• What game originally featured an old man beating up superheroes to steal a girl’s
panties?
What is the “Stop N’ Swop,” and how did Nintendo kill it without even meaning
to?
From deleted scenes to last-minute re-writes, here are 10 crazy pieces of cut or changed
content in video games.
10 – Arwing Fight (Zelda Ocarina of Time) • Deep in the game files of The Legend of
Zelda: Ocarina of Time, there is an Arwing from Star Fox 64.
• And it isn’t just a model.
It’s a fully-rendered enemy that flies around, shoots lasers at Link, and even has fully-animated
intro and death animations.
• The speculation is that they used the model to test the patterns of flying enemies
in the game.
But it still exists in the game code, it just never spawns during normal gameplay.
9 – Language (Atomic Bomberman) • Atomic Bomberman was the first Bomberman
game to be developed for Windows, and Interplay Productions was going to take a… unique
spin on it.
• They hired Billy West (Fry from Futurama) and Charlie Adler (Buster Bunny from Tiny
Toon Adventures) to provide voices for the characters… and it turned into a profanity-laced
tirade.
• Those lines were eventually cut from the game, and it would have been difficult to
look at Bomberman the same if they hadn’t.
8 – Gojira (Fallout New Vegas) • Fallout loves to take one of its monsters
and just make it super huge.
• In Fallout New Vegas, they were going to take that to extreme measures.
• Gojira was to be a super-sized, fire-breathing Gecko roaming the desert.
His fire breath would have done thousands of points of damage per second – enough
to toast all the bosses in the game in under a minute.
• Gojira could have been avoided with the Animal Friend perk, but since he never made
it into the final game, now you don’t have to.
7 – Ending Sequence (Metal Gear Solid 2) • Metal Gear Solid 2 had an odd release
window.
• The game about stopping a major act of international terrorism released on November
12, 2001 – about 2 months after the 9/11 attacks in America.
• And the original version of the game featured a cutscene of Arsenal Gear tearing through
and destroying a decent portion of New York City.
• Another cutscene, a news broadcast about how the Statue of Liberty is now sitting on
Ellis Island, was also cut.
• American flags were also removed from the ending, including a scene in which Raiden
cuts the rope on the Federal Hall flagpole, downing the American flag to fall over the
body of Solidus Snake. 6 – Dark Dialogue (Portal 2)
• The dialogue featuring Cave Johnson and Caroline is some of the most memorable in
all of Portal 2.
• But what was originally written got a lot worse than just the “lemon” rant.
• There was initially a sequence in which Cave Johnson’s consciousness was trapped
in a small cube in the Aperture Science labs, and the player was forced to assist in his
suicide in order to proceed.
• Another bit of dialogue featured Caroline begging not to be forced into a robot body.
5 – Stop N’ Swop (Banjo Kazooie/Tooie) • This was a bizarre function that originally
intended to use a little-known hardware function of the Nintendo 64.
• The idea was to reward people who owned both Banjo Kazooie and Banjo Tooie, by allowing
data to carry over.
• But they weren’t planning on using a memory card.
The idea was to activate the Stop N’ Swop in Banjo Kazooie, switch the console off,
and insert Banjo Tooie.
• The N64 would keep data active for 10 seconds after a game being switched off, creating
just enough time to swap games.
• But once they’d created the Stop N’ Swop system, Nintendo made changes to the
N64, and that 10-second window became one second, making the swap basically impossible.
4 – Johnny Boss Fight (Chrono Trigger) • There is a Transformer-like robot who
challenges you to a race to cross the ruins at Site 32 in Chrono Trigger.
• And in the game we got… that’s ALL Johnny is.
• But buried in the game’s code, Johnny has stats for battle.
So even though he never takes up arms in the game, it seems at one point, the cool jetbike
bot was intended to be a battle.
3 – Norimaro (Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter)
• Norimaro isn’t a cut character if you play the Japanese version of Marvel Super
Heroes vs. Street Fighter.
• And he almost ended up in the English version – some files in the game show him
with English voice clips and dialogue.
• But they decided against it… because Norimaro’s whole backstory is that he is
an old pervert dressed as a schoolboy who came to the tournament by accident.
And he basically just wants to molest the girls in the game.
• His ending in the arcade mode of the game is that he gets Chun-Li’s panties.
That’s basically it.
An old Japanese man beats up the Incredible Hulk to get Chun-Li’s panties.
2 – The Main Character (Final Fantasy 12) • The main character in Final Fantasy 12
isn’t exactly cut.
He’s still there.
He just isn’t the main character.
• Basch was intended to be the main character of the game, but Square Enix was concerned
that the grizzled, 30-year-old disgraced knight wouldn’t resonate with fans.
• So a writing change at the last minute attempted to insert Vaan into the game, pushing
Basch off into a supporting role.
• This is why a good portion of the story in the middle section seems to more-or-less
forget Vaan exists, and is largely jumbled throughout.
• So in other words, the entire story of Final Fantasy 12 that WOULD have featured
Basch… was cut and no longer exists.
1 – Dark Energy (Mass Effect Trilogy) • The ending of Mass Effect 3 is famous
for being one of the biggest letdowns in gaming.
The three endings you have to choose from are just about the same.
• But there was another plotline building up over the course of the series that was
simply dropped.
• At one point, Tali mentions something about “Dark Energy.”
That never really comes into play, but it was originally supposed to be a huge plot
point.
• The story was GOING to be that the Reapers had discovered the secrets of Dark Energy,
and realized it could destroy the entire universe if weaponized.
• So they made it their work to eliminate civilizations when they started getting close
to being able to discover and research Dark Energy.
• This plotline left the game along with its lead writer, so that isn’t the story
we got.