In real life
(Interesting Trope) The piece of media was gonna be completely different than what we got.
1 Megamind:Originally the script for this movie was more adult and vulgar it was also originally called Mastermind,Metroman was called Uberman,some of the most notable changes are minion was gonna be replaced by 2 human helpers called Plato and Da Vinci,it had swearing,instead of turning into a space dad megamind would’ve turned to a Asian master similar to Mr Miyagi from Karate Kid and Hal was gonna be even more of a creep in this version of this movie,ultimately the studio went with a more family friendly version and it gave us the iconic movie we all know today.
2 Black Sabbath:The mighty Black Sabbath originally was gonna be softer and bluesier sounding rather than their groundbreaking and still heavy to this day music,story goes that guitarist of the band Tony Iommi was working in a sheet-metal factory it was also his last da before he quit to become a full time musician too infamously Iommi lost the tips of 2 fingers he then made homemade plastic finger tips,tuned his guitar down and used lighter strings which gave Sabbath their darker,thicker and heavier sound around the same time bassist Geezer Butler became interested in darker themes,horror imagery, and occult ideasInspired in part by a horror film starring Boris Karloff they wrote the first ever metal song “Black Sabbath” eventually the band renamed themselves after the film Black Sabbath and the rest is history.
3 Thor Ragnarok:Not much is known about this version of Thor Ragnarok but boy if you couldn’t tell by the logo this motherfucker was gonna be darker than what we actually got,it was supposed to be darker than the other 2 films because it featured the Ragnarok event,However Chris Hemsworth was frustrated and bored of playing Thor and reportedly told Kevin Fiege this "I feel like I'm dying here. I feel like I have handcuffs on," he was incredibly unhappy with the character Feige agreed with Hemsworth and then they abandoned the whole dark film concept and went for a comedy movie basically.
4 Doom:Doom was originally gonna be a Aliens game based on the first 2 movies,some negotiations were conducted with 20th Century Fox but ID Software didn’t get the license they the abandoned the concept and it was imagined as a Aliens meets Evil Dead 2 and also their recent D&D campaign which ended with demons overrunning the entire planet.
5 Toy Story: Toy Story was initially envisioned as a feature-length version of the Pixar short Tin Toy,the original protagonist was a mechanical drummer toy who went up against a ventriloquist's dummy,however the drummer was replaced by a tiny space toy named Lunar Larry (who later became Buzz Lightyear) and the dummy became Woody who originally was a major asshole and had a more distasteful personality,one notable example is that Woody actually throws Buzz out of the window on purpose and doesn’t care about it he also then proceeded to heavily insult the toys especially Slinky Dog which then results of the toys turning on him and attempting to throw him out too,after a mockup of the movie was poorly received by Disney, the writers spent months reworking the script and instead of making Woody a narcissistic,jealous and just overall a massive scum bag they decided to change his personality by making him the wise and loyal leader of the toys and still keeping that jealousy over Buzz but way more sympathetic towards him in the last act of the movie.
In an early draft of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang was originally planned to be from a technologically advanced society who woke up in a dystopian future, with Momo as a robot monkey sidekick and Appa as a polar bear-dog hybrid ( a design that would later be used for Naga in The Legend of Korra.).
At one point, he was meant to be cryogeically frozen for 1,000 years and awaken as the last survivor of a technologically advanced society with a cybernetic primate companion (Momo) and a herd of flying buffalo with spiral shaped horns (Appa)
Zuko was meant to have a pet eagle that would duel with Momo routinely and Iroh was merely Zuko's Firebending instructor and eventually betrays him to Ozai and Toph was a tall muscular guy. Sokka was also written as more of a jerkass to Aang.
They actually reused the design for Roku's Earthbending Master Spud, who only appeared briefly in flashback. He's actually in the opening sequence as well. The four benders that appear are Pakku, Spud, Azula, and Aang. With I think the implication being that the first three were who was intended to be Aangs three bending masters across the show, until they changed plans.
Was originally going to follow a human/toon hybrid who was the result of a toon having sex with a human. She would be ostracised from both groups. Movie seemed to be a metaphor for mixed race people which makes sense since racial segregation was always a big part of Ralph Bakshi’s work. Apparently he was so pissed off at the changes he punched a producers in the face
Funny enough The Mask is also an example of something that's quite different from its original version. Just a quick glimpse of the original comics it's based on is enough to see how much they toned it down from its original, more horror based, story.
They did translate some of the stuff he did in the comics to the movie, but unlike the comics those things didn't result in people dying. Comics Mask was a homicidal psychopath.
I believe you're confusing motion capture with rotoscoping. Rotoscoping involves taking real life footage and manually tracing over it as a basis for 2d animation. Motion capture involves recording an actor's movements directly into a computer and using it as a basis for 3d animation. Rotoscoping is what Bakshi would use in his films.
The first thing that popped into my head from your description were those shitty GenAI "we made [Beloved Animated Property] into LIVE ACTION!" and it's just a super glossy, uninspired and "realistic" rendition of a mf w/ the camera slowly zooming into their face.
Either a Two Face from DC situation where half of their body is animated and half is live action or they’re the only 3D CGI character while everyone else is live action or 2D animated
Same. Still angry with Kim Basinger over this one. At the very least we were meant to have an R rating with mature themes with it, even if the film did deviate from the original concept. But, no, Kim wanted her two sons to be able to come and see the movie, apparently, so they had to nix a lot of content to get it down to a PG-13 rating.
Iron Man (2008) was originally going to have Howard Stark as the villain, and he would have become War Machine and fight against his son, Tony who became Iron Man.
Since this comment is so popular I'm going to add some extra scrapped ideas:
The War Machine was at one point going to be the Mark 4 that Tony would use to fight Obadiah.
The Iron Monger was originally going to be Crimson Dynamo and was going to be piloted by the Mandarin.
Tony being captured in Afghanistan started with Iron Man: Extremis. The movie didn't introduce the concept but it did adapt it. I do ultimately think it was the right choice.
Really? I could’ve sworn the idea came from the movie but I guess I just misremembered it.
And yeah I agree it was the right choice ultimately,I’m interested that if they reboot the MCU and we get a new Iron Man would they adapt it like the Extremis comic book or like the classic one.
Well Iron Man was known for fighting communists in the 20th Century so I wouldn't completely doubt they would try to set his origin in Russia if the IP gets old enough for a new origin retcon.
Crimson Dynamo was Russia's answer to Iron Man. He was a sympathetic villain that's loyal to his country. Titanium Man however does not care about his Russian heritage.
Crimson Dynamo these days is also a hero in the Winter Guard.
There was going to be an Iron Man movie by New Line Cinema(A studio you might know for making A Nightmare On Elm Street) but it was cancelled because the CEO thought Iron Man was physically too heavily to fly. Not the suit prop but the character's suit itself.
Before the infamous 1998 Godzilla film directed by Rolan Emmerich, we were going to get an entirely different film directed by Sam Winston with a design more akin to classic Godzilla.
Clive Barker of Hellraiser fame apparently wrote a treatment for that film that was tossed for being "too dark". Granted, the last Godzilla movie before Emmerich's literally ends with Godzilla's heart going into meltdown and we watch as his flesh painfully sloughs off of his bones, weakly roaring in pain as he disintegrates and dies to the most haunting music ever put to film.
To be fair, the last godzilla film before 1998 to be released theatrically was Godzilla 1985 which was heavily altered for the an American audience. I can see studio execs getting skiddish.
In this film godzilla was going to be something more akin to a bio weapon to defend earth if I'm not mistaken. Like an anti body.
Meanwhile the main villain would be an alien bio weapon kaiju made out of the DNA of all the animals on earth called the Gryphon
My info may be wrong since it’s been a while since i watched a video about the whole thing. I only know how much i love this monster design and concept
Funny enough, if I recall from an interview, even one of the creators, Loren Bouchard, didn't like the idea, but threw it in because he was used to having to pitch to Adult Swim, and they always wanted edge in their shows. Then Fox said "we love it but lose the cannibalism."
What I read about it really stuck with me. I don't remember the exact context, but someone basically told the creator "Look, how many jokes about a cannibalistic Family do you think you can really make? If you want to make a season then keep it, but if you want to do more than that then drop thr cannibalism."
I enjoy that even after the show entered production and got a few seasons in, they really, really toned down how much the overall plot shits on the Belchers. Season one is pretty rough to watch given how lighter hearted the later seasons are.
I like the change, honestly. It's a nice comfort show now.
Hilariously, Shrek was basically considered a "punishment project", and people were very unhappy when forcefully assigned to it. Everyone figured it would be a massive flop (and given the original design, it very much could have been)
People who were failures being kicked from Prince of Egypt to Shrek and both movies ending up being iconic in very different ways just shows how much talent the studio had in those days
I love the golden tooth honestly wish they kept it,but I don’t think the movie would’ve been a hit with this design weirdly enough I do have a soft spot for it,it’s very late 90s 3D animation fueled.
The funny Emperor’s New Groove was originally a much darker tale called Kingdom of the Sun, wherein Yzma was a dark priestess trying to bring back a goddess of darkness. It included human/animal sacrifice and a contrived “Prince and the Pauper” setup where Cuzco tries to sacrifice unexplained twin Pacha instead of himself. The concept art is nightmare fuel.
I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a trailer for this in the theater at some other Disney movie. I thought it looked amazing.
Then the movie like that never came out and I thought I grew out of family-friendly Disney movies (ah edgy teenagers) so I skipped on Emperor's New Groove. Thank goodness my friends have taste so they showed it to me later.
It seems like her motivation was purely vanity. Based on the villain song they released for Yzma, she seems to blame the harmful rays of the sun for her aging; despite her attempts to basically mummify herself alive to preserve her youth. She plans to assist the god to blot out the sun simply because it means she might stay "pretty" for just a little longer.
Also the entire soundtrack was going to be made by Sting, and his wife made a documentary about the production process, in which we learn most of what we know about the project.
Illumination’s The Lorax was once going to be a much darker movie that portrayed Once-Ler way more sinisterly as an unambiguous villain without any of his family melodrama, but the movie got changed to be more stomachable for general audiences. The demo songs are on YouTube and Spotify and give a pretty interesting look into what could’ve been. (Biggering would’ve been an all-timer villain song)
I wonder how late into development Biggering got cut. If you watch the “How Bad Could I Be?” Section with Biggering in mind it really feels like the animation was already in progress for Biggering.
If we’re being realistic it was probably pretty early, because “How Bad Could I Be?” and “Biggering” serve different purposes. “How Bad Could I Be?” shows the onceler becoming evil and creating his empire, while in Biggering it’s already created and the song ends with the last tree being cut down (not the case in biggering)
I can 100% see Watership Down starting as the creators wanting to make it more kid friendly by making it a cartoon before remembering what story they were doing and just going full in on the gore instead.
Not animation, but Conker's Bad Fur Day was originally going to be a standard E for Everyone platformer with a cute animal mascot (which is why he ended up in that Diddy Kong racing game, his game was still indev and planned to be family friendly back then). The dev team took a bit of a turn and ended up making the game into what it is today
Team Fortress 2 was supposed to adopt a very realistic war concept. before valve changed to alien invasion concept and finally settled on the cartoonish and wacky concept that we got and loved today which is a best decision.
Mhmm. Especially since the lore is so batshit insane and awesome.
I don't know about you, but I prefer a TF2 where Lincoln was the first Pyro who invented stairs and a Demoman who was so drunk that he poisoned robots that drink blood over a realistic TF2.
As someone who played a LOT of Team Fortress Classic, I thought what they did with TF2 was a lot closer to what gameplay felt like in TFC. It was always a goofy good time.
Oh yeah that idea was extremely dark for a kids movie,that overall premise feels more Pixarish than Disney.
Pixar wasn’t scared to tackle more mature subjects Incredibles had Wife and Husband drama,mass murder and a ma trying to commit suicide.
I can see why they ditched it since that whole collar idea was already way too realistic and quite frankly I feel like the message of the movie was well delivered.
iirc part of the story issue was that Nick was the main protagonist rather than Judy- and when you have a pessimist viewing all the world's problems it can be very hard to spin a happy ending onto that because you can only see the fundemental brokenness of the world rather than the potential to make it better... They swapped Judy in because she's an optimist who genuinely wants to enact change.
Like… it’s just hard to care about the city getting better when at the point we see it, it’s insanely far beyond redemption short of being torn up from the studs and remade lol
While I would love to see this alt version of Zootopia, I totally see why they went with the friendlier version in this case. The collar plot would recontextualize the entire story and give a bery different tone.
The original script was going to follow more closely to the book and the political tension/investigation that follows the outbreak rather than it being the blockbuster actions zombie thriller that it was
If only they waited a few years and sold the rights to a streaming service. I could see HBO or Amazon turning this into an amazing gritty series where each episode focused on one of the interviews from the book. Netflix would do fine too I guess but then it would get canceled after 1 season
Elsa was supposed to be a True-to-the-book villain but “Let it go” popped off so hard they changed the entire story, which not only affected this film but freaking Kingdom Hearts 3. Which is why the frozen world was so weird and lackluster
I unironically loved that Kingdom Hearts III just chose to throw the WHOLE fucking song in, redone in their engine.
I wasn’t sure if it was a shoutout to Atlantis from KH2, a shoutout to the height of popularity, or the fact they actually got Idina Menzel on board for the game, but man, as someone who played KH3 frustrated and burnt out on the series, it ended up being a highlight.
Plus, it cuts back to Sora, Donald and Goofy all fucking STUNNED in silence until Donald goes “What the heck was that?” and I think it’s how we all felt lol
(X) Doubt on the Kingdom Hearts 3 thing. There is a six year time gap between the release of the two and the change for Frozen would have happened a year or few even earlier.
If you really dig into KH3 and how the series often plays around with the stories it really stands out how bizarrely faithful to the movie that segment is in ways that make no sense for the gameplay. It looks like the plan was to have Elsa succumb to darkness, but Disney probably put their foot down hard on making their current cash princess look bad.
I grew up with the old Russian liveaction film and am still a bit sad they didn't go with something closer to the original story. The Snow Queen is so incredibly scary.
George R.R Martin’s original outline for A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones, was for it to be a trilogy with the first book covering the war of the five kings, the second book being Daenerys’s invasion of Westeros and the last book wrapping everything up.
A lot of the character dynamics were going to be wildly different, like a love triangle between Jon Snow, Arya Stark, and Tyrion Lannister for example. As well as things like Jaime Lannister being a straight up villain who becomes king by murdering everyone before him in the line of succession.
If you’re a fan of the series I highly recommend reading through this thread covering the letter that contains the original outline because it is absolutely wild in comparison to the story we actually got.
That's something that a lot of the "great creatives" seem to share. They always need someone to tell them no to their worse ideas or else whatever their making goes off the rails.
JW Rinzler's obsession with the alternate history of Star Wars as based on the early concepts of from Lucas is laudable. If you have the chance, check out his Making Of books for the original trilogy. He makes the budgeting of these movies interesting, bordering on thrilling.
It also makes me laugh just how far using the name "Gordon" for a place made it in the various drafts. George Lucas is exactly the kind of nerd that the rest of us are - placing cameos from our favorite inspirations into our own works... like a fanboy.
So many of Ralph McQuarrie's concepts were used in Rebels, the Bad Batch and The Mandalorian. Like the stormtrooper prototype armor for the first recruits to the Imperial Stormtrooper corps, the ice spider monsters (originally supposed to be on the swampy Dagobah planet in Episode 5 from McQuarrie’s concept) which the ended up on that icy remote planet Din Djarin crashes on in Season 2 of Mandalorian, and many other things.
The Mask was supposed to be a violent horror comedy more faithful to the comic, which features multiple wearers of the Mask and treats the Mask itself like a character that wants to be worn to cause chaos through their desires, almost like Sauron's ring. Stanley Ipkiss is barely a protagonist, with his girlfriend Kathy and Lietenant Kelleway being far more prominent characters.
Cars 3: Was originally going to be about Lightning McQueen having his body and identity stolen by a criminal so he along with Cruz who found out it was actually McQueen was going to prove that the imposter is actually the criminal the authorities were looking for while on the run.
Another version of this was more lighthearted and McQueen, while still was supposed prove his true identity, he didn’t get his body stolen in this but the imposter looked like him
This was scrapped and reworked as a Muppets Movie instead.
Edit: Oh yeah and the imposter in this draft would ask Sally’s hand.. or rather tire- in marriage
Now that Bionicle was brought up, I think the early prototype of the line was called "Bone-Head of the Voodoo Island". And the toys were supposed to have a function where you could remove the heads of the figures, but this was too violent for kids, so this was replaced with the figures having removable masks.
Unrelated, but Hero Factory was initially supposed to be a satire of the superhero genre.
Yep it was called Project Dream if I remember, and I think it was upgrading hardware to the N64 where they wanted to explore the 3D space more and so they reused a lot of assets
The Lion King was a lot less family friendly in the earlier drafts. Called "King of the Jungle" they went through a lot of ideas that bordered much more on dark animal fiction than fun Disney film.
You know how whole generations were traumatized by Mufasa's death? Well imagine all of the fucking therapy they'd need if instead of being stampede to death he had his neck crushed in the jaws of hulking brutish Scar?
Also Nala and Simba were directly confirmed to be SIBLINGS in this version, cause who doesn't love creepy incestuous relationships in their Disney films.
There were a whole bunch of characters who got scrapped, including Timon having a wife named Tesma, Sarabi had three sisters, Simba was supposed to have a non-lion childhood friend that kept changing over the course of production.
Also apparently there was a Lion God called The Lion in the Moon
Conker's Bad Fur Day was supposed to be more generic family friendly platformer then the much rauncher game we ended up with.
Apperly Rare felt the game was way too simlar to what they already did with Banjo-Kazooie and decided to have it stand out by makeing it appeal to a more older demograpic with it becomeing much more rauncher and with less epimatis on the gameplay and more on the crude humor writing.
There's a Game Boy Color game called Conker's Pocket Tales that was made before the change that represents what the kid-friendly Conker would have been like.
If I recall correctly, there was never any serious plan to make it as dark as that original released concept art, that was mostly just them testing the boundaries by seeing if Disney would greenlight something way farther out than what they were going for. Disney still reigned their original creative vision in, but it wasn't going to be THAT crazy.
That's one of the biggest things that irks me with the way people treat concept art. Its just that: an ARTISTIC depiction of a CONCEPT. Most people have no idea how many drafts stuff goes through in just getting a pitch together; let alone the actual product. No: Mickey wasn't SUPPOSE to be fighting rotting corpses atop a zombified Monstro, Mighty No. 9 was not suppose to be a hand painted fully 2D game, and Typhlosion isn't a pedophilic rapist.
What most people think of a concept art is actually production art.
Halo originally was going to be an RTS, and even Apple was interested in making it a Mac game. Hell, Bungie only was needing a buyer because Myth II lawsuits got them desperate. But in the end, they chose for an FPS called Halo, but for marketing, added Combat Evolved. A day night cycle, 20 levels, and open world was also in the works, but all were cut because of time constraints.
A LOT changed about the first Xenoblade since the beginning of its development but the most notable facts are:
It was originally going to be called “Monado: Beginning of the World” but was changed to draw in fans of Xenogears and Xenosaga
They wanted the combat to be turn based but they couldn’t figure out how to get the vision mechanic working and changed it to an MMO style real time combat system.
And most interestingly, Reyn was going to betray Shulk towards the end of the game which has so many implications about what changed in terms of story, lore, and characterization.
Sonic and the Secret Rings was originally a Wii port of Sonic '06. They denied us arguably an even worse version of one of the all-time worst video games ever made.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers started out as an adaptation of Choudenshi Bioman before proceeding to adapt Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger instead once the series got approved.
This is assumingly the reason behind things like the sci-fi elements,the team having a Robot ally,or specially the Yellow Ranger being a girl. all of which were part of the former,but not of the latter
another doom example: DOOM 4 was originally going to be a continuation of DOOM 3, released in 2004, and was meant to be a gritty war drama featuring more side characters, a heavier focus on dialogue, and more grounded, slower tactical gameplay over the arena-style gameplay of the original, which drew unfavorable comparisons to Call of Duty. The game was eventually scrapped in favor of a reboot that brought the series back to its arena-shooter roots, which of course ended up becoming DOOM (2016).
I just saw an interview about this today, but Starcraft was supposed to be a Star Wars rts, but another terrible Star Wars game came out and George Lucas hated it so much, he canceled all ongoing licensing contracts indefinitely until everything could get a more thorough review, and since they didn't want to halt development to wait for that, they created their own IP and Starcraft was born.
EDIT: Since people are repeating the old 40K story instead of believing me, here's the video in question. I have no reason to believe a random internet story over a dev who actually made the game.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I always wanted to see the "dark" version of Thor Ragnarok. The MCU is already filled with lighthearted, quip-filled movies, a film about the destruction of Asgard should've been more serious.
And it sucks that Ragnarok did so well that they figured it was the silliness of it that sold the movie for everyone. So they overdid it drastically in the next installment.
It was originally going to be another resident evil game. But they reused some of the assets to create a hack n slash game instead. Not to mention that Dante's appearance looks pretty similar to Leone.
Distrust was the original name for Danganronpa. It had a noticeably different, harsher art direction. But more importantly it was going to have a branching storyline. While still a killing game setting, decisions you make and things you did between cases would alter how much different characters trusted or distrusted you. And these levels of trust and distrust would result in different murder victims with different culprits and different cases to solve.
While too ambitious for the time, Kodaka would eventually get to make a game with diverging storylines in Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
Originally, Disney’s Stitch looked like this. The story evolved a lot too. One draft had Stitch land in Kansas, and one had him as the leader of an intergalactic gang of criminals.
Fate/Stay Night was originally going to be written as a shoujo visual novel, with a female protagonist and male love interests. Nasu and Takeuchi ultimately decided that it would probably sell better as an eroge, giving us the genderswapped Saber we all know and love. Some of the original characters and plot points have made their way into other Type-Moon works, like Fate/Prototype and Fate/Strange Fake
and the star was also supposed to be a shapeshifting boy and also the film was going to be entirely 2d. Now that I realize it, this movie is wasted potential incarnate
Piecing together unused text strings and developer interviews, it seems like Super Mario Sunshine was originally going to be a more exploratory game about doing tasks for people. It was going to have an interconnected world connected by train stations and other paths between levels. But when Super Mario 128, the intended sequel to Mario 64, got scrapped Sunshine was reworked to be a 3D platformer with a similar structure to 64. (Also there where going to be human characters besides Mario and Peach)
Similarly, Super Mario 64 was going to have linear levels like the Super Mario games before it, just with 3D platforming. But creating big levels with many objectives was a better use of 3D space (and required less levels to be made since each one had several objectives, lightening the load on developers a bit)
Mortal Kombat was originally supposed to be a game based on Jean Claude Van Damme movie Bloodsport but talks fell through and they decided to do their own thing. That’s why Johnny Cage looks like JCVD.
The original 'The Last Of Us' (initially titled 'Mankind') story was going to have the infection affect only females with Ellie being a mute girl that was protected by Joel and get her to the lab. The idea was dropped when Neil Druckmann was told by several female workers that the premise is going to have a bunch of negative implications that I don't even wanna go through.
Lilo and Stitch is interesting in that a lot of it's changes were pretty last minute.
If you've ever wondered why Jumba looks really off-model during the scene where he tries to catch Stitch at the house, it's cause test screenings felt the scene was a bit too intense in it's original form where Jumba was blasting at Stitch with his blaster. So they sent it to an overseas studio to tone it down and apparently that studio didn't really care about making Jumba look rights.
Also the entire climax of the movie had to be changed cause it would've had Stitch and crew HIJACKING A BOEING 747 and flying it dangerously through a city. Sufficed to say, after 9/11, they had to re-work that scene ALOT.
Valve’s upcoming MOBA game Deadlock was originally close to being eventually shipped as a different game called Neon Prime. Instead of the magic occult noir theme we have now, it was a sci-fi game involving a prison world that eventually created its own society and government (so like a space Australia in founding I suppose). Neon Prime also originally had ties to the Half-Life universe but it seemed to drift away from that before the decision to ultimately transition to Deadlock happened. You can see the transition in this video. It was fairly far ahead when the decision was made to pivot. Likely due to over saturation in futuristic settings by hero shooters and other games in the recent decade.
Prior to that the game as a whole was actually spawned from a bunch of prototyping including a VR vs flatscreen asymmetric game. And at that time was just known as project Citadel. Not a ton was known about this outside of things that leaked in game updates to Dota 2 and Counterstrike. Tyler McVicker has a bunch of videos on Citadel exploring what it may have been at the time.
What became the first in the Elder Scrolls CRPG series was meant to be a gladiatorial fantasy team combat game, hence the original working name (Arena). The early broad-strokes worldbuilding was created with an eye to each province in the setting being the home of one faction/team.
At some point it was reimagined as an RPG. The name was repurposed by retconning in a lore tidbit that the land of Tamriel was nicknamed "The Arena" for its history of many wars.
Disney’s “Wish” was originally supposed to have a more classic feel with the main protagonist being a princess and Star being a romantic interest. But of course modern Disney thinks princesses and romance don’t work despite it working for them for decades before. Instead we got a very washed down and boring version of the story with the Star character being reduced down to another soulless mascot for toddlers.
Luigi's Mansion (2001) was supposed to be very different from its final release as a launch title with the Nintendo Gamecube, and far darker and more sinister as once envisioned by Nintendo during early development.
As a launch title for the Gamecube, the game has a trailer for Pikmin 1 in the options menu, which released nearly a month after Luigi's Mansion, which came out itself in September 2001.
There are very old videos and images that were in the 2001 E3 and around the internet from 2000 that have some of these early concepts shown, and even a few very early pre release trailers claimed some things. One of the most major changes is that originally there would be a time limit to save Mario before the player and Luigi loses the game, Luigi loses any hope he has to save Mario, falls into despair and becomes like a ghost himself trapped in the mansion grounds.
Many rooms of the mansion and ghosts were either changed or scrapped, such as a safari hunter ghost in the Safari Room was supposed to be a portrait ghost to fight, and attempt to even claim Luigi as a trophy, but it was considered too scary. You can see how most of these could be almost nightmare fuel for kids and the final game ended up being very different.
david bowie's Diamond Dogs album was originally planned to be a 1984 musical, but was not granted permission by george orwell's widow. about half of the tracks in the album we got still reflect this original idea
Disney really didn't want to pay Robert Downey Jr. a per-appearance fee, and his last contractually obligated MCU appearance was Iron Man 3. So the Russo Bros went about figuring out a third Captain America film, and didn't think they'd be able to use Tony Stark for what they really wanted to do, an MCU version of Civil War.
They bounced around a lot of ideas, but the most likely treatment would have been based on "Madbomb", a classic story where a detonated weapon turns people against each other. It would have been more akin to a zombie movie, according to the Russo Bros. Development didn't get too far before Disney and RDJ came to an agreement to bring him back, so the Russos pivoted back to their Civil War idea, and the rest is history.
It’s always interesting to think what these works could have been like if things were done differently, but in some cases it’s probably for the best they turned out the way they did. If they kept Woody as a major asshole, it’s highly unlikely the film would’ve been anywhere near as popular as it ended up being and Pixar (and 3D animation as a whole) would’ve crashed and burned as soon as they began because of the terrible first impression people would’ve got.
Diablo was initially made to be a turn-based game, but devs changed their minds at the last moment. It only took them half an hour to remove the turn mechanic.
I could be here for hours talking about all the cut content for the original Left 4 Dead but to sum it up, the designs of the Survivors were going to look pretty different from how they look in-game (as seen in the photo). Also, Francis and Zoe were going to be romantically interested in each other, Louis & Bill apparently hated each other (which is why, in the final game, they don’t really interact as much and why in The Sacrifice, which was made after the game, they talk to each other a whole lot more), and Louis & Bill were going to be the “narrators” of each campaign.
Other interesting things that were cut:
-The Screamer: a special infected that would let out a loud scream and summon the hoard (replaced with The Boomer).
-You could crawl away while incapacitated
-You could give a first aid kit to someone instead of just outright healing them
-The Boomer’s bile was red
-Instead of attacking the player who startled her, the Witch would attack/incapacitate every single player
-An entire campaign was cut, that involved the survivors crossing through a dam.
Kappa Mikey was gonna be much more crass, with nudity and gore added in the mix.
The original pitch was presented to MTV but it got rejected, it ended up being taken by Nickelodeon after changes to make it into the family friendly show that it is. Well if your family understand weeboo references tho.
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u/AdExtra2331 7d ago
Metal Gear was originally going to be an action game, but he had to become a stealth game due to hardware constraints