Week at Flumpty's. Specific details on what the third game would have included can be read at the trivia page for that game.
• Oni had to abandon a lot of features and set pieces that were originally planned due to developer Bungie's acquisition by Microsoft causing development to be rushed. Such features included a Puzzle Boss fight with a Humongous Mecha (to be called the "Iron Demon") and online multiplayer, as well as expansion of the story that would fill some of the more glaring plotholes. The modding community did eventually create a rudimentary multiplayer mod for the PC version of the game.
• The Oregon Trail: All of the programmers at MECC wanted the food supply to increase slightly if the wagon train had reached the starvation stage and a settler died. Management vetoed this No Party Like a Donner Party reference.
• Ori and the Blind Forest began development as a fast-paced action platformer in the style of Sonic the Hedgehog, titled Sein after its protagonist, whose name was eventually used for Ori's Fairy Companion. The Definitive Edition's bonus videos show many more gameplay concepts that didn't make the cut, including a Pull ability and Ocarina of Time-style musical locks.
• An analysis of Pac-Man's famous Kill Screen determined that if the programmers had included a simple check to prevent the split screen bug, the game would not have been limited to 255 levels and 3,333,360 points. In fact, due to the existence of special "parking spaces" where Pac Man can avoid being tagged by ghosts, a high score would not even be limited by conditions of employment, family or even human endurance. A player could keep a Pac Man session going for years or even decades, racking up ever higher scored as long as the hardware continued to operate.
• Paleo Pines: There's concept art of Iguanodon, which didn't even make it into the game's code.
• Thanks to the Troubled Production of Palworld, a lot of things shown in the trailers failed to make it to the Early Access release.
  • Both early trailers and occasional bloopers reveal that plenty of Pals have had name changes during development, such as Reptigneo becoming Reptyro and Kingferno becoming Blazehowl.
  • A number of in-game Bloopers show that the English naming scheme of Pal subspecies used to follow the route of "(Element Name) Pal" (e.g. Ice Kingpaca), which was later changed to "Pal (Alternate term for Element)" (e.g. Kingpaca Cryst).
  • There exist a number of Dummied Out Pals in the game files, including Dragostrophe, Boltmane, and Dark Mutant, which are mostly properly coded to work in game, but due to the Troubled Production limiting how much could be finished before initial release can not be spawned in-game without mods, with Boltmane in particular being clearly a work-in-progress due to being an Electric-Element pal with Fire-Element drops and work skills.
  • There are a number of Pals that were shown off in super-early-development content, such as the announcement trailer and logo screenshot, that are not only unavailable in-game but not even present in the game files, meaning they don't even have file names to refer to, such as a massive whale and what looks to be a white-colored subspecies of Dragostrophe.
  • The announcement trailer showed a cart drawn by a pair of Direhowl, the player shearing Lamball, Mozzarina powered combines, electrofishing using a Jolthog on a fishing rod, a group of Tanzee turning a capstan and an unknown woman with a Jormuntide. None of these have made it into the Early Access release.
  • Also some Pal abilities appear to have been changed between the announcement trailer and Early Access, such as Grizzbolt's early ability being Deployable Cover instead of equipping a minigun and then hosing down the immediate area with gunfire and the player being able to throw Galeclaw into the air as living homing missile, where it would seek out and ram the nearest target.
  • The announcement trailer also showed a different design for Syndicate enemies with them being shirtless and wearing only red tinted goggles instead of a full face mask.
  • The second trailer showed the player character riding a cart and lassoing a Rushoar, a Hangyu using a Teafant as a watering can, a rocket (with the associated infrastructure) being built in a desert base, a massive city built into a mountain, some kind of dingy laboratory run by what's implied to be the Syndicate, a raid of Syndicate mooks supported by Leezpunk, the player character conducting a Metal Gear Solid-esque raid on what's implied to be a Syndicate facility and an arena for Pals to fight in. Again, none of these made it into the Early Access release.
  • Both trailers implied that you used to be able to fuse Pals together to get an egg containing a new Pal.
  • The Official Pal Reveal Trailer depicted a cage full of Cattiva being wheeled into a Syndicate underground base as well as a Syndicate armored column attacking a player base with Leezpunk support (the previous scene showed Leezpunk riding on the tanks and operating the machine gun). As of the Early Access release, the Syndicate do not have underground bases, their mooks will never use Pals and there are no vehicles in the game.
  • According to the Paldeck video, Dinossom was planned to have the Handiwork skill.
• Parasol Stars, a spin-off to Bubble Bobble was going to have a port to the Commodore 64 developed by Ocean Gaming, but unfortunately someone stole the developer's computer just before the game was due... well, officially. The publisher had contracted an external programmer to develop the game since they didn't want to work on it in-house and it was going to be one of the last games published to the system. The problem was that his wife was The Alcoholic and he confronted her on this and sleeping with her ex-husband. In a drunken rage, she destroyed his computer, his notes and even the back-ups he made of his work. Upon learning what happened, Ocean chose simply to cancel the game and, in a show of solidarity to the programmer due to his marriage problems, came up with the official story about a thief stealing the computer the game was on.
• PAYDAY: The Heist:
  • The game was originally going to be called "Stonecold". The name changed due to not fitting with the theme of the game plus possible lawsuits for being too similar to the wrestler "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. The developers also came up with "Crime Wave" as the game's title before scrapping it, though the name stuck around as the title for the Slaughterhouse heist's music track, then as the subtitle for the next-gen console port of the sequel.
  • The music heard in the Green Bridge heist was originally used for the First World Bank heist. The music composer managed to come up with something more suited for the bank level and he pushed the old music onto Green Bridge.
  • The sequel, PAYDAY 2, had cars that would explode when shot at and the game also rewarded players for bagging a corpse and throwing it in a dumpster. The exploding cars were removed for possibly being a Game-Breaker where players could lure groups of cops to cars and kill them easily. Being given money for hiding a dead body was also removed for possibly getting money too easily and avoiding penalties players would get for killing civilians. The sequel also had several heists that were Dummied Out, one of them being a heist contracted by The Elephant where you had to sabotage votes for him and the finale would involve you wrecking stuff like you would do in Mallcrashers. All the cut heists were cut for simply not working the way the developers had envisioned them to be, but Election Day was remade and released in the game in a later update.
  • PAYDAY 2 was also supposed to have the entire crew (except for Wolf and Bain) be replaced with new characters with similar backgrounds to the old crew. Dallas was supposed to have a Texan accent and he gained a new look, but fan reception to the new Dallas was extremely negative, which got the developers to bring back the old voice actor from the first game.^note His new face is still included, and Etebari plays Dallas in the live-action trailers.
  • The Infamy system started out as a parallel meta-skill tree to the basic one and could grant various bonuses to reduce the cost of climbing a skill tree, which gave players a lot more customization as they can now afford much more high-end skills than before. It also originally had a playing cards theme with 14 levels. Originally only 5 levels were released, with the remaining 9 intended to have other bonuses as the developers got to them, with each tier of 4 levels having different effects. The Infamy 2.0 update changed all of this, doing away with a semi-linear progression in favour of a circuit board-type chart and, aside from the original 5 released, granting only experience bonuses and mask unlocks for the remaining 20 levels (making the levels only good for grinding for more levels). They also removed the playing cards theme, as that theme couldn't support 25 levels (there are only at most 14 cards to any one suit when including the Joker).
  • Infamy 3.0 was presented in a stream on Marth 24th, 2017, featuring two trees where players could either grind infinitely for high infamy levels, or another for capping them at reputation level 100. Players were unsure about the perks they could gain from the new infamy system and the devs did not properly explain how things would work out. Negative feedback resulted in it being scrapped.
• Penny Arcade Adventures: The ESRB's listing for Episode 2 mentions something about "robots humping legs, testicles, and taxidermy". We assume this is from a beta version, because in the final product, the only thing we see the Fruit Fuckers humping is a giant structure designed to look like an orange.
• Perfect Dark:
  • The game was originally going to include a feature that let users take self-portraits with the Game Boy Camera and paste them over the faces of character models in the game's multiplayer mode. This was scrapped; the original official explanation was that the N64 couldn't handle such a processor-intensive feature, but it was later admitted that it was because, due to the Columbine massacre just a year before the game's release, the idea of putting the heads of fellow students and teachers on in-game characters and then shooting them to death wasn't exactly respectful at the time.
  • Every level has a slice of cheese hidden somewhere, which can't be collected and serves no purpose. It's rumored that collecting them would have unlocked something, though some of the devs claim they were put there with no purpose intended other than just driving completionists wild, an interpretation helped by the fact that several of the slices are in locations that the player can't physically reach.
  • Hats and helmets were intended as universal attachments for player models to give slightly more variety (and allowing for them to be shot off of a character's head), working they way they did in GoldenEye. They were scrapped in favor of giving characters permanently-modeled headgear because the more varied shapes of Perfect Dark's head models and the way that they attached to the models (based on the body's neck level rather than directly attached to the model's head) meant that one-size-fits-all hats didn't actually fit much of anything, with even the one pre-release screenshot showing a separate hat on a character model having it clip into his head.
  • The code has references to other missing modes (including one called "Touch The Crate"), features (including destructible doors and walls in multiplayer), and even a level ("Retaking the Institute", presumably pushing the Skedar back out of the Carrington Institute after they occupy it in the back half of the game).
  • According to a Nintendo Power article, Nintendo had proposed renaming the series Red & Black for its Japanese localization due to concerns that a direct translation would sound bland and unappealing. The final Japanese release has the same name as the international version, although the colors red and black were still heavily featured in its marketing.
  • Perfect Dark Zero was originally conceived of as a proper sequel, and shifted platforms several times - it was originally intended for the Nintendo GameCube, before shifting onto the Xbox following Rare's buyout by Microsoft, and ending as a launch title for the Xbox 360. There's not as many hints about changed or dropped features, but the Jungle: Storm level, through its name and several pieces of dialogue, makes multiple references to heavy rainfall that is simply not present in the level.
  • Work was started on a third game after Zero's release, Perfect Dark Core, though progress was only made for a year before the team for the project was cut down to three people and it got canned. Even in that short a time it made some rather large changes; it started as a more gritty and realistic sequel with a less-feminine Joanna and ended as something much different, involving a male protagonist fighting Humongous Mecha.
• Pikmin 3:
  • The game began as a Wii game, but development was moved to the Wii U once that console was nearing release.
  • A few elements were cut from the game. The game was originally going to feature four playable captains. Along with Alph, Brittany and Charlie, it was going to have a 4th "D" character.
  • The game features two Shaggy Long Legs bosses, but the second was originally going to be a Beady Long Legs with a fifth leg instead of a head.
• Plok was almost published by Nintendo. Legendary producer Shigeru Miyamoto had interest in co-developing the title. It's rumored that Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, which had a similar look, is the reason it didn't happen.
• Popful Mail was very nearly dolled-up for international release as Sister Sonic, before a letter-writing campaign by fans familiar with the original game asking them to just translate it directly.
• Populous would originally have been published as a LEGO Licensed Game, except that LEGO at the time wanted to avoid Moral Guardians associating its brand with violent video games.
• Potion Permit:
  • The Male and Female Chemists originally had different designs.◊ They looked older than their final designs, and the Male Chemist had white hair instead of brown as the default color.
  • The Heads-Up Display for your tool menu, HP, stamina, resources, and time in Moonbury◊, along with the UI for diagnosing patients◊ and brewing potions◊, looked rougher and less organized in the pre-alpha screenshots than in the final product.
  • There was originally going to be a fifth member of the Medical Association who accompanied Collin and Moira◊, but she was cut from the cast.
• Prey 2 by Human Head/Bethesda, announced in 2011, was cancelled in 2014.
• Prince of Persia:
  • Prince of Persia, in Jordan Mechner's first concept, was to have been an entirely puzzle-oriented game like Lode Runner, with a Level Editor, but Brøderbund demanded that the game have combat. It seemed at one point that there would not be enough memory on the Apple ][ for more than one set of large, fully animated character sprites; the shadow Prince was therefore planned to be the main antagonist rather than a secondary character, and his strength in the Final Boss battle would be determined by the player's performance against him in previous levels.
  • Prince of Persia 2 ends with an image of a mysterious witch watching the hero in a crystal ball. Word of God has that she was the one responsible for giving Jafar his powers, killing the Prince's family, and sacking the Prince's kingdom. However, the sequel it foreshadowed never came to pass. Prince of Persia 3D had a standalone story, and ever since then the series has stuck to new continuities.
  • Early promo cutscenes released for Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones had the Dark Prince as an entirely different person, instead of just a voice in his head and a model and gameplay change.
• Princess Maker 2 was set to be released in the United States, but a series of mishaps including the bankruptcy of the localization's publisher caused the translated game to be shelved indefinitely. A mostly-translated prototype of the game showed up on the internet years later, and an Updated Re-release of the game was finally given a worldwide release over Steam in September 2016.
• Project Offset, a fantasy FPS by Offset Software, was cancelled after the creators were bought out by Intel.
• In Psychic Force Puzzle Taisen, there is a hidden character named Masato/Masahito Suzuki who was supposed to have been a playable character from within the first Psychic Force game, but was eventually cut out during the later development of the game. Background information reveals that Suzuki would've been a neutral fighter (like Genma and Gates) and that he was a bounty hunter who had sought out the Psychiccers through one of his bounty hunting jobs (this fact, along with the other one that he's a swordsman as well would eventually be passed over to Might from within 2012). Aside from Suzuki, there are two other unknown characters from within the bonus pictures of Psychic Force Puzzle Taisen and that they appear alongside with him, indicating the possibility that they were intended to be playable characters as well and that they would've shared a storyline with Suzuki, but like him, they and the storyline was dropped as well.
• Psychonauts:
  • The player character was originally a completely different character named D'artagan (or Dart) who sported a signature floppy hat that proved "too awesome for Doublefine to animate". He gets referenced a few times in-game (such as Coach Oleander declaring that Raz's name "starts with a D") and manages a short cameo in the game's final cutscene. Also, the main character was created as a mentally-unstable ostrich. That admittedly makes sense - considering the mind of Tim Schafer - but the master himself admitted that games usually act as kind of a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and that there are likely very few people who wished to be an insane ratite.
  • The game was also initially going to be a horror-like platformer that would be Xbox-exclusive, as the 2002 trailer (which was included on the discs for Blinx the Time Sweeper, Voodoo Vince, and some printings of Halo: Combat Evolved) shows. The logo was also going to look like a logo for a spy movie, the camp was going to have a darker atmosphere and was going to be called "Whispering Pines" instead of "Whispering Rock", in Lungfishopolis you were going to fight Linda instead of Kochamara, and the final level was going to take place inside Lili's mind (which Dr. Loboto was taking over), and was apparently going to be extremely terrifying. Halfway through development, Double Fine made the game less scary and more funny, which caused Microsoft to refuse to publish the game.
  • The two Nightmare bosses you face in the Milkman Conspiracy were originally part of Milla's level (thus explaining why them and the stage you fight them on are so similar to what you find in Milla's Room, instead of the level's usual Stepford Suburbia), but the developers moved them because it didn't make sense with respect to why you were in Milla's mind in the first place. Raz and a bunch of other campers were invited there for a party, so she'd have no reason to put him against the Nightmares intentionally, and losing control of them would reflect rather negatively on her abilities and mental state.
• Punch-Out!!:
  • In the Wii installment, Disco Kid's files are named as “kidquick.” Kid Quick was a character in the original arcade version of Punch-Out!!. Whether Disco Kid is the same character as Kid Quick or replaced him is unknown. However, they share the same stats and both have somewhat similar names.
  • Early gameplay footage of Super Punch-Out!! suggests that Little Mac would have made a return appearance as playable character, instead of the unnamed blond boxer in the final game.
• A prototype of Puyo Puyo Fever^note assumed to be the same prototype Sega showcased at Tokyo Game Show 2003 through a tournament held to promote the game's release due to the footage matching up with this prototype from September 9, 2003 contained many interesting differences, the biggest of which being early versions of the game's music, as well as the fact that it ran on a NAOMI cartridge as opposed to the final's GD-ROM.
• Quake:
  • Quake was teased as early as the ending of Commander Keen, which suggested the full name would be "Quake: The Fight for Justice". Once development actually started on Quake, early versions were based around it being a very different hack-and-slash RPG set in Aztec temples (which was eventually changed to medieval European castles), starring a barbarian demigod named Quake who beat people up with his giant magical hammer. It was an eleventh-hour decision to abandon this concept and turn it into a Doom-like run-and-gun First-Person Shooter, which is why the finished game has a muddled and inconsequential plot that tries to explain why you're running and jumping around medieval castles wielding a hand-held rocket launcher. Creative differences (and, apparently, spending less time working on the game than just playing Doom) lead to John Romero leaving id shortly after the game's release.
  • Quake II didn't go through any massive gameplay-style shifts mid-development like the first Quake, but it did get shoehorned into being a Quake game. Originally, the massively-different story and aesthetics were supposed to go along with it being an entirely different game, sharing only its basic gameplay style of a Doom-like run-and-gun shooter, and several possible names for the game were floated around, including "Strogg" (which ended up being the name of the enemy faction) and "Lock and Load"; however, every name they came up with was either unsatisfactory or unavailable due to existing trademarks, and so the game was branded as a second Quake. Ironically, it's since gone on to completely define the singleplayer part of the Quake franchise, getting another singleplayer followup and a prequel in the ten years after its release, whereas talk of elder gods and alternate dimensions and whatnot from the first Quake has mostly been restricted to Ranger's backstory in the multiplayer games.
  • Quake III: Arena began life as an idea for a single player game called Trinity, which was abandoned very early in the game design process in favour of a game focusing more on the deathmatch experience and online gaming.
• Quantum Break was, according to Sam Lake, originally going to include a new Poets of the Fall song, "The Labyrinth" (as per Remedy tradition) but shared contractual red tape held up the deal until time ran out.
• The Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos game was planned originally as a multi-series crossover game, Super Robot Wars-style, but using non-mecha series (besides Queen's Blade, other anime series were planned to appear) but it wasn't possible for those series to be included, due to the authors and companies involved being reticent to allow their characters to cross-over with other characters from other series. The sequel, Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos, is the closest thing to the original idea Banpresto was able to get, and even then they still weren't allowed to use Kasumi from the Dead or Alive series, with Wonder Momo having to take her intended place.
• Quest for Glory V was planned to use a voxel-based graphics engine. Due to severe performance issues the engine was changed to a conventional 3D engine using prerendered backgrounds. Multiplayer was also planned for the game, then planned as a downloadable add-on. A Playable Epilogue expansion would have focused on the Hero's choice of marriage as King of Silmaria and the character Punny Bones, with additional quests and a new storyline.
• Rainbow Six:
  • The original game was meant to be focused on the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, but early in development Ubisoft struck a deal with Tom Clancy to tie it into his upcoming Rainbow Six novel and give the game more international appeal. Ironically, their later adaptation of The Sum of All Fears starts off similarly to the original plan for Rainbow Six, with the player as part of the HRT for a few missions.
  • Rainbow Six: Patriots was going to be the next game in the series after Vegas 2, getting far enough to get a trailer or two and promotional camo patterns in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. It would have involved a group known as the "True Patriots", a group that had legitimate grievances against the government and the rich, but chose to voice them with shockingly-brutal acts against innocent people, and the game would have also involved some form of morality, highlighted by the new Six being a former Navy SEAL who believed ethics are wasted in dealing with the True Patriots, meaning Team Rainbow would be forced to make some difficult decisions to stop them, with the trailer showing an instance of them being forced to push a man off a bridge to his death so that the bomb strapped to him wouldn't kill many more people when it detonated. The game was announced in 2011, then went mostly quiet after that trailer, probably owing to the negative reaction it had garnered for its extremely on-the-nose story, and saw no further news beyond an announcement that it was still in development before it was canned in 2014; the series finally saw a new release with Rainbow Six Siege in 2015, which gained critical acclaim in part for going back to the series' roots as a tactical shooter.
  • Siege itself has gone through noticeable changes during development; the earliest trailers showed no hint of the Operator system from the released game. Several of the Operators also have Dummied Out lines implying they were meant to have access to different gadgets than they actually use (such as Blackbeard, who uses breaching charges or stun grenades, having lines for deploying C4) and/or that they were on opposite sides than in the released game (e.g. Defender operators having lines suggesting they are Attackers instead and vice versa).
• Ragnarok Online:
  • The game will likely never have a great many of features that were originally planned for it, such as player-owned apartments, and is only now, late its life, beginning to see some of the things which were a little more easily brought back such as the 3rd jobs. This was not due to internal reasons, but rather due to an attack on Gravity by hackers after the Korean version entered pay-to-play. The attack destroyed basically everything, including a large portion of the development materials. The infant international Ragnarok Online was wholly cannibalized in a vain effort to keep the company afloat, and Gravity was only 'saved' on being bought out by Samsung. The game was then almost lost a second time when the director Samsung forced on the developer's tried to impose his wholly different vision on the recovery, leading to several members of the original development team quitting - mercifully, an act that lead Samsung to pull their director and leave Gravity alone to restore what they could of the project into what we have today. Further information here.
  • The developers tried for a long time to implement a Karma system, that would have operated based on a player's actions within a global PVP system. Things like 'a wholly bad' player would be free game for others to attack without penalty. There are still glimpses of the system, though a lot have been removed. The unresponsive 'Temper.' tab (that for a while lead to an inactive chart window) under character status is the only one presently springs to mind. One reason for its failure was supposedly the local ratings board not much liking depictions of humans killing one another.
  • The PVP system was originally supposed to have been much, much more complex, with league tables and the like, and was supposed to have operated wholly within a specialized arena in Izlude. Instead, for a long time, a somewhat clumsy system running on empty versions of the various town maps was the nearest thing. More recently, an actual Izlude arena has been implemented, however it still lacks a great deal of the functionality it was originally intended to have.
  • There was, at one point, also talk of the game originally having had a rather-more involved combat system than the version anyone saw, dropped very early on for 'detracting from the game's social aspects', though that story's veracity is somewhat more questionable.
• Ratchet & Clank has the Insomniac Museum bonus that shows all the various things that had been cut, such as original designs for gadgets, unused weapons, missing enemies and level ideas, and even variant physics engines.
• For Rare Replay, Rare had at some point at least considered every game they ever made for the compilation - even GoldenEye (1997), a game infamous for licensing issues preventing a rerelease for 18 years and counting as of Rare Replay's release. They cut the list down to the final 30 based on various factors such as whether the characters and environments were their own creation, ruling out licensed games like the aforementioned GoldenEye and the Donkey Kong Country series in favor of Spiritual Successors with their own characters, like Perfect Dark and Banjo-Kazooie. They also wanted to include Kinect Sports and Kinect Sports: Season 2, but were forced to leave them out due to technical differences between the Xbox 360 and Xbox One versions of the Kinect.
• Rayman:
  • The original Rayman was going to be an SNES title, and Rayman was originally going to have a neck, arms, and legs, but apparently they were too hard to render, so they removed them. The game was also going to be about a boy who is sucked into a virtual world he made, and he becomes his own creation: Rayman.
  • Rayman 2: The Great Escape was going to be a 2D platformer for the PS1 and Saturn, but when Ubisoft saw that 3D platformers like Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot were wowing everyone at E3, they reworked it into a 3D platformer, and it remains to this very day one of the greatest 3D platformers ever created. While it came out on the PS1 as intended, this was only after also releasing on the Nintendo 64, PC, and the Saturn's successor, the Dreamcast. Certain versions of the game have the first level of the original 2D game as an Easter Egg after completing the main game. The kicker? It only exists in the PS1 version.
  • Rayman 3 was also different during its development; while the game's basic story was the same throughout the different iterations, several levels, such as an underwater world, and characters, like Clark and Ly returning from 2, were removed, to say nothing of the many Hoodlum varieties and enemies that got the axe.
  • Rayman 4 as it was originally conceived was to be another platformer like its predecessors, on the Wii. There was even a trailer advertising it as such. In it, Rayman dons various costumes as he fights his way through hoardes of vicious rabbit-like monsters. The rumour is that Nintendo gave the development team a pack for mini-game programming, and the game was changed entirely. As you may have sussed, the vicious rabbit-like monsters were Rabbids, and Rayman 4 became Rayman Raving Rabbids, a launch title for the Wii, consisting of humourous mini-games, and one of the most popular Wii games of all time.
  • Rayman Origins was going to be an episodic title for Xbox Live Arcade, Play Station Network, and PC, about the origins of Rayman, and each episode was going to be about him growing up and maturing. The episodic idea was canned because Michael Ancel thought episodic format would ruin the exploration nature of the franchise, and it was reworked into a retail title. The final game was released as a sequel game involving Rayman and the gang tackling the Livid Dead army instead of the prequel it was marketed as. The game was also going to have lots of dialogue too (some of the dialogue from the beta version is present in the ESRB's parental guide for the game, and the script was in the demo's files), however final product ended up having very little dialogue, and is unclear as to whether it takes place before Rayman 1, or after Rayman 3, though Ancel has at least clarified that Origins occurs after Rayman 2.
• Red Dead Revolver was originally under development by Capcom, with the game planned to be an arcade-y third-person shooter with supernatural elements, including "a character who could fly". Development for the game, however, ground to a halt until it was acquired by Rockstar Games (of Grand Theft Auto fame), who decided to dispense with the supernatural elements in favor of a Spaghetti Western-inspired setting and story with wide open environments. The rest is history.
• In a podcast, Insomniac Games revealed that Resistance: Fall of Man was originally envisioned as a futuristic, time-travelling World War I game with loads of inspiration taken from the film version of Starship Troopers. Also, the actual game was supposed to start with Hale touring an American aircraft carrier before leaving for Britain, but the level was cut due to time constraints. There were also plans to include a grappling gun, but that weapon was cut since the team felt it was too much of a Game-Breaker.
• Rez, or Project K as it was known during pre-production, featured a more humanoid character running across an infinite bridge and a much different control scheme. At one point the music was planned to be composed by Aphex Twin.
• Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends was supposed to have four nations instead of three, and four campaigns, to fit. The mysterious “fourth nation” that was eventually scrapped went through several iterations too: first they were the Skald, based on Finnish, Slavic, and some northern Europeans mythology. And then they were the Kragar(?), apparently a race of bestial giants who tamed great beasts. And then they were the Khan, based on ancient Altaic Mythology and history.
• Rival Schools was originally going to be called Justice Fist, with the plot revolving around the strongest fighters in the world gathering for an international martial arts tournament. The Capcom staff eventually shifted to the idea of using a schoolyard setting and a cast of teenagers to differentiate the game from the sea of similar titles that had already used tournament plots.
• Rogue Warrior. Initially developed by Zombie Inc. (subtitled Black Razor), it was supposed to be a tactical First-Person Shooter that featured four player co-op and randomized level layout (somewhat in the vein of Left 4 Dead 2). Then Bethesda in 2009 stated they weren't completely satisfied with the current status and handed the development to Rebellion Developments.
• When planning bachelorettes for Rune Factory 4 there was serious consideration to make Minerva, the fan-favorite little sister of a previous game's marriage candidate, one of the male MC's potential brides. Unfortunately, two other fan-favorites had already been decided on as returning characters, and the developers worried that adding more returning characters might isolate newcomers to the series.
• Runemaster, a cancelled game by Paradox Interactive, was going to be an RPG based on Norse Mythology.
• Saints Row:
  • The first Saints Row started life in 2003 as a PS2 game that would have been named "Bling Bling", the name being quickly changed for not being any good. Saints Row 2 makes reference to it in a radio ad for a jewelry store called "Bling Bling", which tries to sell jewelry to gangster-types and even claims that "market research said our name was cool!", which, of course, wasn't the case. After a concept it would be released as was settled on, the Saints were originally going to wear green, but they were changed to purple after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out and also had its protagonist gang, Grove Street, wearing green; ironically (or not), the Saints changed their color to that of Grove Street's enemies. It was also planned for several different consoles; in addition to starting life on the PS2, there were plans for a Nintendo GameCube port, which fell through after the Wii was released, and after it actually released on the Xbox 360, ports to the PlayStation 3 and PC were cancelled to put more development focus on making the sequel, which launched on all three platforms.
  • The original pitch for Saints Row 2 would have been as a prequel set in The '70s, showing how Julius and King rose to power to protect the Row, with the final cutscene picking up right at the end of the original game, with Playa having survived the bomb and looking extremely angry; it was changed to a sequel set five years later, with Playa having been left in a coma from the explosion.
  • Saints Row: Money Shot was a cancelled game that would have been released and taken place between 2 and the Third, involving an Ultor assassin named Cypher who could control the flight path of her bullets, the game taking the form of a score-attack game where the player had to guide their bullet to hit as many soft objects as possible while avoiding harder things that would stop the bullet and innocent bystanders. It would have been a short, downloadable game with twelve missions in all, three actual story missions with several stops at a shooting range between them; its cancellation was particularly odd for the games' story, as it would have revealed what happened to Dex after he completely disappeared following the second game's DLC (he was to be the second of Cypher's targets, assassinated at a birthday party). Completing missions in the game also would have unlocked rewards in The Third, including the TOGO-13 automatic sniper rifle and an Ultor-branded version of the Interceptor hoverbike. The rewards, including Cypher's outfit, would later be made a simple DLC pack for The Third.
  • According to the second-to-last paragraph in this article, a feature called "Freegunning" was scrapped from the final cut of Saints Row: the Third. This combat style would have incorporated the series' firearm emphasis with Assassin's Creed-style freerunning.
  • In 2012, Volition was working on new DLC for Saints Row: The Third, titled Enter the Dominatrix, as well as the next mainline entry, Saints Row: Part Four, which was to be set in a whole new city. However, its parent company THQ experienced financial troubles and told Volition to abandon Part Four and to turn EtD into the next main installment, released in 2014 as Saints Row IV. The game proved even more controversial than The Third, mainly because it recycled the latter's world map almost without alterations (for the first time in the series) and took a sharp turn away from urban crime sandboxing into quasi-Super Hero territory. Later DLC for Saints Row IV, also named Enter the Dominatrix, explores the plot changes between the original DLC and IV, such as Zinyak being changed from a Disc-One Final Boss to the Big Bad and others.
  • In addition, the Prima guide for The Third hints that more of Stilwater would have been seen in the game, primarily dealing with a "Saints Con" that the Syndicate would have attacked, ending in the deaths of Tobias and Laura from the first two games.
  • Saints Row IV was supposed to have more dead characters from previous games appearing in the simulation and be reprogrammed into homies, which include Lin, William Sharp, Viola, and Philippe Loren. The cut characters have audio logs that are in the game's data, but are Dummied Out. Philippe and Sharp can be recruited through modding, since they have working character models.
  • Saints Row Undercover was going to be a PSP port of Saints Row 2. The game became its own game on the PSP until it was cancelled, and the developers released the ISO for free.
• Samurai Shodown RPG/Shinsetsu Samurai Spirits Bushidō Retsuden: The Neo Geo CD, PlayStation and Saturn versions were to each have one different chapter, making three chapters total, but instead the games focus on the first two chapters, with the Neo Geo CD having an extra mini-chapter.
• Sakura Wars:
  • During pre-development of the first game, Oji Hiroi contemplated that the game would be set during the Meiji period, but ultimately decided against it and changed the setting to the Taisho period.
  • Ichiro Ogami was originally a placeholder name for the then-nameless protagonist and that name ultimately stuck. At one point, he was also going to be named Kusaku Kanuma, an officer from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
  • Sakura Shinguji was initially named Sakura Nishijo and came from a family of enemy witches. Her first battle was going to be with Ogami in the first chapter and for the next two chapters, she fought with Sumire. By chapter three, however, Sakura and Sumire would settle their differences when they are dispatched to fight the enemy in the Sumida River.
  • During the early stages of development, Sumire Kanzaki was a member of the Dream Division. She was also named Sumire Shinguji.
  • Chapter 7 of the original game would originally take place after the Great Kanto Earthquake. Sakura was going to be the Flower Division's captain after Ayame was killed and Maria would make her debut as a new American recruit. The latter scenario would later be revisited in Sakura Wars: The Movie where Ratchet Altair arrives from American to join the Flower Division.
  • Kanna was originally a nice girl named Koume Ono who stood at 2 meters (a shade above 6'6") tall and the most feminine of the combat revue.
  • Kohran was initially a male character named Ran Yuki.
  • Also during the 1996 game's early development stages, Crimson Miroku was originally named Miroku Hosokawa. She eventually defected to help the Flower Division rescue Sakura from Satan's clutches in chapter 10, and gets killed for her troubles. Parts of that character were incorporated into Ayame for the final game.
  • Kumiko Nishihara and Chisa Yokoyama were originally selected to play Sakura and Iris, respectively. Yokoyama was the one who requested that they switched roles.
  • Kohei Tanaka originally planned 50 songs for the first game. However, due to budget and time limitations, it was reduced to 24 and finally to seven. When Tanaka learned from the developers that a CD's worth of content was enough, he settled between eleven to twelve songs.
  • The PSP port of the first two games were to be localized at one point, but Sony scrapped the project.
  • There were plans to release Sakura Wars 4: Fall in Love, Maidens on the PlayStation 2 when the Sega Dreamcast was ending production, but Red Entertainment and Overworks refused. Oji Hiroi, in particular, felt that they didn't want to have Is Paris Burning? as the final game in the series to be released for the Dreamcast. Also, Ogami traveled to Taiwan and New York to head the newly-formed Flower Division teams, but those ideas were scrapped. The New York concepts were later used in the next installment, Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love.
  • Production I.G almost refused to participate in Sakura Wars 2: Thou Shalt Not Die since it was halfway through development. They would later go on to produce the FMV sequences for the next three games.
  • There have been quite a few canceled games since the fourth game. Gaming news sites reported that Sega had plans to export Sakura Wars outside of Asia under the "Sakura Wars World Project". So Long, My Love, Sakura Wars V: Episode Zero, Sakura Wars Story: Mysterious Paris and the remake of the first game were released.
  • As part of the World Project, there were also plans for a Prequel game detailing the Kouma War, something that was touched upon in the games and given a Whole Episode Flashback in the anime adaptation. Unfortunately, it was canceled.
  • So Long, My Love was planned to have eleven chapters. Tutankhamun was also considered to be a villain in the game and a storyline involving Cleopatra was also considered. However, they were nixed due to unavoidable circumstances in development. Fortunately, Tutankhamun would return in the New York, NY OVA.
  • Takaharu Terada once considered setting Sakura Wars (2019) in Kyoto as well as in a future timeline, before Sega decided to set it in The '40s.
• Sands of Destruction originally had an allegedly much more darker story, drafted by Masato Kato, who's responsible for the Chrono series, Xenogears and Baten Kaitos, before Executive Meddling came in and had the game marketed towards a younger audience. It results in the game's strange case of Mood Whiplash. In the original version, all Ferals actually ate humans, rather than just Porcus Rex. However, this, among other things, was toned down in order to get a much more accessible rating in Japan (since Japan doesn't exactly have a Avoid the Dreaded G Rating/Rated M for Money mentality). Despite the fact that the writers actually did approve of the change, they were cited as saying they thought it would have been interesting.
• Secret of Mana was originally intended to be for the Super Nintendo CD add-on, which would've allowed the game to be much larger and to feature CD-quality music tracks. Notice how many of the plot threads concerning the Empire seem incomplete and rushed, and how the game's sound and music glitches at times when there's a lot going on (the result of the Super Nintendo's eight music channels being too few for the game's complex music).
• Serious Sam:
  • Croteam began designing what became this game in 1996, where it was first titled "In the Flesh", running on a proprietary engine then called "S-Cape 1" because the team didn't have the money to license the Doom engine. As per its inspiration, it would have taken place in hellish areas, and props designed to decorate the levels included sofas and tables. Around 1998, the game was re-tooled into Serious Sam: The First Encounter.
  • At one point, Sam's initial design (think Duke Nukem with black hair, a white shirt, and bright red sneakers) was thought to be too silly for the game. However, there was near-universal backlash against the "realistic" redesign they came up with, so Sam went back to his original look. The would-be realistic version became the multiplayer model named "Hilarious Harry".
  • Egypt was supposed to only be the tip of the iceberg for The First Encounter, with the full game supposed to go as far as Sam actually making it to Sirius to confront Mental, visiting various element-themed planets along the way; time and budget constraints forced them to axe all the content after the climax of the Egypt chapter, and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter would go in a different direction story-wise (with Sam's ship crashing back down to Earth after five minutes and forcing him to do the same thing as before in various other periods of Earth's history). Serious Sam II would follow some of the original plan, with Sam traversing various planets making his way to Sirius and a final confrontation with Mental.
  • Before the announcement of Serious Sam 3: BFE, Croteam had been working on a shooter named T.E.O.R. for the now-defunct publishing company Gamecock. It would have been a more realistic shooter, possibly in the vein of Call of Duty, set somewhere in the modern Middle East. BFE still has some elements of T.E.O.R. in its code: unused idle animations for three weapons that would have appeared in the game, and a fourth being referred to in the animations for the assault rifle.
  • Croteam was also approached by id Software to help develop what would become Doom's 2016 reboot, though very little came of this before they split ways and the whole project was rebooted under Bethesda. The Canned Cain multiplayer character from Second Encounter HD and the Khnum and Scrapjack enemies from BFE are remnants of that, highly resembling the Doomguy, Baron of Hell and Mancubus because they were supposed to be the Doomguy, Baron of Hell and Mancubus.
• Shantae:
  • Shantae (2002):
    • The game would have originally been released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, then the original PlayStation (the final version is a Game Boy Color game). Towards the end of the game, Shantae would have received a blue version of her ordinary clothes, which were later made available to certain Half-Genie Hero donors and owners of the game's Ultimate Edition as a Development Gag.
    • The original plot of the game would involve Shantae transitioning from a half- to a full genie, represented physically by her hair color changing from brown to purple. This plot was scrapped, and with it Shantae's change in hair color: her iconic purple ponytail is now strictly The Artifact. That said, a few games in the series do at least tease the idea of Shantae becoming a full genie: the ending of the Game Boy Color game has the option presented to her, but she chooses not to because the alternative would mean abandoning her friends and family in Sequin Land.
    • At some point, Risky Boots was going to be the ghost of a notorious piratess, which would explain her unearthly appearance. In the final games, she's just a regular pirate who happens to have blueish-gray skin.
  • A sequel to the first game was briefly in development for the Game Boy Advance under the titles Shantae Advance and Shantae 2: Risky Revolution, many of the elements of which were recycled into Shantae: Risky's Revenge. Unlike the fairly short Risky's Revenge and Pirate's Curse, this game would've been bigger than the original with over 20 hours of gameplay and a 4-player battle mode. Some other differences from the final game included the character artwork still using the first game's art style, Shantae being able to dive underwater without the mermaid transformation, being able to have a giant Wrench carry you between islands, which eventually made its way into Half-Genie Hero, and gameplay centered around being able to shift the background to progress, which likely became the basis for the layered outdoor levels in Risky's Revenge.
  • Risky's Revenge itself was supposed to be an episodic game, but this was scrapped in favor of a single game.
• Shovel Knight:
  • The original idea for the checkpoints would be to have them only work if the player had a certain amount of gold on them when they first touched them. It was canned because the developers decided that it would punish less skilled players unfairly.
  • Plague Knight's campaign was to have a crafting system through which most if not all items and upgrades would have been obtained. This was ditched in favor of the simpler cipher coin and relic trading systems.
  • Any of the Order of No Quarter Knights could have had their own campaign and individual game mechanics, but the fan votes decided on three: Plague Knight, King Knight, and Specter Knight. The developers teased that Propeller Knight, had he won a spot, would have probably been a Glass Cannon with short-range flight.
• Silent Hill:
  • Silent Hill 4 was originally just going to be a Gaiden Game and not a full sequel; the only parts of that idea to survive are the first person bits in Henry's apartment. Hacking into the game has revealed placeholder items (the same gems from Silent Hill) for unlocking the absent UFO ending.
  • Origins changed development teams entirely not long before it was released. The original version was a Resident Evil 4 clone that drew on a great deal more material from the movie. The first previews indicated the game was going to use the Always Over the Shoulder camera to deal with the smaller PSP screen.
• The Simpsons: Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly: Screenshots from Nintendo Power's Volume 29 show that the Madman Mort was once designed after Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th franchise and had a different name ("Krimmel Krogan") at one point before the design was changed to make him a bit harmless without the mask.
• The Sims:
  • During its development in the 1990s, the first game was originally conceived as a a house-building simulator where virtual people would judge the player's houses and was codenamed Dollhouse. Will Wright later thought that playing with people was more fun, and turned that into the core gameplay of the series while retaining the house-building features, and the rest is history.
  • Console spin-off The Urbz was planned to be a mini-series of around three games, as well as a PC port. Some assets were used in The Sims 2.
  • The Sims 4: Leaked images and files show that it was originally known as "Olympus", a fully online game similar to SimCity (2013), where all sims were controlled by humans, but following the massively negative backlash that game received and its eventual abandonment, the Sims team was forced to scrap almost all their progress only a year and a half from release. This is speculated to be why many features, including pools and toddlers, were nowhere to be seen in the base game and were only added later through free patches. Other players' Plumbobs were blue, similar to The Sims Mobile.
• Skullgirls: Squiggly was part of the original roster, but was replaced by Valentine, due to Lab Zero wanting to have a playable villainous character. Squiggly was eventually included as a DLC character in the updated version, Skullgirls Encore.
• Sleeping Dogs (2012) started as a game called Black Lotus, became part of the True Crime franchise as True Crime: Hong Kong, then became a separate game as the rights were bought from Activision by Square Enix.
• An early draft of Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus featured Sly with a more Cockney accent (the comment track mocks this slightly) and Bentley with a more studied one. Sly also had a different name. Also, a slight change between the demo and the production game: in the first, the save points weren't remote beacons, but apparently a girl in a trunk who would pop out and photograph Sly (and remain inside giggling no matter how much you smacked her trunk with your cane).
• In late 2009, NBA Jam co-creator Mark Turmell revealed that he was working on a Smash TV remake at the time his former employers at Midway Games went bankrupt. The project died, and Turmell was hired by EA Tiburon shortly thereafter.
• Solatorobo: Red the Hunter went through a multitude of changes throughout the ten years it took developing the game. It was originally going to be a direct sequel to Tail Concerto, before becoming the PSA game Mamoru-Kun, before finally starting development as Solatorobo starting in 2007. All of the different prototypes and plot elements can all be read and seen in a (fan-translated) trivia document as well as nine volumes worth of artbooks each split into three different sets ("Bluesky", "Daybreak", and "Starlet").
• Soulcalibur V would have originally had a story mode for each character in the roster, and would have been 4 times as long and featuring confrontations with the entire cast, but ultimately ended up focusing on the story of Patroklos and his sister Pyrrha due to a limited team of developers and time constraints to release the game.
• At one point, SOUND VOLTEX ran a remix contest based on in-house BEMANI artist DJ Yoshitaka's original songs. However, the contest was suddenly canceled around the time the "BEMANI Sound Team" controversy started, and no remix contests have taken place since then.
• Speedball was born from an abandoned real tennis game that the Bitmap Brothers originally proposed to Mastertronic.
• During its creation, Shigeru Miyamoto briefly proposed that Splatoon become a Mario-spinoff game. The development team was having trouble crafting characters that would fit the game mechanics they've come up with it, and while they were attached to their most recent choice at the time (rabbits), said choice only succeeded in confusing everyone else in the company due to the lack of internal logic ("Why would rabbits be shooting ink?"). The team briefly did attempt to insert Mario and some Yoshis, but quickly abandoned the option to continue experimenting with other ideas before settling on squids once Miyamoto signed off on it and they realized how many other development issues would be solved by their use (namely, the usefulness of inking the walls).
• Splatterhouse: Rick Taylor was originally going to be a Villain Protagonist, until it was decided to have him be firmly heroic.
• Spider-Man
  • Initially, Sega seemed to be pushing Spider-Man as one of their big mainstays for their consoles, what with the popularity of the arcade game and Spider-Man vs. the Kingpin. There were initially plans for a second game, but that got derailed with the explosive popularity of X-Men: The Animated Series.
  • Spider-Man: The Movie:
    • Originally, the Scorpion was meant to be a secondary villain to fill in the gaps of the movie. However, time was not on their side and most of his story was scrapped and was eventually used for the Spider-Man 3 game.
    • Josh Keaton was originally tapped to play Peter Parker/Spider-Man (years before he'd take up the iconic role in The Spectacular Spider-Man) with John de Lancie playing Norman Osborn/Green Goblin. However, this was derailed when Tobey Maguire and Willem Dafoe reprised their roles. Not wanting to waste his talent, Josh was recast as Harry Osborn in the game's unlockable Green Goblin mode.
  • There were ideas for a sequel to Ultimate Spider-Man. Not much is known, but the map of New York would have been expanded to include Brooklyn and Coney Island, take place in the winter and have the Green Goblin as a major player in the game (though it is unknown if he would have been a second playable character like Venom was or not). However, the game wasn't much of a success and the game was shelved with Brian Michael Bendis porting the story idea for the game to the comic as the storyline "Death of a Goblin".
  • Spider-Man: Web of Shadows:
    • The credits of the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game are accompanied with concept art, one of these pieces is the concept of a Symbiote Moon Knight, who is never infected in the game.
    • There were plans to make a sequel featuring Carnage and Mysterio, but it was cancelled when the studio behind the original game was shut down. The design for Mysterio, however, would live on in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. The game also would have had Wolverine in some capacity.
    • An interesting variation but one plan for a sequel was to make it a What-If take with Venom being the hero of New York and Spidey, heavily taken over by the Carnage symbiote, would be the villain who causes an almost WORSE variation of what Venom did in this game, essentially quarantining it from the rest of the world. Venom would be able to form different weapons and eat certain enemies. If that kinda sounds familiar? It should. It's now known as [PROTOTYPE].
    • Speaking of Prototype, Radical was tapped to make a Spider-Man 4 game to tie into the movie of the same name. Since Prototype and Spider-Man 4 both took place in New York, they just used that map and engine and slapped in Spider-Man for an easy fit. They also used this to improve the engine. When the movie fell apart, so did the game, so Radical took the modifications and reused them for [PROTOTYPE 2].
• Splinter Cell: Conviction changed drastically from the time it was announced (in 2007) to when it was released in 2010. In 2008, Ubisoft Montreal put the game on hold and completely overhauled it, changing almost every element as a result. Reportedly, Ubisoft did this because of fears that the gameplay was too similar to Assassin's Creed (also a Ubisoft title). The original character design for Sam Fisher had him looking like a homeless man◊, who sported a hoodie and a large amount of facial hair, and carried a small satchel on his back (in the final version, he simply wears a more casual variant of his normal attire). The “social stealth” gameplay (wherein Fisher could use items, furniture and people in the environment as tools to distract the authorities, as well as being able to hide under tables) was also removed, and replaced with a cover system that measured how long an enemy saw you for, and a ghost of your “last known position” that enemies would focus on until they saw you again. Also, according to beta gameplay seen at the UBIDays game convention, Sam would have to outwit ordinary policemen and bystanders who wanted to take a shot at him. In the final version, he just goes up against conventional terrorist forces and Third Echelon troops. The story changed as well, as the bulk of the game was supposed to be playing Sam as a fugitive on the run as he helped Grim uncover a plot within Third Echelon. Some of this was retained in the final version, however he is no longer a fugitive and his daughter is retconned to still be alive. The beta also had “memento sequences” you would activate at certain points to get flashbacks. In the final version, these sequences are automatically played on walls as you progress through a level.
• Spore originally had a much different interface, procedurally generated content for many more things, an underwater part, more complexity, more animal behaviors. Look at what everyone expected here.
  Maxis had two groups of people that wanted to shape Spore: those who wanted it to be scientific, and those who wanted it to be "accessible". According to Will Wright himself, the game had to be retooled, because the first group was winning, and it wasn't fun at all. An early version had a sub atomic stage preceding the cell stage before it was cut.
• The classic arcade game Spy Hunter (1983) was originally intended to have the James Bond theme as its theme music, but when the rights for it couldn't be obtained, the Peter Gunn theme was used instead.
• Spyborgs is perhaps one of the most drastic cases of a game being overhauled during development. First announced at Capcom's 2008 Captivate event, it was meant to be a humourous action-adventure game whose action would be framed by silly WarioWare-esque commercials running through the levels. However, a tepid reception led to the developers scrapping their original idea and overhauling the game in a gritty, generic hack & slash which only shared the design of the main characters.
• The flagship in Star Control II was going to acquire a cloaking device eventually, but by that point the developers were running out of time and couldn't think of a way to make it “more interesting than the Ilwrath's.” Also, allying with the Orz was originally intended to be more ambiguous than favorable; bringing Orz ships into Quasispace would have had unpleasant consequences. Most interestingly of all, Groombridge was programmed as a Developer's Room and would have enabled the Captain to talk to godlike graphical representations of Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III. Hence, the significance of the Rainbow Worlds.
• StarCraft II would have been considerably different if Blizzard hadn't backtracked and made a game far closer to the original than what their initial concepts had been. Going by early fan suggestions, the game could have included just about 'anything'.
• The developer of Stardew Valley, ConcernedApe, has revealed timelines of the ways many characters' appearance changed through the development process. Some fans wish that the old appearances had been kept for each of these characters. Maru in particular has short maroon hair, but in earlier stages of development she had long, curly brown hair, which many fans find more attractive, as well as being a better representation of actual Black women, since she is the only non-White woman in the game.
• Capcom's Star Gladiator was, according to an interview with Capcom's Seth Killian, at one point supposed to have been a Star Wars Fighting Game. Presumably, Lucasarts thought it would be easier and cheaper to make their own game rather than license a foreign company to make it. A year after Star Gladiator released, the result was Masters of Teras Kasi.
• Erin Roberts' space combat game Starlancer was supposed to be the first title in an epic trilogy depicting a vast war lasting over a century between two factions of humans for control of the entire solar system which would end with one of the sides victorious and the other fleeing to other star systems on colonization ships, shortly before aliens would show up and vaporize the solar system. There were also going to be side-games, of which one, a tactical squad shooter, was being planned. Naturally, the first game did not sell as well as expected and the whole project was shelved. This had an effect on his brother Chris Roberts' game Freelancer, which was in simultaneous development, and is a continuation of Starlancer. It was supposed to resolve the mystery of the aliens who destroyed Earth, as well as simultaneously being the definitive trading space simulator featuring unparalleled AI and freedom. However, studio pressure saw the project's ambitions being greatly reduced (probably for the best, as Freelancer was nearly Vapor Ware to begin with). The cancellation of the remaining Starlancer games also saw all references to the destruction of Sol being removed, although some CGI sequences depicting this did survive.
• Star Trek Online:
  • Perpetual Entertainment was working on a much different version of the game before development was taken over by Cryptic Studios and the game design was overhauled. Planned features included a focus on bridge simulator gameplay, and playable races such as the Gorn and the Borg.
  • During the game's initial development, most aspects of gameplay were dramatically different. The plan was that you would control your character in the first-person perspective, and you would play the role of a bridge officer aboard a ship along with other players filling the other officer roles, each player would have their role (tactical controls weapons and shields, conn navigates the ship, engineering manages resources, etc) with a player also taking the role of captain. Among other things, your ship could be boarded, requiring you to engage in personal combat with the boarding parties. This concept eventually proved too difficult to implement effectively, and the game was retooled into the more approachable "WoW In Space" format we now know.
  • There were plans for a three-parter mission series for the Federation involving an Undine infiltrator in the Romulan group. The first part was made, which infuriated players with how But Thou Must! it ended up being and Cryptic was angry that they couldn't finish it. However, a fan continuation spearheaded by Cryptic and using the game's Foundry system allowed for a continuation of sorts before the mission was dropped during the 5th Anniversary.
  • The mission "A Step Between Stars" was meant to have Harry Kim in it instead of Tuvok due to Harry's involvement with Species 8472.
  • When they brought back Seven of Nine for the second expansion Delta Rising, Cryptic and Jeri Ryan both tried to get Seven to wear something that wasn't a catsuit. They failed.
  • There was meant to be a map for the planet Ferenginar, which would have been home to a Featured Episode series starring Chase Masterson reprising her role as Leeta.
• Strange Flesh:
  • There were different concept designs for The Bartender and Joe.
  • The game was originally envisioned to be much more story and text driven, and to have Joe's face visibly change as you progressed on throughout the levels. Those aspects were eventually scrapped to make development and gameplay far more streamlined.
• Streets of Rage 3 had more features planned for the game before the final version had dummied them out. In the 2nd scene of stage 1, there was going to be a mini-boss by the name of Ash, who was a tall, Camp Gay, man that would mostly body slam you and giggle and if you beat him, he would emit a female cry instead of a male one and sits on the ground crying. This is actually present in the Japanese version, but Executive Meddling forced him to be cut outside of Japan for obvious reasons. A side scrolling motorbike level was going to be in the game as well as shown by the previews in video game magazines, but this concept was cut out.
• Super Heroine Chronicle could have had a vastly different cast of characters. If this post is true, then the series could have had Strike Witches, Slayers, Bubblegum Crisis, Tenchi Muyo!, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 1st and more.
• Factor 5 was working on Superman: Man of Steel, a Wide-Open Sandbox Superman game code named "Blue Steel", on PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360, as a tie-in to the cancelled Superman Returns sequel, then as its own Superman game, before being cancelled.
• Super Monkey Ball originally had nothing to do with monkeys. At first the game used a plain single-colored ball but the developers couldn't achieve the perspective of movement they wanted. They then tried to use balls wrapped with images. When that still didn't work, they decided on 3D models inside the balls, and one of the developers suggested the use of monkeys.
• Super Robot Wars:
  • Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 originally intended to avert one of the greatest What Could Have Beens in Anime history: Giant Robo. The proposed storyline would have had Big Fire attempting to usurp the godhead of Irui, claiming the power of Nashim Ganeden for himself. Unfortunately, Mitsuteru Yokoyama died while the game was in development, and his estate raised the licensing cost for all his works, meaning Giant Robo had to sit out of the Grand Finale of the Alpha timeline. Furthermore, sprites for Gundam Sentinel were found within the game data when hacked; fans suspect that the story was originally planned to be the conclusion of Universal Century Gundam in Alpha, but was cut when Executive Meddling forced Banpresto to include the up-and-coming fan favorite Mobile Suit Gundam SEED in Alpha 3 instead. But digging inside Alpha 2 revealed that sprites of the Strike Gundam and Aegis Gundam were hidden inside the game. It's unknown, though, if this meant that SEED would have just made cameos of some sort, like how Star GaoGaiGar was a cameo of sorts, or if they were going to outright use Gundam SEED to a degree, a la Gao Gai Gar. On a lesser note, that digging also revealed that there was a second Getter Robo theme placed in, "Gattai! Getter Robo", which wasn't used in favor of again "Getter Robo!". A later-revealed a video from Nico Nico was discovered that reveals the extent of Gundam Sentinel's influence in the game, as sprites for both Task Force Alpha heroes and the New Decides units were shown. One notable addition was Amuro's Zeta Plus A1. Also found on there was leftover data from Alpha 2 with the Nightingale, the Wing Gundam Ver. Ka., and units from Crossbone Gundam and Brain Powerd.
  • A lack of money forced Banpresto to leave out a video game recreation of Mobile Suit Gundam 00's final fight between Gundam Exia and 0 Gundam in Super Robot Wars Z2.2, though it's also hinted that it was removed because they didn't want to dump a Mid-Season Upgrade 00 Gundam in favor for a majorly weaker unit.
  • Super Robot Wars Z almost had two other Gundam series — Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ and Mobile Suit Victory Gundam. There were audio files with Amuro supporting Judau and Usso, but were Dummied Out. While it's possible for Victory Gundam to show up, the fact that the game uses the movie trilogy for Zeta Gundam pretty much leaves Judau out in the cold.
  • In Super Robot Wars 2, when attempting to get all the characters they wanted for the game, Banpresto attempted to obtain characters from Aura Battler Dunbine. However, for whatever reason, they were declined. To fill in the gap, they created a new hero and a new villain - Masaki Ando and Shu Shirakawa.
  • Though Shin Super Robot Wars left a wide opening for a sequel, none was ever made. The game writing makes it easy to see why: vast amounts of tedious filler in the early stages and numerous examples of insufficient motivation for many of the member series.
• Super Sprint initially supported up to four players, but the fourth car was made into a permanent AI drone so races could be guaranteed to end without instituting an explicit time limit.
• The grand ambitions of Swordquest and its real world quest for treasure were kneecapped halfway through by The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. Before the contest for Waterworld was held, Atari was sold off following its financial issues, and the whole project was canceled along with the final game, Airworld. As such, the remaining three prizes were never awarded, and were likely returned to the Franklin Mint and destroyed. A retraux version of Airworld based on designer Tod Frye's concepts would eventually be made in 2022, as part of Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration.

---