Dummied Out



When some feature, level, monster or something else was meant to be put in a game but ultimately ended up getting cut out for whatever reason. Except instead of deleting the data entirely, the programmers just remove all legitimate ways to access it, leaving pieces of it in the game code (textures, models, sprites, etc.). For instance, setting the game so a particular enemy never actually spawns, or removing all entrances to a level that was never finished.

/* One reason for this is because most video game consoles use static file structures, referring to particular data segments. Much of the debugging was getting the structure to cooperate with the console, so removing large batches of code was impractical at best and often opened up more problems than it solved. As such, unless the space was needed, dummied content would just be left in with all references in the other files cut. */

The remaining bits of data or map could sometimes result in false cases of Notice This, and players getting an Empty Room Psych out of it. If the fans get talking, a mythical access to it can become an Urban Legend of Zelda. In other media this takes the form of What Could Have Been. Dummied Out content is sometimes accessible with skill, patience, or merciless exploiting of glitches, but usually requires modding or hacking of some sort.

See also Minus World, and The Cutting Room Floor (a wiki of dummied out content). Game Mods will sometimes reopen access to it.

Action Adventure Games

 * The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time
 * The game contains a fully functioning Arwing enemy. Yes, from Star FOX. It was lifted straight from Star Fox 64 put in by the designers as a base for the motion pattern of Volvagia, the dragon boss, as described here. The only known way to access it is by using a cheating device to make it appear, or to crook the game cartridge at the precise moment a treasure chest is opened.
 * There's also all the stuff that would have been accessed with the N64 Disk Drive. The disk drive was never released outside of Japan, and the extra content didn't come out there either; the "Master Quest" included in later rereleases of the games is supposedly at least part of what was intended for the disk drive content.
 * There's also a rumour on Youtube surrounding the Unicorn Fountain room found in the coding. Supposedly it was found in a door underwater in Zora's Domain, and was meant to be the location of the Triforce.
 * The original models for the female Kokiri. Most notably Fado, who was supposed to be the wind sage (coincidentally, the wind sage in The Wind Waker is also named Fado, although male), and since her name isn't given in the game itself in the final version her name is only known because it was on the Web site for the game.
 * The six medallions are programmed in as equippable items, although they don't work even if you try a Game Shark. Originally the medallions were going to fill the niche now occupied by the warp songs. However, this discovery led to something more interesting: the wind and ice medallions. Although no graphics have been found corresponding to them and GameSharking them into the game doesn't work, it seems they were meant to be in the game at some point. There is evidence that the ice dungeon (which in the final version is merely a detour taken to get the Iron Boots needed to access and navigate the Water Temple) was meant to be larger at one point in development, so there's the ice medallion, but nobody except the developers knows what the wind medallion would have been for, though notably the Forest section of Ganon's Castle seems to be more wind-themed than forest-themed, and coincidentally, the Forest Sage in the final version, Saria, is a Kokiri like both the original female Fado in Ocarina of Time and the male one in The Wind Waker.
 * The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
 * In its original SNES incarnation, the game had a secret room which required a near-superhuman effort to get to. While Chris Houlihan's Secret Room (So named after the winner of a Nintendo Power competition winner, the prize being his name being inserted into the game) is present in the GBA remake, the method to access it has been removed, as has Chris Houlihan's name. The code is only accessible in the remake through cheating. Strictly speaking, Chris Houlihan's room was never intended to be accessible at all—it's the "emergency room" the game sends you to if the proper data is not available.
 * Also, either through a bug or some obscurely intentional game design, "ghosts" roam the Dark World's Swamp of Evil. They seem to be invisible versions of the Dark World equivalents of Zoras, the Cyclops Fish, and are located on the lower floor layer that can only be accessed via glitch. They are uninteractable and all but unkillable except with certain superweapons. Just drop Bombos magic near where you first warp into the swamp from the Light World and watch the flames of the dying appear from nowhere.
 * Two unused rooms also exist in the game memory, which appear to be duplicates of the Ice Palace Fairy Fountain and the easternmost room of floor B6. The exits from these rooms, however, lead to different places than the normal versions. There's also several unused graphics, including one supposed to be used for the statues in Skull Woods dungeon, though this graphic ended up being used in the Palace of the Four Sword bonus dungeon in the Game Boy Advance version (though not Skull Woods).
 * In addition, there are several dummied out enemies in Link To The Past, including a soldier with a cannon. They were saved for the GBA Edition, which in turn dummied out two rooms in the ice dungeon, to simplify an otherwise Nintendo Hard puzzle requiring moving blocks across several floors.
 * The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
 * The magic meter was taken out some time before release (there's a visible magic meter in a screenshot on the back of the Wii version's box). Consequently all potions and such that would replenish it were taken out with it. Now, you have to know that in the game there are slime-monsters (ChuChus) that drop potions in their color when killed. So all the green ones of those monsters were taken out, too. But ChuChus of different color can merge into each other and thus become a ChuChu of a new color. At one point of the game it is still possible to let a blue and a yellow ChuChu merge (only in the Wii version), thus becoming green and thus dropping green potion, which is used to replenish magic. And it does... nothing!
 * Some hackers also found an unusable beta item called Fire Arrows with translated description but no in-game model. Anyways, magic would be required to transform into wolf form, as evidenced by some unused text found on the disk.
 * Also, there are many scrapped areas in the overworld, featured on early promotional videos. Namely, a different forest (the trees used in the demo are still in the final build, but without collision detection), a river near your hometown (the kayak was supposed to be used more than once, so this was for the better), and the Ocarina of Time version of the market in the town. Interacting with animals was supposed to have a more important role.
 * Glitching through some of the seemingly Bottomless Pits would allow you to access some modeled areas. The TP overworld was supposed to be even more massive.
 * There are also a few left over enemies who are still in the game code, including a Twilight Palace monster that can knock you 10 ft. away just by hitting you, and a two-story golem made of rolled-up Gorons. A video of these two can be seen here. They have incomplete collision detection, sadly.
 * Speaking of Gorons, there's evidence that the summit of Death Mountain was originally accessible, but later blocked off with a hastily coded patch of wall that doesn't fully match its surroundings. While the area is still covered in twilight, if one speaks to the Goron on the cliff above the hot springs, he laments that the path "is now inaccessible" due to a geyser that's suddenly sprung up out of the wall... yet the path in question leads to a dead end, with the hastily erected wall part-way along it.
 * The path in question might have been leading to the big hole in the Goron Sumo Hall ceiling, seen in the credits. They may have changed their minds about how Link would get in.
 * The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
 * The game has chest data for some rooms that don't have chests in them. This means that if someone used a hacked ROM to put a chest in those rooms, they'd be able to get what was originally supposed to be there (ruppees, mostly, but there's chest data for the shovel and bow, two items that, in the release verison, have to be bought). By default, a chest stuck in a room without chest data will give you the Power Bracelet (or its updated version).
 * There's also an arrangement of Totaka's Song in the music data that is not currently known to play anywhere in-game. (If it's found, it would be the third version of the song in the game.) However, out of the two other versions, one was dummied out in every version except the original Japanese version and the German translation—it required "Totakeke" (Kazumi Totaka's nickname, later used as another name for K.K. Slider in Animal Crossing) to be entered as Link's name in the Japanese version or "MOYSE" (in all caps) using the same method in the German version, with that version's name being taken from the writer of the German script, Claude Moyse.
 * Also in  LoZ:LA , there is a large amount of source code contained in unused sectors of the cartridge, though this was probably put in by mistake.
 * In The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker, it's pretty obvious where all three dungeons were originally supposed to be (Jabun's Belly, Fire Mountain, and Ice Ring Isle, in case you were still wondering.) With the latter two, it's easy to tell. They're the only islands (with the exception of Windfall Island, basically this game's equivalent to Kakariko Village) that don't have true dungeons on them that either are visible as islands on the overworld map or have their names in red.
 * There's also data for an item called the Water Boots. Putting them on causes Link to do the animation for putting boots on, but they don't appear and don't do anything.
 * They were probably intended to allow Link to sink into the water, as a test map level layout (with tranparent water!) implies, but this was probably canned out because of development deadlines (the final lakes/sea bottom landscapes are featureless).
 * At least 27% of the areas on the disk go unused.
 * The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap had a bugged item similar to the Somaria Cane dummied out. Similarly, the Fire Rod was planned to be an item in the game. An unused dungeon, and alternative beta layouts for existing ones exist also. Although the three houses sidequest has the third house dummied out as a Shout-Out to the scrapped third Oracle game (whose remnants are scattered through the two existing ones), the third house indeed exists.
 * A jump command has been found via Game Shark (in the final version, jumping is only possible using Roc's Cape; presumably, Roc's Cape, if it were planned at that point, was originally only going to upgrade the jumping ability to make it possible to float across larger gaps rather than being required for jumping as well). A music track for the Lost Woods and an alternative music for the final dungeon lies unused within the game.
 * Said Alternative music is the Beginning of Hyrule Castle From A Link to the Past.
 * Tomb Raider III had a "cathedral key" as one of the secret objects. The only cathedral you entered was the bonus level (All Hallows) and you did that at the end and only if you found ALL the secrets. The bonus level was basically an underdeveloped mid game level.
 * Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation includes an unused level called "The Valley Temple," known by the file name joby1b.tr4. It was most likely meant to be one of the Giza levels along with "The Sphinx Complex," "The Mastabas," and "Menkakure's Pyramid," since there are three exits, but probably ended up being removed as that section of the game was hard enough for regular players.
 * Due to the developers having a heavy deadline to follow, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness has quite a bit of dummied out content, including a large number of unused animations, sound files, weapons (including Lara's signature dual pistols), and plotlines.
 * The Shaman was a character cut from the game. She would have been seen in flashbacks detailing how Lara survived her fate in the ending of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. Although she, and her plotline, were removed from the final game, text files of her dialogue can still be found within the game files.
 * The first level, Parisian Back Streets, has a large unfinished area which is normally inaccessible, and was meant to be used for the tutorial. The area is accessible through cheats, and is complete with camera angles and sound files.
 * There is a numerous amount of unused sound files, including control explanations for the unfinished tutorial, most of which refer to features that were removed from the game. There are also conversations that were cut and tons of unused enemy dialogue. Interestingly, quite a bit of Lara's cut dialogue include Continuity Nods to previous games in the series.
 * There are lots of hidden items, including Lara's aforementiouned dual pistols, a harpoon gun, and an unused amulet.
 * According to various sound files, Lara was originally able to buy items from Renne's Pawnshop and the Willowtree Herbalist.
 * There was also meant to be a plotline of Lara finding out that Bouchard (likely a shapeshifting Karel) was seen in an alley at the Monstrum Crimescene, sometime after she found his corpse.
 * Lots (if not most) of the content in the original Soul Reaver was dummied out or simply cut (including the entire ending!) due to time constraints. Most notably, the original design included an entire area underneath the human city, which housed a cult of vampire worshipers led by a Priestess, who would've given Raziel a new power after he defeated her. Almost all of the missing content was recycled in the sequels.
 * This must have been rather late in development; a few magazines' strategy guides for Soul Reaver included the cut content. It's not exactly heartening to know that the people who wrote the guide had apparently never played the game...
 * Among the other things missing from the game is a vampire brother boss (leading to a minor plot hole,) and the fact that the Soul Reaver was originally broken up into multiple elemental sabers. Only the fire-elemental sword made it past pre-production, giving it a kind of master sword effect.
 * There are also assets for the lava themed Dark Eden area, which would've been a Continuity Nod to the first game.
 * Hacking the game has revealed several unused elemental reavers, including a Spirit Reaver and Dark Reaver, and exploring the game's sound files has even revealed what the original, planned ending was to be: The only normally accessible remnants of this content are the cryptic visions in the Chronoplast, hinting at events to come. Notably, the Chronoplast visions are a dead giveaway that things were cut with the intent to be wrapped up later, if looked at with the benefit of hindsight; they don't exactly match the events when they happen. Ariel being absorbed by the Reaver is the most obvious, as Raziel is shown striking her with the wraith blade; in Defiance, he merely takes her hand. After the game was released, Naughty Dog admitted that they made a deliberate decision to scrap their planned ending, which they had time to finish, because they'd come to believe it wasn't in the spirit of the series. As they barely had time to plan out where to make the plot go, it's amazing that the predictions for the future they showed here came true at all.
 * YouTube user PikolUploader has found some interesting stuff by emulating Shadow of the Colossus on a PC: Some mountains referred to as "the beta mountains", a duplicate bridge that lies beyond the edge of the Forbidden Lands, and a few other things. And apparently there is a duplicate Shrine of Worship, which is actually used in-game as the setting for the final cutscene. If the game is played on an emulator with the right graphical tricks enabled, the player can actually see the original Shrine in the distance, while the cutscene takes place in the duplicate. This is probably due to a shortcut in the graphics engine: Since the Shrine is so tall, and thus visible from large distances, the game always renders it. During normal gameplay, the original is either occluded from view or hidden by lighting effects.
 * Pikol's Big Secret revealed an area which apparently included a dam, bridge, and what looks like tracks of some sort (reminiscent of a short sequence in Ico). One really has to wonder what the area was going to be used for.
 * Although apparently not left in the code, there are two Colossi seen in early screenshots not in the final game: a phoenix and a dragon.
 * Landstalker had a bath scene that the censors felt was a bit too naughty for the American release. Rather than delete it they just blocked of the room it takes place in by putting an NPC in front of it. It was fully translated, even in PAL releases.
 * Cave Story has an item called the Beast Fang, which can be made to appear in Yamashita Farm using a game editor. It seems to have no use—but then again, so do a number of the other items that do appear in normal gameplay. Pixel the Cat, the developer's avatar, is hidden in an inaccessible part of the Outer Wall, with a message for those who debugged the game when it was unfinished.
 * Blood Omen contains a pirate ship that can only be accessed if the walk through walls cheat is in use. It was discovered by a few Russian fans 14 years after the release of Blood Omen.
 * Kameo: Elements of Power curiously has a very large amount of concept art and, more importantly, alpha cutscenes depicting a substantial amount of game mechanics that never made it to the final product, including what appears to be a garden for the baby versions of the Elemental Warriors, multiple situations depicted in the cutscenes that don't happen in the final game, small dragon sidekicks for Kameo and her sister, and several locations not found in the final product. All of this cut content is understandable considering Kameo's lengthy development cycle as well as its final rushed schedule to get Kameo into the launch window of the Xbox 360.
 * Reportedly, the original build of LA Noire was so large that the developers had to cut out two whole department desks and several cases from the ones that they did leave in just to fit the core story onto three game disks. However, most of this cut content is apparently being released as DLC.
 * Which meant that it would have been seven discs on Xbox 360, and two discs on PlayStation 3.
 * To be fair, the Motion Scan technology used for the faces saves 30 models per second, like a 3D form of video. A ten-second facial animation file takes up about 50MB of space uncompressed.

Action Games

 * In the first Little Big Adventure game, there is a large stationary bipedal robot standing in a garage on Citadel Island. According to the developers, it was supposed to be active, but was cut out of the game.
 * Playing Zombies Ate My Neighbors on an emulator, you can remove the background to reveal that the hidden-behind-the-scenes and super-rare Flamethrower is in fact a can of green paint. No one knows what the paint item was originally to be used for.

Adventure Games

 * Quest for Glory V has several bits of dummied-out content:
 * Multiplayer capability. It was enabled for one of the "sneak peek" demo versions of the game, but because of the disbanding of Yosemite Entertainment, never released for the finished project.
 * Bows. Some of the NPCs (notably Elsa von Spielburg) use bows, but the player cannot. Arrows can be found on dead enemies, but they are only able to be sold. There's a mod around that enables the player to use a bow, albeit with animations missing.
 * There are references in dialogue to the large lake at the center of Marete, but you cannot actually access it in-game. Presumably it was a sidequest that was scrapped because of a lack of time and money.
 * Initial plans for the Haven portion of Myst IV Revelation included a puzzle with animal tracks, noises and food preferences, but it fell through due to time and budget constraints. Some of the clues for this vanished puzzle are still to be found within the game, but aren't any use, aside from confirming that Achenar's got sloppy handwriting.
 * Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis has several items and locations that are either largely modified from the versions shown in packaging and screenshots or inaccessible but still present in the game files, which can be seen here.
 * In Riven, there used to be a book press on one of the islands. However, it was Dummied Out of the final cut of the game because the developers had no time to implement it before the holidays. If you snoop around in the game's files, you can find movie files of this press moving up and down (presumably when clicked upon), and there's actually still one screen in the game where you can still see the very top of the press (the editors didn't even notice it, so it never got Dummied Out of that screen), but it's barely noticeable unless you're specifically looking for it.
 * The Secret of Monkey Island features a parody of this with the now-legendary "stump joke", where the player character can find a stump in the woods with a hole underneath it that will lead into what he describes as "a tunnel that leads onto a system of catacombs". It's impossible to enter, though, because the game will ask for several disks (with absurdly high disk numbers) that didn't ship with the game, and the player character just gives up and assumes he can't get to that part of the game. Many players didn't get the joke, though, and called Lucas Arts about their missing disks, so they eventually removed it in the Amiga and CD versions of the game, making the stump joke a gag about Dummied Out content that in itself became Dummied Out. References to the stump joke can still be found in other games, such as Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (where you can call Lucas Arts' hint line and ask about the stump), The Curse of Monkey Island (where you finally get to see the other side of the stump) Grim Fandango and Psychonauts.
 * The Secret of Monkey Island also originally featured a closeup of Spiffy, the dog that Guybrush can talk to in the SCUMM Bar. It was cut to save disk space, but ended up on the back of the game box, confusing the heck out of many players. In 2009, the Updated Rerelease actually created a brand-new closeup of Spiffy for the enhanced-graphics mode.
 * The Humongous Entertainment Adventure Games had some Dummied Out content that could be accessed in several ways. These included some unused music, unused cut scenes, and unused in-house Level Editors the developers would use in the arcade styled spinoffs. Some of the cut scenes, however, you'd have to wonder why the heck they even exist. One of the unused Freddi Fish cut scenes had Luther being violently eaten by a Psycho Electric Eel.
 * In Lucas Arts' Loom, an early screenshot showed a room in the Glassmakers' City with three giant sandglasses, two of which had run out and were sealed up; the last one was open at the top and a worker was pouring sand into it to keep it running. The three sandglasses of course represent . The room was ultimately cut to save disk space. The sandglasses can still be glimpsed in the 16-color version, in the wide shot of the city (though they were painted out in the VGA upgrade).
 * The existence of a puzzle can be deduced:
 * Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge also had some content removed before release. For instance, after Guybrush blows up LeChuck's fortress, he and Wally were going to land on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Wally loses his monocle and falls into the sea. The scene was cut because even in a game chock-full of sociopathically cruel yet absurdly hilarious puzzle solutions, this was felt to be beyond the pale. The background which was to feature the raft was entirely redrawn and reused for another scene, but the game files still refer to it as the "raft" room.
 * Also of note are several rooms cut from LeChuck's Fortress, which presumably contained extra puzzles, including a voodoo shrine/potions laboratory, closeups of the desk and throne in LeChuck's office, and a closeup shot of Zombie LeChuck in all his g(l)ory. There was also a much more elaborate alternate version of the underground tunnels beneath Phatt Island. The filenames of these unused rooms were embedded in a pre-release demo of MI2, but their art assets were not revealed until the 2010 Updated Rerelease included some of this cut material in its concept art gallery.

Beat Em Ups

 * Streets of Rage:
 * Both the NTSC and PAL versions of Streets of Rage III had a cut-out motorcycle level only accessbile through an exploit that looks completely wrong with the sprites and where getting hit is impossible. The American and European versions of the game are also missing Ash, a tall Macho Camp boss/secret playable character, who in the original Streets of Rage required a Game Genie and the right code to get.
 * Streets of Rage Remake, a great fan game based on the series, restores these elements. Ash is alternate boss of one stage.
 * SoR3 also has some removed areas such as a basement, two extra trap rooms, and a visible exit to the rooftop where you fight Jet.
 * Super Double Dragon, being an Obvious Beta, has quite a bit of dummy content, as shown here.
 * The Punisher arcade game contains an entire half-finished level which takes place inside a passenger plane. It is possible to access and play it via an emulator.

Driving Games

 * The international versions of Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune and its sequel have the Porsche Gemballa cars rendered inaccesible due to licensing issues. However, some players were able to hack Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 2 machines to make those cars accessible. And, thanks to the ability to make backups of cards, and the "discarded card" system (in which a card that has had all 60 of its plays used up can be used to create two partially-tuned clones of it), Gemballa cards spread to WMMT 2 players around the world; all you needed to do to be able to use a Gemballa was to find a player who was willing to sell or give away a used-up Gemballa card to you. However, in the international version of WMMT 3, all data pertaining to Gemballa cars was removed, so attempting to transfer a Gemballa card to WMMT 3 would simply give you an error message and eject your card back out.
 * Gran Turismo 2 was planned to have a drag racing mode, but it was removed late in development, making One Hundred Percent Completion impossible. Some of the drag cars were left in the game, though. The Eiger rally courses were also cut, although reinstated as Eiger Nordwand in GT 5. GT 3 also had the Lamborghini Diablo GT, which was rendered inaccessable (outside of cheats) in non-Japanese versions, due to licensing conflicts.
 * Driver has the dummmied-out city of Newcastle (where Reflections is based in real life), which the protagonist is shown driving through during the ending credits. In the PC version, it can be accessed by hacking.
 * The PS 1 game Formula 1 97 had Jacques Villeneuve replaced by "Driverone Williams" due to licencing issues which existed at the time. However, Murray Walker's commentary referring to Villeneuve by name remains on the disc (and can sometimes be heard when the game crashes whilst a piece of commentary is playing). Lines referring to the ill-fated Mastercard Lola team and its drivers Vincenzo Sospriri and the hopeless Riccardo Rosset also remain. The arcade commentator also has many many lines that are never heard in the game.
 * Diddy Kong Racing has a number of surprising elements buried in its data, including a logo from the game's pre-release life as "RC Pro-Am 64." Hacking also revealed an unused level called Horseshoe Gulch, which doesn't seem to fit anywhere in the game (except possibly Dino Domain), and is obviously far from finished - all characters (including Wizpig) appear, and drive aimlessly; a stone arch is completely untextured; and progress in the level is prevented by a dead end.
 * Mario Kart DS had a dummied out version of Double Dash!!s Mario Circuit track, likely scrapped because of the limited amount of retro tracks that could be used without there being too many tracks (with the game having a limit of four tracks for each previous game). Its graphics are blank and untextured, so everything lacks the proper color, and bizarrely, even though the music that the track should have plays in DSs versions of the Luigi Circuit and Yoshi Circuit tracks from the same game, the title screen music plays if the track is accessed with a cheating device.

Edutainment Games

 * The Windows/Macintosh version of The Oregon Trail has an entire version of its soundtrack Dummied Out. It is possible, by changing the file extensions on the sound files, to listen to the Dummied Out versions. In most cases, the versions that were actually used are better—but not always.
 * In Sonics Schoolhouse, you can find video clips of a anthropomorphized clock who says the same things Sonic does. This may imply this game was a Dolled-Up Installment.

Fighting Games

 * Snooping around the insides of Super Smash Bros.. Melee revealed a few stages that didn't make it to the final game, including Ice Top (presumably another Ice Climber level) and Akaneia (which Fire Emblem fans should recognize). Neither are still in the game—loading Ice Top sends you to Icicle Mountain without music, and loading Akaneia causes the game to crash.
 * Additionally, poking around the insides of Super Smash Bros.. Brawl has shown the names, at least, of seven removed characters: Mewtwo, Dr. Mario, Roy, Plusle & Minun, Dixie Kong, Toon Zelda, and Toon Sheik. Evidence suggests that none of them got particularly far into development outside of Mewtwo, who still has data referencing a Classic Mode portrait as well as a victory theme.
 * Additionally additionally, there's also listings for several songs such as Falco's theme from Star Fox Command and, intriguingly, "Beware the Forest Mushrooms" from Super Mario RPG, the latter of which was probably removed due to copyright issues with Square Enix. Again, however, you can't seem to access them.
 * Additionally times three, there are some trophies that have been dummied out of Brawl, but are still accessible through hacks. These include Donkey Kong Jr., Dread Kong, and alternate character trophies for many of the playable characters.
 * The code of the original Super Smash Bros. yielded two beta versions of Kirby's stage, Dream Land. The first is basically a simpler version of the stage, while the second is... something else. (Fun, though.) Fairly be ye warned, however: Gameshark and Super Smash Bros.' single-player mode do not get along so well.
 * One poking around Melee's Debug Menu can find Captain Falcon's "Come on! BLUE FALCON!" voice clip, which would only be used in Brawl seven years later. This confirms the claim that Final Smashes were intended to be implemented before Brawl.
 * Word of God confirms they were planned since the first game, but time and memory constraints caused the development team to ax them in the first two games.
 * Indeed, there's a similar clip of Ness saying "PK Star Storm!" in the original.
 * This terrifying thing is seen in the background in the single-player mode of Brawl. It can't be fought, and it's the only one in the game. It was likely intended to be a reccuring enemy of some sort, but was removed during development. However, there's a rare trophy that, while describing the thing as an enemy, makes reference to the captured specimen being the only known one.
 * Many King of Fighters games have a lot of dummied out attacks for various characters, with some of them making their way to the sequels while others are forgotten about. They can be viewed with the help of a debug romset and it's easy to see why some of them were never put into any of the games (like for example the previous Big Bad Wolfgang Krauser, an extremely muscular man, doing a strange-looking cartwheel and then landing goofily on his belly), though some are sorely missed (Like the prototype Mu Shiki for Kyo and Deadly Rave for Geese.). Someone made a hacked version of the game and included those moves, you can see roughly what they'd look like in the game in their current form here.
 * Data has been found on the King of Fighters XII disk showing placeholders for pre-planned characters that for some reason couldn't make the cut; among them was Hwa Jai. The likely reason is characters being too incomplete to include (evidenced by the console exclusive characters Mature and Elisabeth, both of which have nigh-on useless movesets). XIII makes many of these characters a reality (Takuma Sakazaki, Vice, Mai, "Dark Ash" who turned out to be Saiki in Ash's body, and yes, Hwa Jai). The only characters whose files appeared on the XII disc and did not appear in the game are '98 Iori (who still had flame powers) and Billy Kane.
 * And now Billy is confirmed for the console release. One more remains...
 * It is done. A version of Iori with purple flames is now in the console version of XIII, meaning absolutely everyone who was Dummied Out of XII has been made into complete characters for the sequel.
 * The home ports of Mortal Kombat 4 had Kitana, who was scrapped from the final version, possibly in favor of Tanya. She was rather incomplete, having only a couple special moves and no fatalities, but she's fully playable in the N64 version. Also in the same game, there's a stage referred to as SKULL which can be accessed with a Game Shark code.
 * Ditto for Noob Saibot, who was dummied-out in favor of Reiko, but can still be accessed via cheat codes. Like Kitana, he has limited special moves and no fatalities of his own.
 * A final cahracter named Belokk was intended for the game, but was leaked before the team was ready, and was subsequently pulled. The only evidence of his existence, beyond the leaked photos, is a mysterious question mark that appears when you try to use the code to unlock Noob Saibot in the game over Tanya's picture, which doesn't do anything but was supposed to be where Belokk was.
 * In the arcade version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Rain was seen during attract mode, but completely inaccessable in-game. He was originally to be a joke (his name is "Rain" and his suit is purple), but was fully implemented in the console versions and Mortal Kombat Trilogy.
 * Hacking into Mortal Kombat Armageddon will pull up a list of inaccessible parts for Kreate-A-Kharacter, including options for staff and two-handed weapon styles.
 * Jump Ultimate Stars for DS has a number of dummied out characters that are actually accessible and (for the most part) fully playable with the use of cheats. This includes being able to play as the Komaman (training dummy), several incomplete (lack of sound effects, no Koma graphic) Support Koma like Sasuke and Freeza and the Game Breaker known as the Black Koma which grants Infinite SP to a player; obviously, that last one is abused by griefers online.
 * Naruto Clash of Ninja Revolution has several unused sounds in its Sound Test. For example, there are sounds that imply that Lee originally went beyond two gates, Kisame calling out his Shark Skin, and another that implies that Gaara was intended to go Shukaku. The developers say that they left them in as Easter Eggs for the fans to discover. At least one, Itachi's "Mangekyo Sharingan!" was used in Clash of Ninja Revolution 2.
 * Players who checked the files for Dragon Ball Z Budokai 3 discovered a few things: announcer sound files that suggest that Android 19, Zarbon, and Dodoria (who appeared in the first Budokai but were absent from the rest) were to return, and perhaps most notably, a card and various sound clips indicating Bulma was to be a playable character. She even has a complete character model that appears in the game's training mode. As well, a bonus video included with the limited edition of the game shows Tiffany Vollmer (Bulma's voice actress) in the studio recording shouts for Bulma. Unfortunately, by normal means, she's not in the game. Using Action Replay codes on the Japanese version managed to yield her as an alternate costume for Videl, which is about as close to a playable Bulma as you can get.
 * The first Budokai, meanwhile, has dialogue recordings suggesting that Cui, Saibaman and Cell Jr. were planned. Though Cell Jr. and Saibaman showed up in Budokai 3 (but were extremely difficult to unlock), Cui didn't make the cut in any of the Budokais.
 * Sonic the Fighters had Honey the Cat, who was modeled after Honey in Fighting Vipers. Her data can be accesses by hacking the arcade version, but is almost completely gone from the version in Sonic Gems Collection.
 * Furthermore, there also exists an unused Eggman form. All that is left is a pair of treads.
 * Karin Kazuki, Sakura's rival from her Sakura Ganbaru! spinoff manga, was supposed to make her fighting game debut in Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, much in the same way Shadaloo Cammy made hers in X-Men vs. Street Fighter. The sprites for Karin's fighting stance were already programmed into the game, although unlike the ones they actually used in Street Fighter Alpha 3, the Prototype Karin was simply a head-swap of Sakura with boots instead of sneakers, different gloves, and bicycle shorts instead of bloomers under her skirt.
 * Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was originally intended to have 2 extra characters, Frank West and Dr Octopus, in the game. Frank was removed due to supposed "RAM issues" whilst the reason for Dr Octopus' disclusion is unknown. Hacking the game revealed their names as part of the character data, but nothing, no models, no voiceclips, no attacks, nothing was shown of them. Frank was bought back in Ultimate Marvel VS. Capcom 3, but Dr Octopus was discluded again.
 * On another note, a Gamespot member hacked Ultimate Marvel VS. Capcom 3 and found a theme for an unused Okami stage, which was supposedly cut out due to not gelling with the games art style.
 * This happened to Bernkastel in Ougon Musou Kyoku, Umineko no Naku Koro ni's fighting game. Thanks to a glitch it is possible to see her portrait in the character selection screen, but choosing it makes the player fight as Battler. A standing sprite with no animation can also be found in the game data, as well as character data that suggest the possible appearance of Ryugu Rena in the game roster. Bernkastel is now avaiable via download, but everything indicates that Rena was dummied out for real.

First-Person Shooter
"Sgt. Newcastle: (before Soap blows up a broken-down car with C4) It seems my ex-wife was kind enough to donate her car to further your education, Soap. Mac: (while running the obstacle course) You crawl like old people screw! I've seen Sandhurst commandos move faster than you lot!"
 * There are some files for British weapons and a British campaign in World At War, but it was cut out from the game.
 * Perfect Dark has several:
 * You'll find a slice of Swiss cheese in every level. Collecting every piece would have gotten you something.
 * There's also "Perfect Head" mode, which would've allowed you to put your own face on a custom head for single player guards or multiplayer using the Game Boy Camera. It was taken out not for any technological reasons, but because the developers realized it would only lead to the same thing any user-generated visuals system leads to.
 * References to other missing game modes and items litter the code, including multiplayer options to have destroyable doors and even walls (it's unclear how this was supposed to work), a missing mode called "Touch The Crate," and an extra singleplayer mission called "Retaking The Institute."
 * Golden Eye 1997 may be one of the single largest cases of this trope in action, as it had a boatload of content rendered inaccessible before the game came out:
 * The Byelomorye Dam mission had roughly half of its original objectives scrapped during development, as the designers believed it would have been too difficult for a first level. The most notable of these objectives was "Tower 1", a remote island with a mounted wall-gun from the later levels that you can still see a far distance away from the dam overpass. Originally, Bond would have had to take a boat out to the island, blow up a machine and possibly retrieve bungee jumping equipment needed to leap off the dam (it's also speculated that it may have been in the building with the commandant). The player would have had to get explosives to destroy the gun from the ultimately rather useless checkpoint with the satellite dish, halfway through the level. Bond also would have had to destroy the truck halfway through the dam mission; when it stops at a depot, you were supposed to plant explosives on it.
 * The pointless platforms with ladders in the Surface levels were originally supposed to be used by snipers. This was never implemented because the Goldeneye AI can't fire over railings, so they could only attack if the player actually climbed the ladder.
 * The game was originally intended (in the first few months of its development) to be an on-rails shooter, in the style of Virtua Cop, but this was changed. The Silo level also would have been an on-rails shooter where you would take out enemies from different platforms; Frigate seems to have been designed with this in mind too.
 * Bond would have fought Xenia Onatopp in the "Frigate" stage, but she was deleted from the final game. Presumably, she was the "helicopter pilot" character who only appears in multiplayer. Instead, you fight her in the "Jungle" stage. She is still mentioned in the "Frigate" mission briefing, though, and the area where you plant the tracker on the helicopter is placed suspiciously next to a large, open area that could have doubled as a boss room, and has an unused spawn location for the helicopter pilot character.
 * You could also access a ton of new weapons and items using a Gameshark or Action Replay. Evidently, these items were part of expanded subplots that were deleted, but the items themselves remained in the game data. These included the gas keyring from The Living Daylights, a watch communicator (to talk to Q?), micro cameras and much more. Several weapons were also found to be embedded in the data.
 * Other weapons were intended to appear but have no level assigned to them; the Shotgun originally appeared in Archives but is only accessible via the All Weapons cheat, the Magnum was available without killing Natalya on Jungle, and the Taser appeared several times.
 * The infamous "Citadel" multiplayer test level, which Rare denied existed for years. Hackers cracked the game's code and found an incomplete stage, then built the necessary setup files for the level to work normally.
 * The "All Bonds" cheat, which would have unlocked all the classic James Bond actors for multiplayer, but became Dummied Out when it became impossible to secure all the necessary licensing rights. The textures remain in the ROM, but the character models themselves were removed; Hackers have managed to create a partially-functional "All Bonds" mode by applying them to other models.
 * The "Line Mode" cheat is present and fully functional, but there's no longer any way to properly unlock it; there's a button-press cheat, but that doesn't permanently add it to the list. This would seem to indicate an entire missing level.
 * Tying in with the "missing level", it's long been rumored that there was an entire Casino level cut from the game (and replaced by the "Silo" flashback level). The evidence pointing to this includes the aforementioned missing cheat mode and the existence of several items that exist in the game code, including a gold bar, casino chips and a camera. Fans have speculated that the level would have consisted of Bond planting cameras at the casino and meet with Xenia.
 * Dam, Cradle and Statue were also originally set up as 2-3 player multiplayer levels (complete with player starts and weapon spawn locations), but they can't be accessed without a cheat device. This is why Cradle has three walkways, while the real antenna only has one. The beta version also included a multiplayer version of Frigate called "destroyer," which helps to explain why the La Fayette in game appears to be an American Kidd-class destroyer. Cradle eventually became a playable multiplayer level in Goldeneye Source, a mod for Halflife 2.
 * Ten old ZX Spectrum games from back when Rare was Ultimate Play The Game could be played in an emulator. This was apparently never intended to be on the actual release, but it was merely rendered inaccessible.
 * Half-Life:
 * There were a number of enemies that were modeled, textured and coded before being cut in both Half-Life and Half-Life 2. One such monster, Mr. Friendly, was cut from the original Half-Life because his attacks would include pounding the ground to knock the player's weapon out of his hand, knocking his glasses off and raping the player to death.
 * Another monster cut from Half-Life 2 was the Hydra, which was cut because although it looked cool, it was no fun to fight since as the developer put it "You'd just see this blue blob doing something vague, then you're dead". There were also some coding issues, since it would impale whoever it attacked.
 * No screenshot on either of the original Half-Life or Half-Life 2 boxes actually exists in the games.
 * In Halo, the Covenant Engineer was cut so late that the files were left on the discs. The cannonical novels which make up Halos expanded universe include them though, and they are in Halo 3: ODST.The only reason they were cut was that the developers felt the tech couldn't convey them well enough for an emotional impact.
 * Same goes for the Flood Juggernaut in Halo 2. The files are still on the disc, so with some modding you can put them in the game and fight them.
 * There was a planned monster called the Drinol that didn't make it past the concept stage. It was supposed to be a Shout-Out to the Hulks from Marathon. The Flood Tank form in 3 is similar, though.
 * Halo has multiple examples.
 * Halo 3 had the deleted "Guardian Forest" level, part of which was made into the MP map Guardian, another part of which was merged with The Covenant.
 * Previews of Halo 2 showed black Spec-Ops Elites (supposedly a higher rank) like the first game, but in the final game, all Speccies have indigo/violet armor.
 * The flamethrower that was a "new feature" in the PC/Mac port of Halo was almost finished and is usable on the two levels Library and Keys in the Xbox version, with the use of a trainer with the spawn all weapons in game key. The weapon model is essentially the same as the one of Halo PC/Mac (just has a different ammo counter), it doesn't do any damage (except melee attacks with it) and there are no biped movement animations well holding it other then standing straight as if at attention with the weapon at your side pointed at the ground.
 * The three Marathon games have a few pieces of old data in them, including:
 * Old level names (or at least parts of old level names)
 * In Infinity a level had a double dummy, with a missing terminal and a hint that the text left in the resources was not the intended text for the terminal (a couple members of the dev team later gave us the real text)
 * The first game had a text string in a mission end terminal that, in the resources, was pure gibberish that included a character string (it was %r if you were wondering), that if the string is copied into another terminal, would display the same line (it's believed that this is a remnant of an attempt to make the first game have multiple endings or paths).
 * The level "Fatum Iustum Stultorum" has an inaccessable dummy room in the upper left corner, only visible in a map editor. Was this supposed to be the player's starting point?
 * A planned Wave Motion Gun and shotgun for the first game.
 * The Hound, a planned companion to the Hunter, which was featured in the manual and some screenshots, and the Armageddon Beast (a Nigh Invulnerable Juggernaut type monster, not to be confused with the actual game Juggernaut), which was pictured in the Marathon Scrapbook.
 * The level "Come and Take Your Medicine" has an extra destroyable circuit that does nothing, a door that can only be opened by enemies, and a large meaningless outdoor area, indicating that more stuff was planned for this level.
 * Left 4 Dead apparently was going to have zombie dogs in the game, but was cut. Proof of this is in the sound files in the PC version; there are sound effects for the dog still left in the game.
 * Lines spoken by the survivors are also cut out from the game but are still present in the folders for the files. For example, a survivor may ask another one for their first aid kit if they are hurting and don't have a kit to heal with. This is also present in the sequel, most noticeably with Rochelle, who has lines that flesh out her character more, but because she never says them, it makes her appear bland.
 * The beta version of the game was going to have Zoey show some romantic interest to Francis, but it was cut out due to play testers deeming it as too distracting. The files for the conversation are still present (example: Zoey tells Francis she knows how to cut hair. Francis in the beta version of the game had long hair). However, one beta dialogue still plays out in the game, but it makes no sense in context; If Louis is shot by Francis, Louis may yell "Go on! Do it again, fat man!" The beta version of Francis showed him with a beer belly while his final version does not have it.
 * Similarly in the sequel, there are unused lines by the survivors and some NPCs that indicate a part of the map the lines used was going to be more than what it appeared to be. One example is Whitaker having lines that suggest he was going to give the survivors covering fire as they got him some cola. However, he doesn't give any cover whatsoever.
 * A more well known example came from the chopper pilot in the No Mercy campaign. After saving the survivors, he would complain about feeling cold and then he would become sick and become a zombie. This was during a time in development when all the campaigns in Left 4 Dead were going to be connected, but since play testers felt frustrated that their rescue was a failure, Valve cut the lines, but they can still be heard in the game's files.
 * The demo version of Left 4 Dead 2 also had every weapon and item that wasn't supposed to be in the demo dummied out but could be spawned via console commands. The Grenade Launcher is a more obvious example since it lacked textures and there was no official model for the fired grenade (which showed ERROR instead). A patch disabled the ability to spawn these items until the retail version of the game was released.
 * There were also a few maps cut out of the final game, such as Survival versions of a few crescendo events. Various mods re-add these maps.
 * The sequel also made it possible to splash other survivor players with Bile Bombs (summons a horde of zombies on the target or area) and there's actually unused lines with the survivors getting angry that the thrower smeared them in bile. However, this ability was cut out due to the feature making it too frustrating. A console command in the PC version can be used to enable this feature if cheats are turned on.
 * Laser sights were going to be used in the first Left 4 Dead game but was oddly cut out in the final version (some modded servers re-enable this feature). The sequel made the laser sights a complete feature.
 * Early on in the development for Left 4 Dead 2, survivors were able to find ammo packs, which they could deploy and the whole team could get ammo. This was cut out due to most people finding the idea useless. The console command to give the ammo pack still exists, but it does nothing. The texture for the ammo pack is also still present in the game's files, which was just a reskin of the health kit.
 * In The Parish campaign, the first two maps were going to be a large single map until Valve decided to split the area into two joined maps. The beta version of the single large map can be played by loading it from a console command. Aside from no sky textures and some model errors, the CEDA trailer by the bus station had a different design and would spray something on the survivors when they entered it. There was also a heavy machine gun near the switch to shut the alarm off, which is not present in the final version of this area.
 * Thanks to being rushed out the door to meet its release date, Jurassic Park: Trespasser had a host of dummied out features. A beta version of the game showed what was deleted from the final version:
 * For starters, the developers originally created a wide range of possible emotions for the dinosaurs in the game, so that they could react accordingly with what was going on in the world. In practice, though, this caused the dinosaurs to stay paralyzed in place because they couldn't decide between moods, so they were permanently set to maximum hostility as a quick fix.
 * The game was originally supposed to run at a much higher framerate than what it eventually ended up being. The sheer number of textures in the game (as well as conflicts with the game engine) forced the designers to severely scale back the framerate between the beta and final version.
 * Early on in development, it was proposed that the game would have a third-person perspective instead of a first-person one, and it's still possible to enable the third person view with cheats. In practice, however, this not only makes it even more difficult to aim your weapon and grab items, but it also reveals that the player character's model is just a floating pair of breasts and one arm - which is all you'd see in first person anyway.
 * The physics system in the game caused a bug with the game's melee weapons. Simply walking around while having a melee weapon unequipped would cause said weapon to knock into the player and deal damage (because it Sticks to the Back). The developers worked around this by removing mass from all the melee weapons, which also made them useless in combat - except for one, which is Nedry's mace.
 * The "Pine Valley" level, which was deleted from the final game (but, inexplicably, is the level you play through in the demo for the game). Pine Valley was supposed to take place between the worker town and docks levels (explaining why the terrain of the two levels is so different and the starting point of the latter looks nothing like the ending point of the former). It was going to feature Site B's geothermal powerplant, but the the dinosaur AI didn't work properly in interior spaces (they kept getting stuck in walls) and the physics engine couldn't handle the mechanical puzzles the level was supposed to contain, so the level was unceremoniously cut.
 * Call of Duty: Modern Warfare had several levels that were scrapped late in production, but can still be viewed by accessing the PC version's mod tools to view the remnants. Most of the scrapped content centered around the American campaign, with at least three more missions focusing on different protagonists fighting in Riyad'h (including a Cobra helicopter pilot and a Marine). The most notable dummied content, though, was a segment of the opening training mission that involved Soap running through an obstacle course and practicing his weapon proficiency, all while being verbally berated by two drill instructors. There's even a mod that allows you to play the cut content!


 * Also cut out was a series of very strange lines from Captain MacMillan, presumably meant to be spoken during the Pripyat missions. They're hilarious, but it's hard to imagine under what circumstances he would have said them.
 * Call of Duty 4's Variety map pack was to include maps called "Favela" and "Invasion"; both were cut from the pack, but they were eventually included in Modern Warfare 2.
 * Modern Warfare 2 also had several levels cut. One of these involved you following  into the sub at the end of "Contingency" and was presumably cut to make the part where   more surprising. There was also a mission where you rode a motorcycle (which would probably be similar to the snowmobile part), and one where you fought Russians on the ISS (which IW cut for being too out-there, making it just a cutscene ).
 * It's worth noting that Call of Duty Black Ops included a motorcycle section at the end of the mission "Vorkuta" that plays similarly to the snowmobile section in Modern Warfare 2, suggesting that they reused the data.
 * Team Fortress 2 has many lines and content features that end up unused. There is a list here of unused content found in the data files.
 * How much of that content was planned to be used and how much of it was there as a Red Herring for people who look specifically through files for dummied out content, will only be known to the TF2 developers. However, the "medic follow" lines were put into use since the Engineer Update (July 8, 2010).
 * One feature was the "Melee Dare" lines where if you took out your melee weapon with another player nearby, they'd say a line daring you to a melee duel. This was cut for an unknown reason, but some servers enable it as a mod. The lines were later scripted in (among other lines) when a player aims at an enemy with a melee weapon and chooses the "Battle Cry" speech.
 * This was later implemented back in with some classes through the duel minigame; upon challenging another player, one of several responses (a few of which are melee dare sounds) will play.
 * Source Filmmaker was on the original Team Fortress 2 demo—since its discovery, amateur filmmakers everywhere have used it to make videos. A version of Source Filmmaker was officially added later to meet player demands via the Replay Update.
 * Jedi Knight II: Jedi Academy's multiplayer option allows for a player to use RGB colour customization on a small array of player skins in the Player Customize menu where one can change their name, lightsaber, etc. However, this RGB option can be applied to some player skins that aren't in the Customize menu, which can quite easily be done by opening the Command Window. Doing this results in much fascination amongst newbs, and is mostly done by highly interesting and dominant figures of authority and internet heirachy who like to feel unique amongst thousands and thousands of Kyle Katarns.
 * Jedi Academy also completely missed some player models from the Player Customize menu, although the models themselves are completely playable. The models include the RGB compatible non-customizable skins, as well as the Jawa model, which, because of the problematic AI, has developed a cult following where a Jawa will bop up and down into and out of a crouch. This has been called the "Jawa Dance."
 * One of the multiplayer levels on Taspir has towers with elevators that constantly go up and down. One of these towers has an elevator that doesn't go to the final floor, as it was never finished for some reason.
 * Also note that, similar to Half-Life above, it is usually impossible to replicate official screenshots of the game without cheating - they typically show the player character using two lightsabers or a double-bladed lightsaber in levels that come before you have that option.
 * Then again, this may be a result of double dummying-out; the code exists in the game (and can be activated through the console) for Jaden to pick up the lightsabers of defeated Reborn, which means you could have potentially been able to dual wield as early as the tutorial level (of course, unless you used the console further that second one would invariably be red).
 * Unreal features a number of creatures that were never used in the game or are incomplete, a non-functioning weapon's file and a level named "Gateway" representing a huge empty space station with no item, no monster and non-functioning stargate-like teleporters made of water. It has a number of cool features and can be accessed through the level editor.
 * Unreal Tournament, having all of its spiritual predecessor's data (sans maps and music) even has several items, (such as a silencer and the nali fruits and seeds to restore health) models, textures, codes and sounds which weren't used in the final game nor in the console ports or the official free bonus packs. Being a moddable game, there are several maps which incorporate such things.
 * Unreal Tournament 2004 has the "Vehicle CTF" mode, which is, obviously, Capture the Flag with vehicles. There are no official maps of this gametype, however, so until you download a custom one the mode isn't even listed in the Instant Action menu.
 * Quake II has a fully-working Power Screen, which worked the same as the Power Shield, but only in one direction. It wasn't included in any level, outside of third-party ones.
 * Quake III Arena has a Grappling Hook, similar to that of the past CTF incarnations, almost fully working. The Expansion Pack Team Arena even had a portal device. Had it been completed and polished, (the item was modelled, but the portals weren't visible in-game) it would have predated Narbacular Drop and Portal.
 * Quake is an interesting example: the very first release was the Beta version, Q Test, which was a three map multi-player only version of the game with slightly different game mechanics from the finished product. Not long after Q Test was released on the internet, however, enterprising hackers discovered a way to access/spawn enemies from the game code inside the levels; giving players a sneak peak towards what would be available in the then upcoming single player shareware release. These early Dummied Out versions of the enemies include an Ogre who has got a nailgun instead of a grenade launcher, and a MASSIVE version of the leaping demon. The latter was in fact so big that it actually caused the Q Test to crash when it attacked you, which is presumably the reason why the ones in the finished Quake are so much (comparitively) smaller.
 * Quake III Arena has unused sound files for announcing a win by a Character named X-Ray.
 * Duke Nukem 3D has dozens of textures and sprites in the data files which are not used anywhere in the main game. User-made levels, however, are more than happy to make use of them.
 * The manual for Turok 2 describes a monster called a Hunter, but you don't see it anywhere in the game.
 * Descent II has an unused Evil Counterpart of the Guide Bot.
 * Strife had a number of unused resources buried in the .wad files, such as graphics for a gas grenade and some bits of voice acting.
 * The original Medal of Honor had several missions/levels scrapped due to time and/or processing constraints, including a radar train (possibly during or after the Railgun Greta mission), a jet aircraft facility (although the game still shows the jet fighter film clips), and Colditz Castle. The last one was resurrected as the Panzerknacker Unleashed bonus mission in Underground, and its music was used in Allied Assault.
 * Allied Assault also has an unused level that can be accessed through the console; it may have been intentionally left in as a Secret Level.

Four X

 * Spore was originally going to include a 'flora editor'. This can be accessed in the final version with some hacking, but it's very buggy.
 * In Civilization III: Conquests, there exists art and text files for an entire Austrian civilization. It was likely not put into the final game because, as the editor reveals, it's impossible to put more than 31 civilizations into the game at once.
 * Also, the Conquest minigames sometimes leave out the railroads due to time frame; these are kept from appearing anyway by making the coal needed to build them depend on an inaccessible tech (confusingly labeled "Invisible Railroads").
 * Civilization IV has a model for a non-religion-specific temple, presumably from before religions were added to the game. It also has a number of unused buttons such as SETI.

Freeware Games

 * Ending Zero in Garden Society Kykuit. It has been accessed post-release, but nobody quite knows how to do it - retracing the posted steps doesn't always work.

Hack and Slash

 * Half of the new monsters introduced in Hellfire (the expansion to Diablo) are just things that were dummied out in the original Diablo.
 * There are several items dummied out of Diablo II—some apparently complete, but with the flag that allows enemies to drop them disabled.
 * Diablo III has the Mystic Artisan. She was supposed to be an NPC who could infuse items with targeted enchantments, but was removed late in development. Her model, voice work, and place in the story still exists as the NPC Karyna you rescue from the Spider Queen, with the only difference being she doesn't follow you after.
 * Ninja Gaiden 2 NES has the unused song "Inevitable".

Maze Games

 * The PC version of Atomic Bomberman came with modding tools, so it was pretty easy to find stuff that was Dummied Out. The strangest bits, though, were unused vocal taunts that contained strong profanity and yet got past the radar. (The game is rated E for Everyone.)

Miscellaneous Games

 * The Action 52 rom has several dummy sprites and other dummied-out code, indicating they may have originally intended to do 60 games.
 * Since the unfinished Cheetahmen II locks up at the end of Level 4, the only way to access the last two levels is by rom hacking or an occasional Good Bad Bug that starts you on those levels.
 * As shown on The Cutting Room Floor, Ooze has an eighth level that is only accessible by hacking and has different graphics from all the other levels. Since the game crashes on level 3 of most versions, you probably won't see the other four levels either outside of emulation or hacking.
 * This article details some things that have been dummied out of Sierra games.
 * Unlike many developers that use their Dummied Out content later, Spiderweb Software generally used it earlier. It has a tendency to cannibalize its old code and just dummy out anything that's no longer applicable, so dialogue from Exile remained in its code, albeit inaccessible, as late as Geneforge.
 * The Glider PRO CD house "Grand Prix" has an unfinished, unplayable set of rooms after the last star, whose stage name promises one more.
 * In Night Trap, although it is not viewed normally, there is a seventh Game Over scene, where Shelia Martin disconnects your controls after discovering the SCAT Team. This scene was never, ever added into the game, but can be viewed using a Sega CD Movie viewer on a Windows computer.

MMORPGs

 * World of Warcraft, due to its constantly updated nature, has bits and pieces filtered into the game each patch (so as to make expansions not too big to install). The end result is basically too many doors leading nowhere (both literal and figurative), until the newer patches catch up with the older patches, as it were.
 * The biggest of these mysteries was the legendary sword Ashbringer, which, despite being in the game files since forever, is still not currently in the game. Though Blizzard gave out hints about how to obtain it, they were just stalling until they came up for a real use for it in the next expansion... much to the dismay of people who spent literal days of played time trying to decipher the hidden meaning behind the herring. As of Wrath of the Lich King, those same players were badly disappointed to find out that the Ashbringer has been given to an NPC in a Death Knight only quest line. One of the more bizzare artifacts of this example was a quest item that dropped from a mob - but no quest associated wth it.
 * Poking around in the game's data files reveals some interesting things, though, that one can't see just by playing through the game. Things like "test player housing", or the baby cradles (which people saw in game in Burning Crusade but were in the game much earlier), or what is now the Albino Drake mount - the "albino" drake has actually been in the data files since launch but it has never, ever been actually utilized for anything until it was turned into a mount in Wrath of the Lich King. And unlike other dragonflights, there's never been a matching color for full-grown dragons, or whelps, or dragonspawn. What was it intended to be originally? Nobody knows. The albino drake appears in the original Wrath of the Lich King trailer as a proto-drake near older vrykul models.
 * Even more interesting are the extra maps, however - particularly an early version of what became Hellfire Peninsula that exists on the Eastern Kingdoms map-file (suggesting that the original plans for Outland were much, much less grandiose than what Burning Crusade became), or an Emerald Dream map which cannot be accessed on an official server and is very incomplete, but is still easily the size of Lordaeron (i.e. from the Thandol Span to the Eastern Plaguelands in "height", and easily as large in "width" as well). Presumably that too has been shelved for an expansion, despite significant work being finished for it.
 * A battlefield for Azshara was planned (Azshara Crater), but dropped during development. The map for the battleground still existed in the game's data, albeit with some incomplete and untextured buildings. The entrance flags for the battleground in Azshara still existed 4 years later. Of course, before Cataclysm, the entire Azshara zone was a mess of cut content and dead-end quests, so this example is par for the course. Azshara has since become a starting zone for Goblins in the Cataclysm expansion; the goblins have literally strip mined the entrances to the battleground, so it is unlikely that Azshara Crater will ever be implemented.
 * Most infamously was the complete Mount Hyjal zone in the center of the Kalimdor continent, that was (supposed to be) inaccessible and had no content for it. Enough people went to Hyjal using the now deleted (doubly so! curse you pillar humpers) method of wall walking that they added signs saying you're not supposed to be here, it's under construction, now go away. Basically, anyway. A past Mount Hyjal was used in The Burning Crusade as a raid instance. It has players assisting the combined forces of the humans, orcs and night elves during the Battle of Mount Hyjal in Warcraft III. This past version is an altered version of the northern half of the inaccessible version. Mount Hyjal of the present was finally opened up as a level 78-82 zone with the release of the third expansion, Cataclysm. Again, an even more heavily altered version of the original inaccessible one.
 * There also exists a zone called Old Ironforge, basically a remaining section of the beta version of Ironforge which was replaced by its current, much larger form later on. It was possible early on to enter this area by dying in the nearby forge and going through the door blocking the way as a ghost. Blizzard later made the door solid even for ghosts. However, as of patch 4.1.0 it is accessible and populated with NPCs.
 * Another odd example is Blackchar Cave in the Burning Steppes; the area has a seperate subzone name, but no content or quests related to it.
 * A more recent example with the achievement system: There is an achievement to cook every food added in Wrath, but several of those recipes were removed before retail due to a change in design philosophy. However, Blizzard has announced that some of these will be added in another form soon while others will be cut for good. A similar change is presumably responsible for several jewelcrafting gemcuts not having a Wrath equivalent yet.
 * At launch, there were plans for two mounts to be available by quests: one in Winterspring for the Alliance, and one in Un'Goro for the Horde. The Winterspring trainer was added at launch, but the Raptor trainer in Un'Goro was added without quests, and then removed years later. Years after that he was finally added back with his quests in a content patch in Summer 2009. The Horde quest chain is significantly different, and easier, that the Alliance version. Take that as either an "I'm sorry" from Blizzard or a look at how the game has changed since launch, or both.
 * Before the Cataclysm expansion, Stormwind City had two instance portals behind doors. One was presumably where player housing would go if they ended up ever doing that. The second led to a non-implemented dungeon (Stormwind Vault); the map for the dungeon was completed but it was never implemented and is inacessable. The second instance has been said to be a prison for Stormwind's more powerful convicts, such as mages and demons.
 * Karazhan was also planned for vanilla; there are several videos showing a pre-Burning Crusade design. Underneath the tower, there is also unopened dungeon (which you can get to in the live game), called 'Crypt'. It contains, among other things, a pile of bones (that fills an entire room), skeletons everywhere (even in the walls - every square foot of the hallway is basically made of body-filled cubby holes), and an underwater room full of chains with corpses hanging off them entitled "The Room of Upside Down Sinners". One can assume this dungeon was cut for rating reasons, despite the fact that the hanging corpse model is used extensively.
 * The Karazhan Crypt is being added in patch 4.3 as part of a legendary quest chain. Apparently its been taken over by a cult that worships the black dragon Nalice.
 * An untextured and unused, but still rather extensive, set of shell-themed structures and caves called the "Dragon Isles" can be found in the game files. An old piece of concept art shows what the main nautilus-like structure would have looked like textured. Blizzard has given no hints as to what these were for. There are not the same as the shell-creatures seen in Vashj'ir.
 * The Ruins of Kunark expansion for EverQuest was rushed, and shipped with a missing underwater dungeon called Veksar. Players could find the door to it (hidden in a lake), but trying to enter it would pause the game for several minutes and then kick you back out. It was later redesigned and released in a patch.
 * EverQuest also included models for each of the worshipable deities. Many were redesigned when the gods were eventually released in subsequent expansions.
 * When the MMORPG Runescape introduced the Grand Exchange, players could search by name for the item they wanted to buy. Players quickly discovered several dummied out items including the 'Thingie'. These were quietly removed within a few days of the Grand Exchange's release.
 * The same thing happened when QuickChat was released- the item database included items that didn't exist. Word of God says that some of these from both events were jokes put in the game by the Dev Team.
 * Ragnarok Online contains a number of dummied out elements, though most of them stem from a hacking incident after the KR version left beta. The damage from the hack forced a (rushed and somewhat mis-handled) total remake, and elements of the game still bear what would probably have been links to features that couldn't be implemented in the rush to restore the destroyed development files. For instance, signs exist of planned-but-abandoned housing and karma systems, cave entrances with no actual connections on some maps, and until more recently the location for the PvP arena (which in the end got a vastly simplified and smaller system in place of planned automated league system). As the game has come of age, many things that were planned in the initial version have finally begun to filter back in, such as the 3rd and Alternate-1st jobs, and these signs of dummying out are slowly getting filled in with replacement ideas or remakes of the original concepts. Bits of data have been mined from the client files for planned, possible, and abandoned content. .. Oh and the Casino mini-game was dummied out of the international release for legal reasons.

Platform Games
""Come now, as we explore a new dimension! It should have been two new dimensions, but we ran out of time...""
 * The Banjo-Kazooie titles had the legendary Stop 'n' Swap:
 * The end of Banjo-Kazooie featured footage of secret items hidden in the levels that would be used in Banjo-Tooie, with the ending promising said sequel would reveal how to get them. The plan was apparently to discover how to get the items in Tooie, go back to Kazooie to get them, then while the N64 is still on, take the cartridge out and put Tooie in, which would transfer them. This was supposed to take advantage of the fact that memory stayed in the N64's hardware for 60 seconds, but newer versions of the console cut this time down to 2 seconds, making the technique impossible and causing it to be scrapped. Instead, as a sort of consolation, you got the items in question by hunting down three Banjo-Kazooie cartridges in Tooie, cracking them open, and taking the items that fell out.
 * Curiously enough, the Banjo-Kazooie Stop 'n' Swap things actually are accessible in-game, albeit only through a series of very long "codes" in the beach level that were practically impossible to find without hacking the code, as someone finally did.
 * Banjo-Tooie also had Bottles' Revenge.
 * Since Microsoft owns Rare, the series developer, both BK games are put on Xbox Live Arcade. And, since both games are digital, Stop 'n' Swap actually saw the light of day. AND they're compatible with Nuts & Bolts to earn !
 * And to top it all off, now there's a Stop 'n' Swap II unlockable in Banjo-Tooie XBLA..
 * The Sonic the Hedgehog series has enough that it has its own wiki.
 * Sonic the Hedgehog
 * The original game had its fair share of removed work, most notably the enemy "Splats the rabbit", who never appeared without hacking, yet whose image got into the promotional artworks, and turned up in the comics and toy lines for it. There's also the checkered-ball obstacle, which had its graphics reused for Robotnik's wrecking-ball and was sort of brought back for use in the Sonic 2 prototypes.
 * Going into debug mode in the special stages in the first game, and teleporting yourself outside the maze can produce some interesting results. You will eventually run into random graphics of powerups that were never used in the final game, including a 'W' powerup, '1 zone', '2 zone', and '3 zone' powerups, and an extra life powerup, the latter of which is mentioned in the manual.
 * Sonic the Hedgehog 2
 * Two different prototypes of Sonic 2 have been found: the first one discovered, the so-called Simon Wai proto (named after the person who released the ROM to the Sonic community; he in turn found it on a Chinese ROM site) is a dump of a fairly late build that was stolen from a toy fair in New York in 1992. The second is the Nick Arcade proto (sometimes called the early proto, since it is from a fairly early development stage), which seems to match a build used on an episode of Nick Arcade (starring Melissa Joan Hart!)
 * Hidden Palace Zone's music can be found in the Sound Test in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and the level layout is also contained in the ROM. The sprites, however, aren't, which means that RAM hacking to access the level produces a very garbled screen. It also contains the palette for the further-deleted Wood Zone.
 * Hidden Palace Zone and Wood Zone are playable in the leaked Sonic 2 "Simon Wai" prototype, though many areas are inaccessible without the debug mode. The former is about two-thirds complete, and the latter consists only of random fragments.
 * The beta also had the blank Genocide City zone, a planned single act zone whose map became Metropolis Zone Act 3. The story goes that one of the (Japanese) designers wanted a word that sounded "dangerous" and overshot. Once they realized what it meant they quickly changed that name to Cyber City before turning it into Metropolis Act 3.
 * A promotional screenshot showing a "Desert Zone" baffled fans for years. In the "Simon Wai" prototype, there is a level select entry for "Dust Hill Zone," which in fact led to Mystic Cave Zone. This led many fans to assume the desert level had been named Dust Hill Zone and possibly worked on before being overwritten by Mystic Cave Zone. Much research has been done, but fans have yet to agree if it ever existed and what it was called, and the screenshot was not a screenshot but a mock-up. Supposedly, the zone would have also had a winter-themed level use most of its graphics later on, with the cacti replaced by Christmas trees.
 * Sonic The Hedgehog 3
 * Sonic 3 seemed to be full of this sort of thing - unreachable areas, half-implemented bosses, enemies which appeared in the manual but not in the game proper, etc. - until the Expansion Pack Sonic And Knuckles was released, and gamers were allowed to buy the second half of the game. There are still a few mysteries that appear in the Debug Mode, though, like a surfing Sonic and a giant cluster of red spheres which was probably used to test the Special Stage pseudo-3D graphics.
 * Surfing Sonic was meant for the intro, but was pretty obviously scrapped because someone on the dev team decided that Sonic going Super Mode to infiltrate the island would be more interesting.
 * This also works backwards: When playing Launch Base Zone (the final level of Sonic 3) in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the original end boss and ending sequence of Sonic 3 (including the original end credits music) are omitted in favor of carrying straight on to the first level of Sonic & Knuckles instead. It's still possible to fight this boss by playing Sonic 3 individually as Sonic or Tails, or by playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles as Knuckles.
 * There's a Gold Chaos Emerald Special Stage, which can only be accessed via Debug Mode and is extremely difficult. You could try it by using debug, but you'll lose unless you have no eyelids. Was this supposed to be the Master Emerald? No, that would just be silly.
 * Sonic Adventure 2
 * In Sky Rail Zone, one of the platforms near the end of the level has an invisible section on its right-hand side. It would appear that another path was originally present here, and rather than remove or even Dummy Out this path, Sega simply made it invisible, so that gamers were unlikely to stumble upon it and wouldn't be able to follow it very far if they did.
 * Several levels have distant components, such as alternate goal rings or tiny, almost invisible platforms, that the player can see in the extreme distance, but are impossible to reach without cheat devices.
 * And to further add more to the dummied-out bin there were the Knuckles and Amy chao. They were both exactly like the Tails chao in terms of immortality, that both look somewhat like their namesakes and so forth, except that unlike the Tails Chao, both the Knuckles and Amy chao had no trigger to unlock either of them (even so, the Tails Chao required Phantasy Star Online Ep I and II to unlock it and couldn't be done so in-game within Adventure) and because of this they had many rumors on how to unlock them among the debates on whether or not either exists. In truth they still exist and are fully functional, but both of them can only be unlocked by using Action Replay codes.
 * Well, reportedly they were available at an event, but where this event was held is currently unknown and nowadays hacking is the only way to get one.
 * Not to mention that Metal Sonic is the only character in this video whose victory screen after the fight doesn't glitch. Maybe SEGA planned him to fight the Biolizard at first.
 * Other
 * Knuckles Chaotix has at least one dummied out character, which the hacking community has dubbed Wechnia, and a number of items and level elements that weren't implemented in the final version of the game. This is because Chaotix was meant to be Sonic 4- I mean "Sonic Stadium", but somewhere along the lines developers and executives decided that the gameplay was too divergent from the previous games to keep with the idea. If you compare the sprites from the unreleased Sonic Stadium closely, it's clear that Mighty is a sprite-edited Sonic, and actually shares moves and gameplay properties (he is the fastest character in the game, and in most games made after this one Sonic can wall jump,) and "Wechnia" is Tails (he had the right palette in a rather early beta of the game, and in an even earlier version, he and Sonic both have character portraits). Tails was probably removed from the game because having two flying characters would be redundant and overly game-breaking. The dummied-out concept of a hub world made its way back into several later games, such as Sonic Battle. In addition more traditional Sonic level aspects such as loop de loop platforms are found in prototype versions (albeit working improperly), but are absent in the final product (likely due to programming issues).
 * An early version of the level music "Sunset Park 3" can be found inside the Sound Test of Sonic Chaos. It was not used in that game, but was brought back for Triple Trouble.
 * In the Game Gear version of Sonic 2, the Sprint Shoes are clearly marked inside the manual, and yet they never appear in the game. The powerup only makes a single appearance in the Master System version of the same game, and is replaced with a box of rings in the Game Gear release. Furthermore, it was probably once intended that Tails be playable in this version of Sonic 2, as careful searching reveals that Tails has extraordinarily detailed sprites for a non-playable appearance, even including his Idle Animation.
 * In Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, the "Super Sonic" gem is partially in the final game, and the hacking community have found an actual transformation sequence for Sonic during gameplay. However, coding to actually allow one to play as Super Sonic isn't present.
 * In a similar vein, Super Sonic was also originally intended to be playable outside of the Last Story in Sonic Adventure, as proven by this Tikal clip.
 * Super Sonic's story also had text that recapped what happened in the story, like what happens with the other six characters. In a subversion, this is possible to view if you grab Sonic's option upgrade in the Last Story and then exit the game, but after playing said recap scene, the game freezes, forcing you to create a new save file if you want to complete the game.
 * One example from Sonic the Hedgehog CD that many people miss is the Desert Zone. This zone shows up in the ending video and on the interactive Sound Test via a "world map" option, but since zone design and programming were given to individual people, and the person in charge of this zone was late in finalizing the look of the zone, it was dropped late in development. There was, according to some interviews, yet another zone planned for the game, but it didn't even get past concept phase. Furthermore, the PC version has all the levels contained in separate folders and one is conspicuously missing, R2, so that it goes R1, R3, R4, etc. The level is glimpsed in the ending animation, however, featuring an enemy that looks a hell of a lot like the first boss from Sonic 2 for the Game Gear, or should we say a boss that looks like an enemy from Sonic CD.
 * This legacy was actually carried on in the downloadable remake in 2011, with an early screen of the Desert Zone imagined into programming form found inside the games' memory. The reimagined "Desert Dazzle Zone", along with a new boss stage called "Final Fever" were planned as extras for the remake, but were turned down due to time restraints and SEGA's preference that the game not be altered too much from the original rendition.
 * There are also a few alternate Twinkle Circuit tracks in Sonic Adventure that can't be normally accessed, but may have been meant as Sega Dreamcast DLC.
 * If you hack Sonic the Fighters, you can play as not only Dr. Eggman and Metal Sonic, but "Rocket Metal" (which is a form of Metal Sonic that appears in the game's opening) and a female character named "Honey" who was based off of a character of the same name from Fighting Vipers (also developed by Sega) and never made it into the game. A couple of unused tracks (including one for an unused level "Sunset Town") are also found inside the game.
 * In Sonic and SEGA All Stars Racing, the Final Fortress track descriptions talk about laser gates and a cameo that don't exist.
 * In the Famicom Sonic the Hedgehog bootleg port Somari, the Scrap Brain Zone is dummied-out. The game goes straight from Star Light Zone to the Final Zone.
 * Sonic Generations was to feature Big the Cat in some capacity, to the point of having voiced lines, as confirmed by his voice actor. It can be speculated that he was to be the host friend for the "Speed Highway" stage (as Sonic Adventure is his debut game) but was probably cut because he likely couldn't actually do anything in the stage, being a fisherman/power lifter in a stage with no water or physical obstacles.
 * Castlevania series:
 * In Symphony of the Night, there's a little trapdoor right when you enter the castle. You can glitch through it and find a vestigial level down there. It was later fleshed out to a full level in the Saturn release. The game code also contains recorded dialogue that isn't found in the game, apparently from an unused ending in which Maria turns into a demon.
 * There are audio clips of the voice actors (English and Japanese, at least) yelling "KONAMI!" with different inflections on the CD. It's pretty surreal.
 * Castlevania Bloodlines for Genesis had dummied out levels, which were brought to public knowledge when a prototype cartridge surfaced. One of the levels took place on board a zeppelin.
 * Stinkoman 20 X 6 ever since Version 1 has had data for an enemy that looks like a cabbage. This is referenced in the Negative Zone level, a garble of sprites from all seven previous levels, where it finally makes an appearance.
 * The ROM of Super Mario 64 has an untextured model of Blargg.
 * And now they found a Yoshi egg,Boo's key,a beta trampoline and an animated,two-dimensional flower.
 * There's a hidden palm tree inside the rocks near the bridge in Super Mario Sunshine's Bianco Hills level (from Mission 6 on).
 * Similarly, in Delfino Plaza there's a extra Rocket Nozzle Box inside the belltower closest to the beach. (Shown here.)
 * Rather infamously, there's a book and a door hidden in the structure at the bottom of the giant bottle in one of the red coin missions in Noki Bay.
 * Mega Man X 8 might have been planned to have X, Zero, and Axl to be Navigators like their Distaff Counterpart. In the 2nd PC CD of it, you could find a folder of Japanese Voice Actors' sound data, including the main character's voice as Navigators(!). The idea seemed to be scrapped out because it would involve further scripting and scenarios. It's amusing to find that Axl feels very, very bored to have his job as a Navigator in his line.
 * Every single game of the Mega Man Game Boy (Rockman World) series contains unused music tracks. Many of them can be identified as alternate versions to existing tracks, most notably the ending themes to Wily's Revenge and MMII (the latter of which sucks alot less than what you hear in the final game). MMV also contains two unused leftover tracks from IV.
 * Taito's little known game Chack'n Pop features the first versions of Monstas and Mightas enemies found in Bubble Bobble (respectively, the purple whales and the white rock-throwing ghosts). The data found in the rom hinted that the Zen-Chans (the toy looking robots) were planned to appear as an enemy too, but were dumped from the final version for unknown reasons.
 * An unusual example: in Commander Keen: Aliens Ate My Babysitter, using a level warp code takes you to the now-playable high score screen, along with the message "Keen is in the High Score screen. Call iD!" (the game's developer). Well, you can imagine that whatever contest that was meant for must have been scrapped really quickly!
 * The high score screen is also accessible via warp code in Keen 4 and 5, altho you do not get a similar message. In all three games the high score screen has Keen running around the screen fighting enemies. Presumably the playable version was used by the developers to create the animation.
 * A similar example in another id Software game shows up in Wolfenstein 3D. In Episode 2, Floor 8, the entire western half of the level is occupied by a huge and nasty pushwall maze with multiple dead ends. In these dead ends are extra lives and some bosses. However, at one particular dead end is a floating sign which reads "Call Apogee -- Say Aardwolf." This was intended to be part of a contest where a prize would be awarded to whoever found the sign and followed its instructions, but it was quickly scrapped when cheating and level-editing programs were published almost immediately after the game came out. In spite of this, Apogee (now 3D Realms) still gets calls about it to this day.
 * Two very interesting things were removed at some point from Metroid: Zero Mission. One was the ability to turn suit upgrades on and off from the pause menu, as in Super Metroid; fans are still wondering why this much-missed feature was taken out. (Cheat codes can turn it back on.) The second was... Crocomire! This Super Metroid boss was found in the ROM, with a full set of sprites and some movement code, but nothing else. It's possible to hack him into various rooms.
 * In turn, Super Metroid's ROM includes some interesting objects that were never used, most notably a "reflector" which would bounce any beam or missile off at a 90-degree angle.
 * This was actually used as an inherent attribute for the metallic Space Pirates, whom you couldn't shoot normally because the shots bounced off.
 * Like Zero Mission, Metroid Prime would have had a battle with an old boss... Meta-Kraid, which would have marked his first official 3-D appearance. A picture of what he would have looked like was shown by one of the modelers. Also, Metroid Prime 2 was to feature a battle with an Ing-possessed Ridley, as seen here.
 * MP2 also originally was supposed to have Samus battle an Ing possessed Luminoth. This one has an actual reason for being taken out: it's commonly stated throughout the game that a Luminoth would rather self-terminate than be possessed by an Ing. Still though, What Could Have Been...
 * Just to compete the trilogy, Metroid Prime 3 was meant to have Samus' gunship be controllable, which the otherwise useless 'ship missile' upgrades would presumably have been for.
 * You actually do use the ship missile upgrades for bombing runs, but you can do bombing runs in so few places that few know about them.
 * And because you don't pilot the ship, you only use the Ship Missile ammo one at a time, meaning that between uses you will 99.9% of the time find refills. Thus, the capacity upgrades are completely unnecessary.
 * In the original Metroid Prime, a variation of the intro can be found, featuring a narration by Samus herself (voiced by none other than Jennifer Hale). It was presumably removed due to Nintendo wanting to keep Samus as a Heroic Mime, rather than speaking directly to the player.
 * If you bust out a FSB file extractor and the VGMStream program, you will find that Nicktoons: Globs of Doom, has several recorded voice clips that suggest that Dib would have got to fight GIR gone crazy and stuff again (The final game stuck you as Beautiful Gorgeous and Nicolai Technus for the boss battle); the clips perfectly describe every element of Zim's hijacked house that attack you in the battle.
 * Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for the Game Cube, Playstation 2, and Xbox included remakes of the original game accessible through an in-game puzzle. The PC version left it out for some reason or another, but left the puzzle in place, minus the last step. You can actually see the secret door, but there's no way to get it to open.
 * Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of the more prolific examples of this on the NES. Numerous "lost levels" have been found, one of which consists of several unused variations of the empty white room with a giant question mark block that spits out three one-ups. Some of these levels contain Gold Cheep-Cheeps and Green Parabeetles, otherwise unused Palette Swaps. Several unused bonus games have been found; they all involve dice rolls, but no one knows what they're actually supposed to do, since all they do is roll the die, spit out some coins (which doesn't actually give Mario any coins), and then return to the map screen.
 * One of the box screenshots showed a level that was completely deleted from the final game, and another showed an alternate version of the World 1 map.
 * The original game, in addition to its well-known Minus World, has a dozen other glitch worlds accessible via Game Genie.
 * Hackers found a beta level shown at E3 in the code of Super Mario Galaxy.
 * Platform game Titus the Fox has an array with room for twenty levels, only sixteen of which appear in-game. Interestingly, the game is a reskinned version of a game called Moktar, which has a few of the missing levels (and misses a few others). The free one-level demo is another of the twenty.
 * The first Crash Bandicoot game had a completely finished level called "Stormy Ascent" cut from the final version. The level resembles Slippery Climb in terms of design, only it's A LOT harder. The level was probably cut due to difficulty on account it's the hardest level in the original game and is probably the hardest level in the entire series.
 * Crash Twinsanity got hit with this HARD. Aside from the game feeling somewhat incomplete overall, the game had afew levels cut, at the very least a lava level and a cutesy level taking place inside Coco's brain were partially finished and programmed into beta builds. Cortex even lampshades it.


 * Wrath Of Cortex uses a few areas from early development and planted new levels on top of them. Ice Station Bandicoot for example uses a small platforming area as a background under the helecopter racetrack. An unused racing and dogfight level have also been found inside the game.
 * Full sets of brand new sprites for all the Koopalings have been discovered in the data for Super Princess Peach, suggesting that they were at one point intended to appear in that game, presumably as bosses. By the time the game was finished, however, they'd vanished again.
 * The NTSC/UC PlayStation 2 version of Strawberry Shortcake: The Sweet Dreams Game has the full rendition of the song "How A Garden Grows" dummied out. The song is among the game data, but there is no conventional way to access it in-game.
 * In several of the Ratchet and Clank series, the developers took a lot of material that didn't make it into the finished game, and left it for the player to access in a secret area known as the Insomniac Museum. There have been three of these museums in the series so far (five counting the High Impact Games Treehouse in Size Matters and Secret Agent Clank), and although the first two (the second and third games) had sort of out-there methods of reaching them, the one in A Crack in Time just requires you to
 * American McGee's Alice has Frog Footman and Fish Footman enemies and a strange 'Fungi' character (physically, a larvae-like creature with long skinny arms hanging from another inflated animal) that don't appear in the game proper, but can be spawned using console codes. There's also many unused lines, some of which were used in the sequel.
 * Several dummied out areas can be found in Spyro: Year of the Dragon without a cheating device. It just takes some glitching skills.
 * Plok had three deleted levels, "Brendammi Bog", "Badream Fens", and "Breezy Beach". Like Sonic 2's dummied-out levels, the graphics and/or layouts are unimplemented. There's also a vehicle test track.
 * In Bunny Must Die there are some dummied out items which seemingly do nothing - one is a stop-watch in the Chelsea & the 7 Devils mode, presumably this would be a time-stopper similar to Bunny's, another was frog icon which may have been a mega-jump, a wheel icon which had no known or theortical use, and a wand which was linked to a fire-ball attack that was also dummied out but used by a boss in the same game area.
 * There is several objects in the tile set which do not get used including a sea-floor, water graphics, and gray and gold objects.
 * Bunny had two other costumes which were dummied out - a pink one which may have been an upgrade ment for early on and a bright seafoam green one which was on the switch screen similar to the Busty Outfit and may have been the prototype.
 * Magical Doropie, according to this blog, had unused sprites for Kagemaru and another unnamed character as if they could be playable characters.
 * In Atlantis no Nazo, a door in Zone 50 which leads to Zone 59 is inaccessible. Due to this, Zones 59 and 55 cannot be entered without using a cheat code.

Professional Wrestling Games

 * WWE games:
 * WWF Smackdown 2: Know Your Role for the first Playstation had two characters dummied out: namely, The Big Show and Ken Shamrock (the first had been sent down to the developmental leagues, and the second had left the company). Both could be unlocked via a Game Shark, but entrances must be disabled as well, as their lack of an entrance video would hang the game. A developer oversight could also be used to encounter The Big Show: In the Royal Rumble mode, the developers mistakenly forgot to remove him as a possible random participant. This leads to a small chance of him entering the Royal Rumble, complete with theme song.
 * Similarly, WWF No Mercy for the N64 had a CAW mode face for Big Show and an alternative one for The Rock able to be unlocked with a GameShark, as well as an extra Create a Wrestler slot that would have been unlocked via connecting with the Game Boy Color version had it not been cancelled. A completed texture for the Brahma Bull belt is in game, and can be used with texture-modifying Gameshark codes. Presumably, the belt was cut from the game because the real-life version was never saw the light of day either; WWF Magazine reported that it was lost in the mail when shipped from the belt maker to WWF.
 * Smackdown: Here Comes The Pain infamously had Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, and Jeff Hardy removed prior to release; lesser known is that it had many, many more dummied out characters (seen here). Their data is still on the disc and they can even be selected, but all cause the game to crash (with the exception of Al Snow, who instead strangely loads The Rock's model). There also remains Team Angle sweatsuit alternate attires for Kurt Angle, Charlie Haas, and Shelton Benjamin that are fully useable via gameshark (seen here).
 * Related, hacking the original WWE SmackDown vs. Raw would let one play as the British Bulldog (not in the game in any way), though one of the members of the main roster had to be replaced. There was also voice data for The Rock and Mankind in the game's story mode that was not used.
 * WWE Smackdown VS Raw 2006 allows you to play as Jerry "The King" Lawler in season mode but you can't unlock him (except presumably with a cheating device). It is possible he was intended to be playable at one point and was Dummied Out, much like the Smackdown2 examples.
 * In a couple of similar examples, in 2008 Armando Estrada appears in one small section of the story and one of the tag entrances is for him and Umaga but he is not selectable in any way, and in 2011 Hurricane appears in Road to Wrestlemania (including in a match in Rey Mysterio's story), has a newly-done entrance and a full moveset, and can be used in the story creator, but for some reason you cannot play as him without hacking.
 * In WCW vs nWo Revenge, Wrath was only accessible via a Game Shark code. He had Sting's outfit and no sound effect for his finishing move, but was otherwise fully functional. Oddly enough, the character would be fully accessible without a Game Shark as part of your save after the code was used. There were also dummied out managers that just were buggy versions of some of the existing managers with misspelled versions of the new managers' names.
 * In AKI's next wrestling game, WWF Wrestlemania 2000, a Game Shark code could be used to access an unfinished version of the shootfighting mode that showed up in their next (Japan-only) game, Virtual Pro Wrestling 2.
 * In WCW Nitro, Jeff Jarrett was dummied out very shortly before the game was released due to Jarrett leaving WCW on fairly bad terms. Images of Jarrett in the game could be seen on, of all places, the packaging of the PlayStation itself.

Puzzle Games
"GLaDOS: "I'll use lasers to inscribe a line down the center of the facility. And one half will be where you live, and I'll live in the other half.""
 * Even Portal has its dummied-out stuff. A few lines by GLaDOS and the turrets are unused, and there is some ASCII Art that never gets used in the credits. Here is an example probably from before laser turrets were redesigned as rocket turrets (the commentary mentions the change itself):

""Preparing to dispense product.""
 * And a turret line in general:

"Cave Johnson: "Anyway, overruled. If you think I'm affecting your decisions, in any way, don’t be afraid to speak up. I’m not made of glass. That reminds me: Caroline, Do we have a wing made out of glass yet? Let's get on that, Caroline.""
 * The sequel has a few examples of unused dialogue in the game files.
 * There are some leftover lines from a time in the beta when GLaDOS' dialogue was more aggressive and vitriolic towards the player. The developer commentary states this was changed because playtesters found it too intense. Interesting to note: she actually calls Chell by name in a few clips.
 * Cave Johnson's posthumous Moral Event Horizon -  - was later Dummied Out as they generally felt it unnecessary. Since a couple of lines of  remained in the game, people created drama by insisting there was originally a rape scene and/or J.K. Simmons refused to read lines due to being disturbed. The rumors were then considered "true" (as anything resembling fact, such as Simmons doing rape scenes previously, were used to exaggerate the offense of the scene), and Word of God eventually said in an interview that J.K. Simmons will do anything for money and any rumors of cut content due to offensive rape similarities, etc. were false.
 * On a lighter note, some removed Co-op dialogue reveals what must have been a scrapped mission to retrieve - of all things - a Garfield comic.
 * One odd downside is that this caused the set-up for a Brick Joke to be left hanging.


 * One disturbing scene that was left out of the game involves  These and other unused lines can be found here.
 * Files in Portal 2 contain a blonde, blue suited reskin of Chell; this stems back to when the multiplayer aspect of Portal 2 was in development, where the players originally controlled Chell (from single player) and Mel (the reskin). While the blue/orange concept was kept, having controllable humans was scrapped due to the frequency of player deaths in co-op, yet Mel's texture files remain in the game despite being removed).
 * Tengen Tetris NES rom has nametables similar for multiplayer co-op mode but with places for scores for four players which means that co-op was originally intented for up to 4 players using an adapter, but was scrapped later for whatever reason.

Real-Time Strategy

 * Earth2150's map editor allows vertical water to be created by some judicious placing and removal of capture-the-flag flags while terra-forming. The water is perfectly usable by in-game LC units, making it likely that it was meant to be included as a feature.
 * The N64 version of Command & Conquer had a few secret levels that could only be unlocked with the Barracuda Cheat. They were weird.
 * The data files for the Covert Operations expansion disc several music files that are not used ingame, including alternate versions of two already-existing songs that feature vocal samples, the songs used in the ending cinematics, and a few others.
 * The missions for the Unguided in Syndicate Wars might fit. They come from a third campaign that was dropped, but if you know how you can play them separately.
 * In the pre-release demo of Command and Conquer 3, the player was supposed to only be able to play as GDI; the Scrin simply weren't in the demo at all, and Nod was to serve as an enemy only. However, they failed to disable some keyboard shortcuts as well as they meant to, and as a result enterprising members of the fan base were soon trying out the Brotherhood of Nod well before they were meant to.
 * Because most of the code for Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 was taken from the previous C&C game Tiberian Sun and simply rewritten, lots of TS names still exist in the code, for instance, technically, the code refers to the Allies as the GDI and the Soviets as Nod. Also, if you're curious, most of the TS superweapons are still in there, just dummied out and can be re-entered fairly simply, assuming you work around the ones that have been repurposed and you obtain the correctly sized animations for RA2's different resolution. This caused a now dead Game Mod called Command & Conquer Reloaded, which was RA 2 with everything from TS added in.
 * Which is why Final Alert 2, RA2's map editor, is apparently compatible with Tiberian Sun.
 * Red Alert 2 had three vehicles (A light tank, a mobile artillery and a transport helicopter) that were resonably complete, including artwork and statistics, but were not used in the game. The light tanks code was reused for Yuri's tank in the Expansion Pack.
 * Likewise, Tiberian Sun itself was littered with dummied out content... namely the Dropship Bay system, voxels for Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert 1-era units, and so on and so forth. In many cases, however, there are large portions of the assets still missing; there are no sidebar portraits for any of the TD and RA-era units, no art or rules code entries, and the units themselves are not designed to the same standards as the normal units (they are just flat colour/remap) and so on and so forth. There is also an unused flame tank from the first game.
 * Famously, the beloved Mammoth Tanks from the previous games didn't appear except as non-useable units in a few scripted cutscenes. They were instead replaced with the "Mammotk MK II", a giant walker. It was, thankfully, very easy to edit the game file to restore the non-usable Mammoths in the build queue.
 * Additionally, the Yuri's Revenge disc contains a few maps for what was probably going to be a single-player Yuri campaign. Among these maps is a large map of London, presumably the final level, loaded with triggers and sound files.
 * Command & Conquer: Generals had several units that didn't make the release build, but still had data files on the disc. This also meant that the two generals that heavilly relied on these units for their Generals Challenge maps, the Demolition (GLA) and Infantry (China) generals, had to have their maps cut from the random selection of the Generals Challenges.
 * In addition, there was initally going to be 3 bosses, one for each nationality. These, too, were cut but still have data files on the disc.
 * The Homeworld games recycled most of its rejected ship models to use as derelicts in 'starship graveyard' scenes, but a few items were only found with code digs:
 * The original game's code had a fairly complete version of a faster but more lightly-armed version of the Mighty Glacier of the game's various fighters, which was kind of redundant and left out of the release version, as well as textures for the lifeboat Narcissus from the first Alien film that was presumably intended as a Easter Egg.
 * The sequel was originally intended to have support units, along with support frigates, drone carriers and something similar to the mobile cloaking field generator of the original game. Stats for ships associated with the latter two and some broken drone AI remain for the modding community to pick over.
 * A promotional demo disc of Homeworld was released under the title "Raider Retreat". It follows the first few missions of the game faithfully, which almost all deal with the Turanic Raiders, but the final mission in the demo is an assault on the Turanic Raiders' world, which doesn't appear anywhere in the game, and even had some special voice acting. A look at the game's data files reveals that it is present as "mission05_oem", but unplayable in the final version of the game. Quite a pity, because the level was enjoyable.
 * Rock Raiders is just full of unused data, from Giant web-making spiders to mobile teleports to Sax-playing Raiders...
 * In Medieval II: Total War, you can make the Papal States playable by editing a single line in a game configuration file. This allows you to rampage across Europe with the Pope leading your dread army of Swiss Guards, lets you excommunicate other nations merely by declaring war on them and gives you full use of the Inquisitors as virtually unstoppable assassins. While playing the papal states Venice is capable of excommunicating you oddly enough.
 * There were also dummied out traits referring to heretic armies.
 * In Rome: Total War there is residual code that suggests originally there would have been a second campaign called "Caesar in Gaul" presumably where you, as Julius Caesar, would have conquered Gaul, perhaps similar to the way the Viking Invasion additional campaign worked in the original Medieval: Total War. There isn't enough to start it up and no-one seems to have tried to create a Caesar in Gaul mod using it, though. The official expansions for RTW (Barbarian Invasion and Alexander) worked differently.
 * The First Shogun Total War has files naming "Chosokabe". It can be more obvious that in one of the intro videos shows a Leader's Castle in The Tosa area. Many fans speculate that the Rebels icon in the select screen would've been for the Chosokabe clan, since the rebels, except the Alliance Chart, Uses different Icons.
 * It Also Makes it obvious that In Real Life, The Chosokabe Clan was mostly in Tosa province during that time.
 * Faxanadu has item sprites for the Crystal, Lamp, Book, Brown Potion and Fire Crystal. Since similar items appeared in Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu, it's possible to guess what some of them might have done. The Lamp was useful in Blackout Basement levels; these could have been removed or lighted in Faxanadu. The Fire Crystal had the opposite effect of the Black Onyx; it's speculated that in Faxanadu it might have opened a way to return to Eolis. The other three probably related to the magic system; the Book was probably a Holy Bible before the game was purged of all Christian references.
 * Warcraft 3: In the Frozen Throne expansion, some spells and abilities that weren't used in the game can be found in the editor. For example, the Spell Breaker (and bandit creeps) have the animations to raise their shields to deflect magical/piercing attacks as the footman does, or Akama summoning felhounds instead of the standard spirit wolves. In addition, some units whose models were inexplicably changed (ballista to glaive thrower, catapult to Demolisher, Steam Tank to Siege Engine) can still be used, though it requires typing in the exact filepath.
 * Within Command & Conquer Red Alert, multiple normally-unusable units lay in wait. The Phase Transport/Phase Tank for the Allies, which appears in some missions in The Aftermath, the Giant Ants which have their own mini-campaign, but the only unit that doesn't appear anywhere is the complete Helicarrier, which sits ready for implementation in an ini file.

Rhythm Games

 * DDR Extreme US was apparently a little rushed. The "MASTER" rewards (save for one message) cannot be collected through normal means because one of the songs (which conveniently does NOT have an Oni chart) appeared to be unlockable ONLY through hacking. Also, every DDR home game has a "dance mode" that disables accidental shape button presses on dance pads. DDR Extreme has the setting, but you'll need to hack a save file to take advantage of it because the setting isn't in the options menu.
 * A code was released to unlock the missing song, "Memories", through a Burger King Kid's Meal promotion - two years after the game's release! Presumably, the code was supposed to have gotten out long before then, but despite the fact that people analyzed the disc inside and out, nobody was able to figure out what it was. The song in question ALSO had a different color message title in the information screen, too, which led to many theories about what Konami wanted players to do to unlock it.
 * Which is more of an extreme Guide Dang It.
 * The Japanese PSX port of DDR 3rd Mix had some data for songs that in the arcade version but were removed from the console version (ostensibly due to the music licensing not getting sorted out in time, since the missing songs were in the JP PSX version of DDR 4th Mix).
 * At least one PlayStation 2 DDR release had the Basic step data for the song "Peace (^^)v" on the disk but not the song itself.
 * An odd case can be found on the PSX version of Beatmania Best Hits. Dummy data appears to have been added to the disc, which is actually a common practice to force the data that will be used to sit on the outer edges of the CD track, where it will read faster. The oddity is that the dummy data contains the source code and developers' memos detailing things like the scoring algorithm.
 * The US arcade version of Dance Dance Revolution SuperNOVA had an unfortunate case of dummying out too much. The Japanese version supported e-Amusement, which is a feature in Konami's arcade games that allows the machine to connect to Konami's servers over the Internet to automatically download bug-fix patches as well as provide features such as saving players' personal records and nationwide and/or international multiplayer and score rankings. DDR SuperNOVA had four secret songs, Fascination MAXX, Fascination -eternal love mix-, Healing-D-Vision, and CHAOS, which could only be played on Extra Stage or One More Extra Stage, and only on Expert difficulty. Previous DDR games had a secret code that could be entered in the operator menu to unlock these songs, and Konami would release the codes a couple months after the game's release. However, SuperNOVA was the first DDR game after e-Amusement rolled out, so Konami had planned to simply release an update patch to enable the secret songs. Unfortunately, when all e-Amusement code was dummied out in the US version, the only way of unlocking the secret songs was dummied out as well, leaving them permanently inaccessible.
 * This was fixed on SuperNOVA 2 with the revival of unlock codes (but this time, entered by the player on the title screen), and an attempt to beta test e-Amusement in America. The latter didn't end well, but they're still using codes at least.
 * The first Guitar Hero features two obscure bonus songs that can only be played through hacking. They're some of the toughest in the game.
 * Interestingly enough, one of those songs, Trippolette, is now available for download on the Rock Band Network. It's one of the toughest in the game.
 * The initial release of Guitar Hero III had Co-op Career mode as the only way to play co-op, but still included bass charts (accessible in practice mode) for songs that are not part of the Co-op Career setlist. An update for the Xbox 360 version added a Quickplay Career mode, presumably making use of those bass charts.
 * Those bass charts were still accessible normally; once a Co-Op Career was completed, the songs not included in the tier progression would be unlocked (with the exception of "Paint It Black", which had the guitar and bass on the same audio master track, and was thus unavailable for multiplayer). Nonetheless, Co-Op Quickplay was invaluable for getting around some of the unnecessary restrictions of Co-Op Career.
 * Although the Guitar Hero 2 Demo had only 10 playable songs, it was found that there were actually around 30 beta charts of songs on the disk that could be retrieved through hacking. Some of the note charts were very different
 * Also of note is that the song (Bang Your Head) Metal Health, which later appeared in Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks The 80's, is in the files for the demo as well, and the version on the demo includes a solo that was taken out of the GH 80's version to make it fit it's first tier ranking after I Want Candy was removed from the game and Because It's Midnite was moved out of it's previous bonus song slot. See the song here.
 * The first DJ Hero had three mixes removed from the game for unknown reasons. One was unfinished, but the other two were very good, including a Ludacris vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers mashup.
 * Several songs in Dance Dance Revolution Extreme AC, such as "Dam Dariram", had dummied-out Challenge stepcharts, which could only be accessed via a glitch in Oni Mode.

Role-Playing Games

 * The entire Snow Queen Branch of Persona was removed from the U.S. Version of the game. This is a major plot branch which leads to an alternate ending. This is still in the game files, and certain lines have been translated (Although most text is in gibberish), meaning that Atlus was at least partway through adapting this portion before removing it. It was finally made available to U.S. Gamers in the PSP Remake.
 * Certain quests in Ultima VII such as restoring the shrines of virtue had to be patched back.
 * With Exult's tools you can find bits and pieces of unused assets. For instance, the guard sprite has frames where it is blowing a horn, and there is a separate sprite for flying gargoyles.
 * Ultima VII Part Two has a large number of hidden and incomplete areas that can be found with the teleport cheat. These include a few empty dungeons as well as a copy of the initial area with a staircase leading to a mountain top, and an infinity bow.
 * Origin continued this trend with Ultima VIII, the most glaring example being the birthplace of Morien and the double doors (see below). In the former case, the patch tried to fix but in doing so created a severe inconsistency in the plot. Some promotional material for the game also included images of the undead attacking Tenebreae. This sequence is in fact still in the game but the flag to activate it cannot be triggered without cheating.
 * Ultima VIII had these giant doors that were completely unopenable. Apparently they were supposed to be accessible once you got the expansion that never got produced.
 * And if you use a cheat to move the doors out of the way, you'll find that there is no trigger behind them that would transport you to another map.
 * Oblivion and other games in The Elder Scrolls series have some quests which were never implemented (for example you can pick up the topic "Are you looking for couriers" in the Imperial Marketplace but none of the NPC have it as an option).
 * There are several of these quests that are hinted to but never programed, including one involving a cave (in the game, but there's nothing there) and a women named the Red Queen (not in the game, but mentioned by NPCs), and one involving rescuing a self-proclaimed half-ogre from being eaten when he tries to contact his relatives (the half-ogre is in the game, but he doesn't serve any purpose). There's also the infamous city of Sutch, mentioned and used for early development videos, but not in the game due to time constraints.
 * Another involves the NPC Branwen, who is perpetually sparring with her Argonian partner Saliith outside in the Arena district. There's a note on the floor inside the Bloodworks near Owyn that indicates he is her father and she wants to become Champion in order to impress him, but there's never any further implementation of the quest. Like many others, some enterprising modder has finished it.
 * Oblivion also contains some item models that for some reason were never attached to their respective items. E.g. there's a unique mesh and texture for cyrodiilic brandy in the game data, but the game just uses a generic potion bottle for the drink instead.
 * Also, there's a reason why you can't wear nothing above the waist. Why? Because the female models have bare tits with nipples—as revealed by an Oblivion mod that lets you take off your top clothes. (As with "Hot Coffee," this resulted in the ESRB altering the game's rating—as well as the ESRB having seen a pre-release build that didn't have some of the more intense violence, such as the mutilated corpses.)
 * A caveat rendered ridiculous by the fact that, thanks to a large and dedicated modding community, there is now a hirez model for any possible nude female body type (and a couple of male ones, with or without erect member), from flat chested through ridiculously enormous. Almost all have some sort of Stripperiffic clothing support as well.
 * A platform specific Dummied Out, the Xbox 360 version of Oblivion is missing a piece of music called Auriel's Ascension. The music is part of the game's "Explore" package, meaning it would play while you are out exploring the Cyrodiil countryside, however it only plays in the PC and PlayStation 3 versions of the game. The track is present however in all Game of the Year versions of the game.
 * While predecessor Morrowind has the Levitation spell that allows you to fly around at will, Oblivion doesn't. The spell was cut from the game because of the ways cities are treated; Morrowind had them as permanent part of the game world, but Oblivion confines them to their own maps, accessible only through the doors, and the player isn't supposed to go outside in other ways. This is easily visible by using a cheat to fly outside the walls; the outer world is a sparse version of the original, with no content whatsoever aside from a few inert buildings.
 * Morrowind, Oblivion's predecessor, has several, including:
 * There is an alchemy ingredient called "bloat," which can be purchased from merchants or found in random crates. Where bloat comes from is never explained in-game---but the level editor reveals an unused "bloat spore" plant that was supposed to produce them, but was never placed in-game. Several mods out there deal with this, ranging from placing them in several swampy areas to working them into a House Telvanni quest line as being in a bloat mine.
 * There is fountain in Morrowind called the Pool of Forgetfulness. Players have frustratedly tried to get it to do something, but it apparently does nothing. Perhaps the developers simply forgot about it?
 * To defeat the Big Bad, players need two special weapons called Sunder and Keening, which are being guarded by the Big Bad's higher-ranked minions. The data files of the game reveal a phony look-alike of Sunder, and a voice file for the Big Bad taunting you when you try to kill him with it. These never got included in-game.
 * The idea was borrowed by a large fan mod that opens up a series of quests for the Sixth House, treating it like a guild, and building an alternate main quest. One new weapon is named as a prototype of the Keening.
 * "The Wings of the Queen of Bats", The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind's Infinity Plus One Axe, isn't actually in the game, but can be obtained through cheat codes or modding the game.
 * Morrowind also has a version of Azura's Star that can be used as a shuriken, but the final game replaces it with a Soul Gem.
 * And in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall it's widely believed that the many outfits you can dress in were going to be used for the purpose of using different ones depending on the NPC to interact with them, but nothing comes of it in the release.
 * About a third of Daggerfall's magic spells qualify. You think I'm exaggerating?
 * Daggerfall also contains some unused dialogue files that indicate you were supposed to be able to sleep with the prostitutes found in many of the inns. You can't.
 * The dialogue files also have little bits of doggerel verse that were supposed to have been pieced together by NPC minstrels so that you would be able to hear the fame of your deeds spread.
 * Various stores which were used as fronts for the Thieves Guild have a sign that looks like the store was to sell furniture. Thanks mostly to the incredible work by the Andyfall mod, the remnants of code used for a furniture purchasing system that was never completely implemented was uncovered.
 * Containers are broken in the game. Originally the player was intended to be able to casually store furniture on shelves and in chests, but that feature had to be removed due to problems.
 * The Earth Wall spell in Arena was cut because of the technical difficulties of implementing user-made dungeon paths between the different dungeon sections in a 3D environment (Arena was a 2.5D game).
 * A data file exists in Daggerfall which consists entirely of various rhyming lines. The developers have revealed that originally, there was going to be a troubador who would compose poetry of your exploits.
 * In Dark Cloud, you can't access the back floors in one dungeon because the keys were left out of the U.S. release.
 * The first US release of Final Fantasy IV had many items dummied out. Some of them were inexplicably restored when it was ported back to Japan as Easytype. To give a full list of lost commands...
 * Cecil: Dark Wave (becomes Darkness in the DS version). Notably this turns the solution to the confrontation with Dark Knight Cecil a Guide Dang It.
 * Kain: Nothing (lucky bastard!)
 * Rydia: Nothing (she STILL loses White Magic per Plot-Relevant Age-Up)
 * Tellah: Recall
 * Edward: Salve
 * Rosa: Pray
 * Yang: Brace, Focus
 * Palom: Bluff
 * Porom: Cry
 * Cid: Nothing (he actually GAINS a command in the DS version - Upgrade)
 * Edge: Nothing (lucky bastard!)
 * Fusoya: Bless
 * Also, a few spells were removed, those being the White Magic spells Protect, Shell, and Dispel, and one of Rydia's summons, Cockatrice. These spells were actually left out in the aforementioned Easytype version as well, but could still be accessed by using certain pieces of equipment (see below).
 * Another element that was removed was the ability to use certain pieces of equipment to cast magic. This feature was restored when it was ported back to Japan as the Easytype version, however. Interestingly, in the SNES version, the PROGRAMMING was still there. If one used a Game Genie (or other cheat device), the commands could be re-enabled, and you could also buy and use the removed items, even the Soma Drop or Gold and Silver Apples. They would simply be called "Dummy" in the inventory...you just had to remember which was which.
 * The DS port also, frustratingly, had the vocal version of "Theme of Love" dummied out of international releases for no apparent reason and now the credits, where the song was supposed to play, have generic background music in them instead. Rumor holds that the vocalist for the song's manager hadn't signed away the international release rights to the song, wanting to keep it Japan only. Squeenix should have played the instrumental version of the "Theme of Love" at least.
 * In Grand Tradition; in Final Fantasy IV: The After Years all of the items from the GBA version of Final Fantasy IV are included in the code; plus some "Uber" Debug equipment named after the programmers that makes you invincible. You're not going to see these without cheating.
 * There are also dummied-out commands. Some of them were available in the GBA version of the original game (Brace, Cry, Dark Wave, etc.), but some are upgrades of existing commands that are completely unavailable in either game through normal methods (Double Throw, Omni (attacks all targets at once), etc.), and most interestingly, there's also a dummied-out command for Blue Magic. Common Fanon theory is that Blue Magic was supposed to be on Harley but was removed for some reason.
 * Famously, the Czar/Kaiser Dragon in Final Fantasy VI. The developers later reused its name for a boss in Super Mario RPG and in its original game it was apparently intended to be a Bonus Boss, as this was the case when it was finally put in the game in the GBA remake—although it did have an associated speech even in the SNES/SFC game that suggested it was supposed to be some manner of uber-enemy.
 * Another example would be the Colossus. Unlike the Czar Dragon, he had a complete battle script and for some odd reason was programmed to attack wild kid Gau if he was in the party.
 * Knights of the Old Republic II, due to being rushed to publication, had a lot of content dummied out, including most of the Very Definitely Final Dungeon and an entire planet. There is a fan project working to mod the material back in. There´s also this Let´s Play, which hacks the game and takes a look at a ton of the cut content. It even has an actual ending. What makes the deleted content (and the grumbling thereof) in KOTOR II so funny is that most of the content was deleted due to time constraints, and the major groups trying to bring it back still haven't finished years later. Not all of them are unfinished.
 * Though it doesn't have as much as KotOR II, the original Knights of the Old Republic game did also have some content dummied out:
 * An alternate ending for the Dark Side female PC which would have allowed her to take the Last Second Chance offered by Carth was lost to this.
 * There also seem to be files for an incomplete Rakatan ruin on Tatooine (with a Sarlacc pit!), another area of Kashyyyk shadowlands, a Czerka regional HQ on Korriban, a third level of the Black Vulkar base (where you'd have to masquerade as a Vulkar to get to the garage), and the planet Sleheyron. Here are some mods that restore or use dummied out content as a base.
 * Juhani, one of your party members, is rumored to have been removed from the game and then put back at the last minute. The rumor exists partly because she is a character with the Gay Option, which apparently LucasArts doesn't like, but more because poring through the data files reveals a lot of dialogue that got left out. This includes her observations about the planet you're on, which the other party members had, a few other comments, and her revealing to the player her deep distrust of a Mandalorian.
 * The Commodity Dealer window in Freelancer shows the prices of the local merchandise in a stock exchange-like ticker; this is because the economy was originally supposed to be dynamic, with prices changing according to the laws of economy. The game had been promised to be a lot more similar to the X series than it ended up being; it was supposed to contain a dynamic economy, trading as an actual gameplay mechanic, possibly the ability to own stations and/or buildings and generally to do whatever you liked. Time and budget constraints, sadly, caused much of that to be left out. As it was sold, Freelancer was a combat simulator with a very simplistic monetary factor that only influenced the gear you could buy.
 * The Pokémon games usually end up with dummied out stuff when brought to North America.
 * Apparently, Pokémon Red and Blue was supposed to have 190 Pokémon. 39 of them were removed.
 * In the Japanese version of Pokémon Crystal, you could get Celebi with the GB Mobile Phone Adapter.
 * The Safari Zone. No wild Pokémon are present if it is accessed, though. In the remakes, there's a Safari Zone, but it's a completely new one in Johto—the location of the old Safari Zone now has a Pal Park.
 * In the European version of Platinum, you could not use the slot machines. You could, however, buy coins which you couldn't exchange for prizes.
 * Missingno., the infamous glitch Pokémon, is part Bird-type. No normal Pokémon have that type (it could have been scrapped in favor of the Flying type several normal Pokémon such as Pidgey have).
 * Newer games also have some dummy data, such as eighth and ninth Sevii Islands (not to be confused with Navel Rock and Birth Island, which are accessible with items from promotional events) in FireRed and LeafGreen as well as the Mystery Zone in Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, which can be accessed by using a cheating device to walk through walls. To be fair, the Mystery Zone appears to have been implemented to allow the Underground to work, so it isn't exactly Dummied Out. Yet at the same time, well, if one is cheating so that, when they go up from the underground, they appear in a different place, well, it isn't exactly Gamefreaks fault when the game crashes horribly, so it IS a bit of a redundant feature...
 * There is actually a little game data in FireRed and LeafGreen for Sevii Islands going all the way up to 24, but obviously there are only seven (plus Navel Rock and Birth Island).
 * In FireRed and LeafGreen, the Japanese version had e-Reader support for scanning Trainers into the game, with the house they're fought with being in the Sevii Islands and the door being blocked unless a card is scanned in. In the international releases, the door stays shut due to the removal of e-Reader support and hacking to access the permanently blocked door leads to a battle with Archie. The door does not work outside of the Japanese release unless the game is hacked to put the proper warp there. (Due to programming reasons Archie is a placeholder for when no Trainer is scanned into the game, so he always appears in international releases if accessed.)
 * In the fourth generation of games, Arceus is capable of transforming into the "typeless" ???-type, but there is no corresponding plate. It's only there to prevent a game crash when it changes type. (The fifth generation of games removed the ??? type entirely, so Arceus can't transform into that type even with hacking.)
 * Before HeartGold and SoulSilver were announced, users of the Pokésav hacking utility discovered that Pokémon could be configured so their capture data would say that they came from Johto. Curiously enough, HGSS Pokémon traded from a Japanese cartridge into US Platinum has their capture data say "From a Far-away Place," which is similar to, though not exactly the same as, the string for Pokémon in the 3rd Generation that were transferred into the GBA titles from 'Pokémon Colosseum and XD'' (they display "From a Distant Land").
 * In Pokémon Crystal, we have the Pokémon Communications center, which replaced the one in Goldenrod. It was avalible only in the Japanese version and it let the game connect to the internet through a special mobile adapter. It essentally functioned as the predecessor to the Global Terminal that would appear in the Nintendo DS installments. The servers have long since closed and you can't use it anymore, but the reason why it is in this section is because it was actually translated and partialy implemented into the American release before getting taken out at the very last moment and replaced with a normal Pokémon Center. The remnants can be reached with a Game Shark.
 * Another Pokémon with dummied out curiosities is the Sea Slug Gastrodon - data has been uncovered for it to have other appearance variations different from the East and West Sinnoh varieties.
 * In Red/Blue, there is coherent (i.e. not glitched and apparently intentional) data for a trainer battle with Professor Oak. He was probably the game's Bonus Boss after you fought your rival at the Pokémon League - his Pokémon (Tauros, Exeggutor, Arcanine, Gyarados, and one of the starters ) go up to level 70 and have really good movesets. He can be fought with a Gameshark.
 * In Gold and Silver, evidence exists suggesting that you were supposed to get a skateboard instead of a bike. Incidentally, the manga counterpart of Ethan (the games' protagonist) does use a skateboard.
 * Red and Green were to have a female protagonist, but was taken out due to technical limitations. She was later slightly revamped (as in a somewhat different hair style and new clothing), put into the remakes, and named "Leaf".
 * In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Time and Darkness, Shaymin and Arceus—two "secret" Pokémon back when the games were released—were originally going to be programmed in. However, they scrapped the idea...but Action Replay codes can allow you to change your leader into a decoy that learns Shaymin's moveset AND a prototype of Seed Flare, and encounter decoys that learn a prototype of Judgement.
 * Shaymin had an entire substory arc and new area implemented with it in Explorers of the Sky, and becomes a playable team member after completing it.
 * Darkness shows a Time Gear in its title screen in a lava-like place that is never seen in any of the games. If one looks at the monument at the end you can see there is enough space for there to have been one more gear, hinting that the volcano-like area was cut.
 * Fallout 2 contains lots of items and references towards things that were cut from the game due to time restraints.
 * Some of this has been restored in the Fallout 2 Restoration Project.
 * Paper Mario:
 * A number of Badges in Paper Mario and its sequel (the non-Japanese releases, at least) were Dummied Out. Some of them, had they actually been available, would have broken the game wide open, others would have been pretty useless... and at least a couple would have been insanely cool.
 * Sprites of all the partners from the first game have been discovered in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door; only Parakarry and Bow show up in the final game, with the former being given less screen time since he only delivers the Mario Bros.' mail at the beginning of the game. Also, name labels were discovered for, among others, Shy Guy, Anti Guy, Mecha-Goomba, and Mecha-Chomp.
 * The alternate graphic "tile-set" for Nethack features a few tiles that never actually appear anywhere in the game: a Beholder from Dungeons & Dragons is perhaps the most noticeable example.
 * With Nethack being open-source, you can look right at the source code and find many "deferred features" that aren't in the game at all yet but are at least partially coded. The Beholder, for example, is actually in the source already, but there's no code for its gaze attacks yet. See here for a list.
 * SLASH 'EM does, in fact, add in the Beholder.
 * Xenogears is infamous for having a whole disc dummied out, yet some data from it remains, like cutscenes that you cannot see during the course of the game, bits of script, places on the world map that cannot be accessed, and it seems that it was intended to make the whole Lacan flashback a playable part of the game and not a bunch of cutscenes: more information here.
 * Tales of Symphonia has a lighthouse in one early city that you can't enter, because "everyone who goes in it gets sick". It's an obvious sidequest trigger, but no actual sidequest is ever triggered by it. There's also a book later in the game that you're apparently supposed to fill with gossip, but it's completely useless except for filling in the entry in your Item Book. Not to mention the non-functional casino in Altamira, which is a mini-game in the Playstation 2 Japan-only re-release: this was obviously the original intent, before they ran out of time and/or money.
 * In the Derris-Kharlan prison, there is a teleporter that apparently has no function, making the short corridor to it a waste.
 * In the sequel, the final battle(s) have lines that were recorded, dubbed into English, and left out of all versions of the game. First of all, there's unique Boss Banter for each member of the first game's party, which trigger when that person is the first in your team. However, they decided to make it impossible to put anyone but Emil or Marta in that slot, so you can't trigger it without hacking. They're real cool, so it's too bad. Secondly, there is a special version of the quote used for Emil's Mystic Arte that is never used. Fans have speculated that, but for whatever reason, it was cut. It's pretty obvious that they were last-minute cuts, because all the voices are fully recorded, and they even have the English dub done.
 * Tales of the Tempest once had Stahn Aileron as a cameo boss battle.
 * A character exclusive to the Japan-only PS3 port of Tales of Vesperia has been uncovered as this trope in the original Xbox 360 game. Uh oh.
 * Also, more hacking revealed that Flynn and Repede have full field-screen animations (that is, running around and using the Sorcerer's Ring). Flynn is in your party for the grand total of one battle and leaves before you regain control, and the game never allows you to select Repede as your party leader. The PS3 version changes both of these factors: you can control Repede on the field screen, and Flynn becomes a proper party member at various points throughout the game.
 * Not to mention these dummied voice clips of Yuri, Rita and Estelle's second PS3 "exclusive artes". Makes one wonder...
 * Using the NWN toolkit to examine the expansions for Neverwinter Nights, you can find (and restore) some dialogue/action choices that were Dummied Out apparently at the request of Wizards of the Coast. One such option let you sell a kidnapped baby to a Red Wizard as a slave; hilariously, you can still kidnap the baby, but there's nothing else you can do with him.
 * At least until Hordes of the Underdark. In which you may insert the baby into a console and get summonable Drider, a dark elf with the lower body of a giant spider. Squick.
 * Neverwinter Nights 2 has several examples of this. Almost every companion has at least one unused scene that reveals more about them or expands their side-quests. For instance, Qara's side-quest with an elemental trying to kill her was supposed to be much more detailed, and include an implication that she could potentially be a greater threat than the king of shadows.
 * Arguably, the dummied-out elements that most annoyed the fanbase were the deletion of Neeshka and Bishop's romance plots.
 * Both Baldur's Gate and its sequel had some incomplete content in it. Fans scouring through the source code have, with some help from the original developers, created mods which restores some of this content, called Unfinished Business.
 * Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace Gold Box game (unsurprising, given that it's an almost-Obvious Beta) has unused data entries for extra power sources (furnace, Crown of Stars, etc), Sceptre of Cloaking, "McGuffin", smokepowder and mention of firearms (it was overwritten with shorter text, but "...K PISTOL" part remains).
 * Kingdom Hearts II had a few instances of these, including equipment that was never used in-game and enemies like Behemoth and Wyvern.
 * Proof that Nintendo Power wasn't totally wrong about a non-existent Pinocchio world in Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. Also note Hades and Megara, who aren't in the finished product.
 * Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep had levels from The Jungle Book and The Sword in the Stone that were planned to be in the final product, and even have remnants left in the code (mostly of The Jungle Book world...The Sword in the Stone one must have gotten axed very early in development.) Proof here.
 * A deleted cut scene in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne had the Demi-fiend meeting with Lilith, who after talking to him would open up a door to a bonus dungeon.
 * This was scrapped in favour of the Labyrinth of Amala.
 * In the fan-made RPG Maker game Mega Man: The RPG, there are at least two cases of this:
 * In the equipment screen, there is a slot for shields. At no point in the game do you actually get anything to put in that slot. It's all that is left of the author's intentions to put Proto Man in the game.
 * This probably has more to do with the fact that RPG Maker's equipment screens have a Shield slot by default, and there's no actual way to remove it.
 * In the desert area, there is a square that has a distinctive red marking and triggers a line from Mega Man. Apparently player would have found out what to do with it by getting a private message from the author on their birthday. It never got implemented.
 * Mother 3 has a few enemies that were cut out of the game, discovered by the hackers while working on the translation patch.
 * In addition, both Earthbound and Mother 3 contain several unused background layers. Though most of the dummied out backgrounds contained in Earthbound are just palette and/or transformation swaps of existing backgrounds with a few exceptions, Mother 3 seems to contain a series of backgrounds intended but not used for the final boss (warning: could be considered Nightmare Fuel)
 * They could also, in theory, be for the Mushroom Samba scene instead. Word of God hasn't said anything either way.
 * There is also an unused cave error that has several sprite layer issues. (If you walk to close to a certain wall you can see the individual tiles going over the lead character.)
 * Final Fantasy VIII has an entire mini-game mode for the Pocket Station, which never made it out of Japan. Said mode is still referenced in the English release and manual, probably because the decision not to release the hardware hadn't been made yet. It is (or at least was... the game is now over 10 years old) possible to play it with an imported Pocket Station from Japan. The mini-game could be used to get many useful items, and of course, 100% Completion.
 * The PC version of Final Fantasy VIII has this mini-game as a separate program which can be left running on the desktop while you play (or indeed, while you aren't playing). It still connects to the game like the original Pocket Station version did and can provide very helpful items early on.
 * Because this version was hastily thrown together, it's entirely possible to make a back-up of the minigame's save file before you import it, import the files, and then overwrite the updated save file with the backup. Repeat infinitely or until you have every item in the entire game, making it a serious Game Breaker.
 * Originally, Selphie was supposed to have two more Limit Break spells which apparently were never programmed in. These spells were Percent which cuts all enemies by 93.75% of their current HP and Catastrophe which is more powerful than the ultimate spell, Apocalypse. They can be accessed with a Gameshark.
 * Accidental example: The Angel Ring in Final Fantasy I: Dawn of Souls is supposed to be found in a treasure chest on the 33rd basement of the Whisperwind Cove, a Bonus Dungeon with 40 floors, each floor being a randomly selected one out of a set of pre-made floors. Unfortunately, the only floor that gives you the chance to collect the ring (since it's the only one that has enough treasure chests in it) is never selected to be the 33rd floor.
 * Using the Fallout 3 GECK Editor, you can find a abundance of strange items and NPCs with no model. There was going to be a better Tesla Armor that involved something called "Robo-Thor". Who was O'Grady, and why does he have his Peacemaker? Was Three Dog supposed to wield Law Dog? And was whatever the "Spinebreaker" thing that was explicitly used to scare the player in Vault 87 related to that Failed FEV Subject, and where does it "spawn the Super Mutant and start him running"?
 * These items can also be discovered and obtained by PC users without the GECK by typing "coc testqaitems" in the console. This takes the player to a room designed to test various items. Several of the dummied out items appear here as well.
 * In a reversal of the usual removal of features for Western versions, the Japanese version of Fallout3 has the evil resolution of the Megaton bomb quest removed (since it involves detonating a nuclear bomb and destroying a town. Japan is a little senstive about it if you may recall....) by removing the NPC that would trigger that part of the quest. The only thing you can do is disarm the bomb (the good resolution). As a result, the Tenpenny Tower suite and destroyed Megaton are unaccessible in the Japanese version of the game.
 * It's common for demos to block off some features without completely removing them, leaving them accessible only through cheats or exploits. A bit of map finagling in Arcanum's demo permits players to leave the roped-off starting area and explore the rest of the world (although it's very boring and most of the enemies are invisible).
 * Chrono Trigger has two music tracks, Singing Mountain and Battle 2, that were never used in the game itself. They were included on the soundtrack CD, however. The DS remake included new bonus dungeons that use the music themes.
 * If one were to make use of the "Walk Through Walls" code via cheat device in the original SNES game, walking through the bookshelf in Schala's room resulted in the screwy graphics, then your party ends up in an elevator in the Water Palace dungeon with Magus in your party. Even if you chose to kill him in the game. Something was written in that spot, but who knows what.
 * That would be the site of the "Zeal Dungeon", a dungeon of unknown purpose present in that same area in a pre-release version that's been floating around the internet for a while. The pre-release also reveals several more things of interest that were removed, such as maps and a world map graphic for the infamous Singing Mountain (present in 65,000,000 BC), a coliseum-like building on the 2300 AD map (which contains no corresponding maps anyone has found), and an entire structure using graphics from the Ocean Palace underneath the Forest Ruins near Medina in 1000 AD.
 * There are also a few weapons that were dummied out, including a weapon for Lucca that cuts an enemy's HP in half (although it's a bit glitchy sometimes, or possibly it just doesn't work on certain enemies), that can be accessed via save state editing and such.
 * The original Star Ocean for SNES was so rushed that most of the final dungeon and world never got made, making it seem very unfinished. There's also a door in Van Castle which dialogue indicates is meant to be opened, but can't be in the game. There are dozens of items and enemies (including an instrument, the Shamisen) that are in the code but can't be found, several abilities, and even remnants of code for an unused character. The remake for PSP recreates most of the things that were unfinished, including the hidden character.
 * In the Nobilia marketplace in Secret of Evermore, an old man will give you the magic gourd in exchange for the chocobo egg. The egg boosts your max hit points. Not even the game developers can remember what the gourd is supposed to do, and its description certainly doesn't give any clues.
 * Speaking of dummied out content found using an emulator, another user that goes by the name of Dunkelzahn1 uploaded a few videos of Persona 4 in which we can see unused scenes for some Social Links, incluiding totally different versions for some events and a "flag" system like the one used only in the Route allowing a Friend or Lovers relationship. Also, some of them cointains traces of early localization, such as referring to the Amagi inn as "Amagisa Ryokan" and Yukiko as "okami" instead of manager.
 * Golden Sun had quite a number of dummy items in the game data, apparently removed for the sequel. It's possible, with a password editor, to put in those items in Issac's party for The Lost Age. Some are merely dummies. Others... well... How does multiple Sol Blades and Masamunes sound to you?
 * Not to forget, Link from the Legend of Zelda in the Golden Sun art style is also hidden in the game's data.
 * Also, the sequel, The Lost Age, had several Psynergy dummied out. Through hacking, you can use these Psynergy in the game, but there's nothing that will react to them... except interestingly, some things in the second Test Room.
 * Eye of the Beholder has teleportation doors with eight symbols that come in pairs: the door with the "orb" symbol will take you to the other "orb" door on another level, and so forth.. You will find a corresponding activation key for seven of them. The eighth is the stone gem, which cannot be found in-game (although you'll get it in the sequel). Level editing reveals that the very first level has a disconnected and empty area, which contains the second portal for the stone gem.
 * Fable I contained model information for a dragon (which only appeared in the expanded version, The Lost Chapters). Likewise, the demon door which kicked off the expansion could be found, but not opened.
 * The RPGClassics shrine for Terranigma has a whole page for describing dummied-out items and dialogue.
 * Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has at least one dummied out item, a type of mushroom that can be used on Bowser by either of the bros in battles where they're fighting an enemy he's inhaled. A lot of the Bowser-only enemies were also apparently intended to be able to be fought with the bros as well, since most of them have attack patterns they only use against the bros, like Choombas blowing out smoke that forms either M or L to signify which character they're going to attack and most notably, Naplocks that throw a stack of bricks into the air over the targetted brother that need to be smashed by jumping against them and breaking them, exactly like in the platformers: this specific way of avoiding an attack doesn't occur with any other enemy in the game.
 * Even the Dark Mechawful(and its .5 power up thing) are fightable by the bros. Note, these guys are in the deepest part of the bowser only final dungeon, the game works fine. Untill you try to fight Dark Bowser with Mario and Luigi. (Fighting against the peach castle glitches, odviously. Mario and Luigi vs. Dark Fawful and Blizzard Midbus are untested, however.)
 * Breath of Fire: A dummied out item exists in the code called the "Dr Warp" (it's even in the manual and on the item list), and if you hack it into the inventory, you can use it to access dummied-out areas of the game, as seen here. There is a bar in Nanai that is normally inaccessable, probably due to the Censorship Bureau; the entire town is inaccessable during the day, and the bar door is blocked at night. If you Dr Warp into it, it looks rather unfinished, and has a music that is not heard anywhere else in the game. There's also another unfinished building in Nanai, and a Minus World-like unfinished Dragon Shrine.
 * This is what happened to the original bath scene CG images in Riviera: The Promised Land when Sting Entertainment was forced to remove them for the PSP remake. Fans who hacked the UMD found the images rather quickly.
 * A lot of unused lines, game mechanics and plotlines were left out of the Mass Effect series (with the sequel having much more cut content than the first):
 * In the sequel, it was possible to go for any of the recruitment missions at any time after you received the Normandy SR2 (including Legion, who only shows up in the final game on the mission just before the endgame begins). This was changed when the game was split onto two discs for the Xbox 360.
 * Same-sex romance options were written and fully voice-acted for Kaidan Alenko and Ashley Williams, but were left out of the original game. In the sequel, there exists coding that suggests Tali and Thane could be romanced by both male and female Shepard.
 * The Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC has several cut dialogue sequences that assume a female Shepard romanced Jack, Miranda or Tali. These suggest that the Fem Shep romances were planned, but scrapped very late in production.
 * Content removed from Samara's dossier suggests she was an accidental Ancient Astronaut in Elizabethan England who embraced eternity with William Shakespeare.
 * Harbinger has unused taunts and a longer ending speech that would have played as Shepard and his/her team flee the Collector base, where he comments that many more Reapers will be coming soon. It is believed that Shepard's dialogue in the worst possible ending (where he/she falls from the Normandy) references this deleted footage.
 * At one point, Mordin would have had the option to create a biotic field (for the "Long Walk" portion of the suicide mission). Several voice files were recorded with Mordin telling the team he can create a biotic field, and his reactions during that section of the mission.
 * In an earlier version, it was possible to complete Tali's loyalty mission without ever seeing, and have others comment on the fact that he couldn't be found.
 * Deleted voice files indicate that there would have been a confrontation scene between Mordin and Grunt. This was removed to focus on confrontations between possible love interests (Tali, Miranda and Jack) and vital squadmates for the loyalty mission since it is very easy to be without them.
 * Early video previews showed more involved gun mechanics; weapons would cool down on their own like the first game, with ejectable thermal clips as a "need More Dakka right this second" option. Specialized ammunition was shown to be a consumable resource instead of a passive ability and as such could be turned on or off at will.
 * The DLC characters (Kasumi and Zaeed) had changed loyalty missions in development (as evidenced by text files found on the disc). Kasumi's mission originally involved going after a company called Nava Corporation that was going to unleash a series of bio-viruses into the Alliance, while Zaeed's involved going after a fellow bounty hunter who's "gone corporate", then faking his own death to throw other bounty hunters.
 * In Mass Effect 3, there are several files on-disc that contain deleted or removed material from the game:
 * A (text) conversation between Ashley and Shepard onboard the Normandy, where she asks if Shepard remembers what being dead was like and if there's an afterlife. It was likely removed due to overt religious tones.
 * An audio file of an extended version of Anderson's with Shepard, where Anderson talks about possibly raising a family after the battle for Earth. The scene was apparently removed by the development team for dragging too long, even though most people seem to agree that the scene would have worked much better with the additional dialogue.
 * Additional Joker dialogue during the push towards the Conduit. Joker gets several lines, including "I'm late to the party, but the girls are coming home with me!" and "That was for Cortez!"
 * Lots of deleted audio files from various characters participating in the Priority: Earth mission, including, Grunt (who has a rallying cry about Earth and Tuchanka), Jack (who tells her students she's proud of them before they go into battle), Jacob (who says "This is my planet,assholes!") and Zaeed (who apparently manages to take out a Reaper while yelling, "Burn, you son of a bitch!").
 * In Dragon Age, several of your party members have dialogue and scenes which are not seen in the game but can be restored by mods. For example, party member Morrigan asks you to and then retrieve a certain item. A cutscene had been animated and voiced for when you return with this item, but without mods, you never get to see it and the item simply acts as an ordinary gift.
 * In Lands of Lore 3, eating a rifthound's heart will make a few random items appear. Once in a while, items will appear that can never be found normally in the game.
 * In Skies of Arcadia Legends, Pinta's Quest is dummied out. It's meant to be played on a VMU (a Dreamcast memory card/handheld console hybrid), so this makes sense, but a lot of the items are still available in-game and their descriptions still have some information about the quest they're made for.
 * Telefang has at least a couple of dummied out things:
 * The Human World, the area at the beginning of the game, was meant to be larger than what the player can normally see in the game. The whole area has plenty of buildings (albeit locked), including two of which are large and have unique graphics not seen anywhere else in the game, but the player can only see a small part of this area at the beginning of the game.
 * Telefang also has unused Super Game Boy features, including an awesome border (depends on the version you're playing) and a few color palettes (and many more unused ones).
 * Magi Nation, due to being rushed to release, has some dream creatures (mons) that are referenced in dialogue and listed in shops, but don't actually appear, and can't be obtained without a Gameshark. Rather frustratingly, this includes a couple legendaries, and some creatures that do appear require ammanite from the lost creatures, so they can't be obtained either.
 * There are even a few items that hold no purpose, such as the Ornate Awl, and the Feather items.
 * Text dumps of the original Final Fantasy reveal a line that one of the Sages was meant to deliver late in the game: "In the Temple of FIENDS are the remaining SKY WARRIORS. They fought the FIENDS and are now bats!" Its absence is more likely an accident than a deliberate choice, since the bats will tell you their story anyway (and FF1 is famous for its sloppy coding, which made whole gameplay components useless). The line is back in remakes of the game.
 * A team working on an undub ROM Hack of the European version of the first Inazuma Eleven game found a makefile in the ROM data, originally used for packing the game's sound data.
 * Moon Knight and Colossus were Dummied Out of the Xbox, PS2 and PSP versions of Marvel Ultimate Alliance. However, they can accessed by certain methods.
 * Septerra Core. Early, pre-patch release versions of the game had one more card slot than there were cards. This caused some people to believe that they were missing a card, and scour the game for the (non-existent) card. It is, however, still believed that there was a card meant to go in that slot at one time, but it got cut or combined with another card.
 * The code for Might and Magic VIII includes three skills from the game before that cannot be learned. There is also a Druid Circle dungeon in Murmurwoods, filled with dangerous monsters and with a quest item called a "Druid Circlet" in it. A quest item without a connected quest, and that is not a wearable headgear. The most common theory it that it was supposed to be part of a Druid promotion quest, before the Druid class got axed.
 * Might and Magic VII was, at some point, intended to have Manticore and Scorpicore monsters. They were never finished, and lack a model, but while they do not spawn in any of the regions, they can show up in the Arena—which is rather problematic, because lacking a model they are invisible and the game crashes if you try to check how much health they have left.
 * SD Snatcher has an unfinished stage on the third disk that is inaccessible except by hacking.
 * A large amount of material was cut from the original Deus Ex prior to its release. Using console commands, it's possible to access a selection of cut content:
 * Originally, the player could choose to stay with UNATCO instead of transmitting the NSF emergency signal. Conversations can be accessed that have JC telling Paul that UNATCO isn't perfect (but he'll stay with them anyway), and, later on, the troops on the superfreighter being able to talk casually with Denton. It's believed the alternate plotline was removed either because it was much shorter (content-wise) than the NSF plotline, or there wasn't enough time to finish it.
 * You can use a console command to summon Ford Schick (who normally disappears after saving him) in Smuggler's hideout, where he has a full set of lines thanking you and offering augmentation upgrades.
 * There was an entire level planned at the White House, where JC would supposedly visit the President and his wife and get advice. It was cut because the designers thought it would be boring, but various elements can be summoned through the console.
 * At one point in the game's development, there was a plotline where JC would discover that Maggie Chow was married to Paul Denton. By clipping outside of the Wan Chai Market, you can find a Red Arrow guard that tells you about this plot point, and gives you tips about the people in the area. It's unknown if this was actually a planned plot twist or just Chow trying to throw you off her trail.
 * There are all sorts of deleted items and NPC's that can be found in the gamecode, including an alternate Chinese security bot, a vial of Gray Death and more.
 * The fact that, when activating the console cheats, the user needs to specify JC's sex (along with the gender-neutral language refering to the Dentons used in the opening cutscene) suggests that the developers were planning to allow the player to choose which gender the Player Character could be. This was a feature later fully implimented in Deus Ex Invisible War.
 * Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines was originally supposed to have a "Histories" system, wherein the player could affect point distribution or XP costs at character creation. For instance, a Ventrue (which usually gets the most points in Social Attributes) could select the "Union Leader" history to make Physicals the primary Attributes, or a Malkavian could take "Doomseer" in order to get greater benefits from Auspex at the cost of Obfuscate. The code's still there and can be activated easily, but it's not something that comes with the game automatically.
 * The GBA version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has remnants of a Tapper clone floating about in the data. You can cheat your way into it, but its Unwinnable, as the "catch the mug" routine was either removed or never finished.
 * Dark Souls has a lot of dummied out dialog, items and quests showing What Could Have Been. There are also a few items that were dummied out that can be obtained by hacking your save file, such as the Elite Cleric Set and the Mage Smith Armor.

Shoot Em Ups

 * Embodiment of Scarlet Devil's game data reveals a few lines for one "Rin Satsuki", who was cut for reasons unknown. Isn't it sad, Sacchin?
 * Early on in Sakuya's stage in Mega Mari (a Touhou-themed clone of Mega Man), there is another hallway underneath the floor. A Lyrica is down there as well as a ladder leading down, but there is no way to access it.
 * Touhou Hisoutensoku, one of the fighting game spinoffs, was going to include Kaguya and Mokou as playable characters. They were cut because as initially designed their movesets were gamebreakers, and there wasn't enough time to balance them.
 * Nitori was also supposed to appear, but was cut for time. Claims of Wriggle appearing might just have been a joke.
 * Metal Slug has a number of dummied out content within each game, with Metal Slug 5 being the most Egregious. Ragey's site Metal Slug: Missing In Action documents the vast amounts of lost content there is in the series.
 * Astro Blaster has a Sector 8 which is featured in the Attract Mode but can't actually be played because the game loops after Sector 7. This makes Secret Bonus Number 20 impossible to obtain without hacking the game.
 * The cutscenes of Thwaite were originally supposed to have characters walking around. Graphics for this are still present in the tile sheet.

Simulation Games

 * Animal Crossing:
 * In Animal Crossing Gamecube, the "Dummy" Item escaped though a mistake in the igloo trading game.
 * Similarly, if one hacks an item not meant to be in the game at all, and then drops it outside, there is a chance it will either A) become invisible and thus impossible to pick up again (and also make that tile unusable to drop any other item on it since it's "used"), B) shuffle among the icons of other droppable items (such as a bag, a pitfall, furniture leaves, etc), or interestingly, C) a fish frozen in-mid flop. This icon only appears through this method and was never used in-game officially otherwise, perhaps hinting toward the possibility that fish could have had more freedom of what to do with them than they did (such as dropping them in places besides in water (not including within a house where they are displayed in tanks and aren't the same as this sprite), although what that says for the fish's well-being is another story.
 * Also, the NES Games, The Legend of Zelda & Super Mario Bros. are only available in the Gamecube game via Action Replay.
 * In Wild World, the game will treat any item that isn't defined in the game code as a pitfall... but only if you receive the item in-game, because the check for this is built into the item-reward code. With Action Replay you can get any item, including an item that completely bricks the game card if you drop it in someone else's town.
 * Supposedly the basegame of The Sims 2 was supposed to have weather, but the code was commented out when they couldn't prevent the rain from falling through the roofs of buildings. An expanded version was wrapped up into the Seasons expansion pack. Pre-Seasons houses are not all weather-proof, though, and many have to be altered.
 * An Expansion Pack introduced the object magic lamp, which when rubbed summoned a genie. The player could ask for something predetermined, e.g. love or beauty. There was code that would supposedly give the option for sims to change their age bracket, but that was Dummied Out.
 * And can be expected in a widely-modded game, two people managed to find and fix the code (adults to teens or elders to adults), and someone else is working on new wishes.
 * There also is a Debug mode that is only accessible by using a cheat code in Create A Sim which allows you to access hidden outfits that for whatever reason are not available in the game (along with NPC outfits and career outfits).
 * Sim City has it's fair share of hidden content, some of which was discovered by mere accident by modders:
 * In 3000, some of the game's adviser panels would display buildings that didn't exist or couldn't be found in the game; this included what appeared to be a smaller version of the Maximum Security Prison, a variation of the apartment building Rock Bottom Terrace, and some bizarre rocket-ship-shaped building.
 * The Sim City 2000 theme is still in 3000, but can't be found in the music list. Some judicious editing of game files will fix that.
 * Some hidden contents in 3000 can be accessed through a cheat. This includes the Sim City Castle and tiles to make real-size airports (compared to the surrounding buildings) instead of the small-scale airports. It's also possible to get a very useful 'Better Bulldozing'-tool through the editing of a configuration file, which allows things like half-highways. Furthermore, by importing a grayscale file you can have maps that are impossible to create in the map-editor.
 * In Sim City Deluxe (as well as the original game and separate expansion pack), there was supposed to be some extra tools that would allow you to change the color of the terrain, create lakes at various altitudes (like in a mountain gorge), and plant various species of trees, but weren't available in the final product (mods do offer some of these, but most aren't permanent and won't save in the city). And if you also look at Rush Hour's additional music tracks, you'll find that some numbers aren't there (it appears that there were going to be about 15 new music tracks, but not all made it). There also appears that there was some kind of on-screen advisor or some kind assistant who would point things out that had a full body model and even UI panels, but he shows up no where in the actual game.
 * The Sim City 4 expansion also came with an unfinished transportation network. It's impossible to mod a new "real" transportation network, but this unfinished network allowed a major mod.
 * Wing Commander Prophecy was originally slated to have multiplayer capability, but development resources prevented it from being finished. Unfortunately, the work had proceeded for long enough to have made it into an ad for the then-upcoming game. A fan Game Mod later added the capability to play against others online.
 * X 3 Terran Conflict has a couple dozen starships that were not included in the final cut of the game, though only three of them were actually finished (the rest were still placeholders). The ATF Valhalla and Woden did make it into the next game.
 * Barney and Mimi from Harvest Moon DS and Cute were supposed to be in Harvest Moon a Wonderful Life. You could also train your dog and the animals had more movements then in the final product.

Sports Games

 * Kobe Bryant in Backyard Basketball 2004. That was because his court case was that year.
 * Similarly, the final patch of Madden 08 removes Michael Vick from the game.
 * The iPhone port of Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 did not let players make their own skaters, unlike the original versions. However, looking in the app files reveals that many textures used by custom skaters are still in the data.

Stealth-Based Games

 * Metal Gear Solid 2 has a mysterious video of the Statue of Liberty with no sound, and some sound files that were never used (like Snake shouting 'La-li-lu-le-lo? La-li-lu-le-lo! LA-LI-LU-LE-LOOO!').
 * The Liberty video might have been part of the cut-scene which showed . It was removed after 9/11.
 * There's also the FAMAS rifle, only available in the Tanker chapter using a cheat device. Snake's FAMAS rifle still appears in the game, but only in one cut-scene which uses FMV footage from one of the pre-release trailers.
 * The final level of Hitman: Blood Money has a room that cannot be accessed without carefully placed teleportation skills using the Command Window. The room is the crematorium where, which, most likely would have been implemented, had the Alternate Ending not been chosen instead.
 * Aside from some data for the cancelled Thief II Gold bonus levels, the entire multiplayer feature in Thief II definitely counts. Cut from the game due to time constraints, multiplayer was later modded back in using netcode in the game's files, and maintains a small community of players.

Survival Horror

 * Silent Hill has several dummied-out rooms in Midwich Elementary School. Also, the Bottomless Pits were intended to be death traps as in the later games, but you can't fall into them during normal gameplay.
 * The boat was meant to be a vehicle to reach the lighthouse, as evidenced by Harry looking at the steering wheel although it does nothing. There's also a car engine at the gas station that serves no purpose.
 * Silent Hill Homecoming has a ton of unused voice files that hint at various dropped characters, a cameo by Walter Sullivan of Silent Hill 4, a larger amount of involvement by Deputy Wheeler, and lots of explicit backstory before it was made more subtle. There's a blog entry going into tremendous detail here, as well as a YouTube video containing some of the unused dialog here.
 * The blog link is dead. But you can still find information on the cut content on the Silent Hill wiki.
 * A truly horrible example of this afflicts a certain version of Resident Evil 3. This is somewhat odd in that it is only a particular re-release of the game, not the release for a certain country or console. Players of the original Playstation version found that completing the game would get them a "boutique key" item, allowing access to the secret costumes, and would also unlock "The Mercenaries", the extra game mode in which you unlock weapons for use in the main game. The Dreamcast version of the game was a little strange. There was no boutique key, and indeed the Boutique is inaccessible. Instead the player has every costume when they start the game. The Mercenaries still functioned as normal. The PC version is a port of the Dreamcast version, the same in every way but one. "The Mercenaries" is accessible from an entirely separate .exe file instead of from the main menu of the game.
 * This incident occurred when a certain company known as Xplosiv (they specialise in releasing cheap versions of old PC games) brought out their version of Resident Evil 3. "The Mercenaries" mode was completely and utterly missing. They'd even deleted the pages about it from the .pdf file instruction manual, but had left in the contents page which clearly said it should be there. The Mercenaries mode can be replaced by downloading its .exe file, if you can find it online. But it still won't make the game fully playable as originally intended by Capcom. Why? Because the Xplosiv release also removed the function allowing you to save your completed game file. Weapons unlocked in "The Mercenaries" can only be used in a second play through a completed file. As a result, Xplosiv have managed to break every single unlockable item in the game, remove most of the replay value, and caused many many fans of the game to scream in frustration and horror as they realise what has happened. WHYYY!?
 * Speaking of Resident Evil, Resident Evil Outbreak and Outbreak File #2 both contain data for extra character costumes not normally acquirable in the games, and it's largely speculated that these were intended for a File #3 if it ever saw the light of day. A Game Shark can be used to put them in the game proper, but while the games were online, Capcom eventually locked out accounts that were found to be using these inaccessible characters.
 * Poking around on the Resident Evil 2 disc with a Game Shark reveals a number of items and weapons that were cut from the final game, including a machine gun called the Calico.

Third-Person Shooter

 * Freedom Fighters, though a lengthy and satisfying game, has a very odd bonus stage. It is a half-assed mission where one kills Russians on a semi-modeled Liberty Island. It is a fun mission but suggests that something was cut out of the remainder.
 * Apparently, tons of stuff was dummied out of the James Bond game Tomorrow Never Dies. To wit: sound files in the "Sound Test" that don't appear in the game such as Q saying "007, you're going the wrong way!" and the sound of a punch (as well as pre-release footage of Bond punching out a bad guy). The hard difficulty ending movie shows a cutscene of awesome stuff from the game, but most of it was dummied out: flying the MiG, Bond bailing from the BMW, and a large, mysterious rusty tanker in the Japanese terrorist camp.

Turn-Based Strategy

 * Fire Emblem always has a few dummy items/characters. A (mostly) full list can be found here - there are some minor spoilers. Interestingly, some of the plot of the tenth game (Radiant Dawn) could be spoiled ahead of time by breaking open the ninth (Path of Radiance). The biggest example is that two characters have the exact same stats (basically giving away that they're the same person), but you would only be able to see the stats of one of them in normal gameplay.
 * Final Fantasy Tactics A2 was supposed to have a "Transmuter" job for the Nu Mou race, but it was cut out since the game was close to release time and they couldn't afford to delay the game and test the (very complicated) abilities from the job. The job was supposed to let a Nu Mou mix items together to get various effects. Its sprite still exists in the game; the character portrait/avatar is used for the luck stick sellers (showing both player and enemy colors) and the battle sprite can be seen when you start any tower in Brightmoon Tor and in some of the auctions. Word of God confirms this and they were visibly upset about being forced to cut the job.
 * X-COM features all sorts of unused stuff in the code/data of the game, such as Gatling Laser, smaller holdout pistol (1x1, but not as fast and accurate), various alien UFO components, a differently-shaped Small Scout UFO, and the ability to generate random UFOs based on the various major classes of enemy ships. Some of these features can either be hacked into gameplay by XComUtil.
 * Terror from the Deep has a lot of shared data from the first X-Com, allowing canny modders to bring back some of the stuff they had from Enemy Unknown.
 * Apocalypse has an unused Research option called One Way to Win, along with several other things like Tracker Guns and Prison Cells for human criminals and organization leaders, and weapons like the Dimension Destablizer. These hint at a far more ambitious game that eventually got smacked with time and budget problems. See this page for a list of dummied out items.
 * After Strategy First released the source code to Jagged Alliance 2, many such removed features were revealed, including random airstrikes, weather effects, and a massive attack set to occur in the very early stages of the game. Most of these features were returned to the game in Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13.
 * In Phantom Brave there is an "Infernal Sword" version of the Yoshitsuna that can only be gained via cheating. This is the version that the Disgaea protagonists can get. The holy version of the sword is merely called The Divine Sword.
 * In Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, hackers can find that the Hyperdrive item from La Pucelle and Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. It lets you teleport anywhere on the screen; it functions perfectly, it's perfectly translated into english, and it was even moved onto the PSP Videogame Remake. According to the Doublejump Strategy Guide; when asked; Nippon Ichi and NIS America "have nothing to say on the matter."

Wide Open Sandbox

 * The Grand Theft Auto has several:
 * An infamous example is the "Hot Coffee" (by which we mean sex) minigame from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Apparently, some of the resources used in the Hot Coffee minigame actually were used in other parts of the game, which is why the data is on the final version of the game disc. It's also (most likely) thanks to Hot Coffee that the ESRB now asks game developers to see any dummied data when rating games.
 * San Andreas is also missing the interior for the San Fierro Police Department (which is why you respawn on a nondescript street corner near the building and you can't enter it, unlike the other ones,) presumably because entering it crashed the game or they didn't have time to clean up the programming for release, and hospital interiors as well. There is also text data for a skateboard hidden in the game's main files as well (which is why Los Santos has a skatepark.) The skateboard was scrapped for the presumably much easier to program and animate bicycles.
 * Don't forget the normally-inaccessible Andromada plane, tons of building interiors, and a substantial chunk of Liberty City.
 * The area of Liberty City where the opening of GTA 3 takes place is not seen anywhere in-game. Unless you can fly the Dodo, that is.
 * GTAIV has several vehicles that are innacessible by normal means, which later appeared in the DLC episodes.
 * Bully, another Rockstar Games game, has a few as well:
 * Hattrick Manor. It's a house with a partially finished interior that can be entered with a well-timed bike jump. There's a mission where you have to steal a female student's diary back from Mr. Hattrick and it's believed that the original concept for the mission involved breaking into his house rather than the teacher's lounge at the school.
 * Several characters were dummied out. There were a pair of adults named Nate and Flynn, it's believed that they were for the cancelled Xbox version of Bully and would have been involved in uploading songs to the game.
 * A room that appears in the opening trailer doesn't actually appear in the game.
 * Bob, the wide-shouldered white kid in the mission cutscene for The Gym Is Burning, appears nowhere else in the game. The character model in his wrestling outfit can be hex-edited into the game, but a regular clothes model seen in old screenshots was removed from the code entirely.
 * There are a few cutscenes in trailers that were cut from the final version of the game, mostly likely to keep the T rating. One had Gary Smith pantomiming doggy-style sex, another was a closeup of Mandy's legs while she was wearing a towel.
 * Although skateboard and bike tricks weren't included in the final version of the game, there's a skate park that serves no purpose except for one mission, and lines of dialouge for watching someone screw up a trick in the data files.
 * The Boys' Dorm was originally intended to be a two-story building. If you stand far enough away from the dorm and zoom in with your camera, you can see the old two-story model.
 * Most of the new content for Scholarship Edition was dummied out of the original game, then readded.
 * Black and White has an Easter Egg where you move the mouse in a certain way and phoneboxes appear. Unfortunately, if you try to actually do anything with the Easter Egg, you get a message saying "sorry, the boss removed this cheat".
 * In The Godfather the map displays Barbers and Tailors as important locations but they are in fact just normal shops. They were meant to be where you would buy new clothes and change your hair but this idea got scrapped and instead you buy clothes and change your look outside the main game, when you select the file you wish to play.
 * S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl has a huge amount of cut content, of which this is only some.
 * These included an entire area called "Dark Valley Escape" South of Dark Valley (explaining the odd transition from Dark Valley to Cordon, where you walk through a gate and come out of a tunnel), a second mobile lab associated with the Americans and guarded by Freedom (see next point for a particularly obvious relic of this system), the swamp level that ended up in Clear Sky control bindings for cars and a helicopter, and a number of barely dummied-out weapons, equipment items (including useless anomaly detectors), and even several enemies. Early versions of the game also had mounted guns (the leaked Beta included a minigun).
 * Many players were puzzled by a glitch in one of the Yantar lab's missions, where Kruglov would wake after a blowout and become hostile to the player. This is because the Yantar lab is still Duty-affiliated, and the player's reputation can cause Kruglov to think they're an enemy.
 * The infamous "Chernobyl Dog" in Red Forest probably wasn't supposed to be in the game at all, given that it only appears once and the game crashes if you kill it. It's a strange Pseudodog with a Controller's screen-blurring attack and the ability to spawn clones of itself that attack normally but vanish if shot even once.
 * Red Forest also includes a strange door, likely to a missing area; a combination lock leads to a small room with another door and nothing much inside.
 * Several NPCs carry useless items; it's possible to get hold of a guitar, a harmonica and a pair of goggles called "hand_radio."
 * The original game's artifact descriptions name one called "shell" that never actually appears. Descriptions of cut anomalies called "lift" and "time" are present in the game files; respectively supposed to create the artifacts Pellicle and Mama's Beads.
 * In the Gamecube Version of Ultimate Spider-Man, there is a dummied-out piece of ground in the water by the Statue of Liberty. No points for correctly guessing where it was supposed to go.
 * In the Spider-Man 2 game, jump from boat to boat until you get to one that's farthest southeast from Manhattan. Now take a fully-charged leap as far as possible into the sea further southeast. Right before you hit the water and get teleported back to shore, you'll see the words "Governors Island" show up as if you were entering a new area, but there's nothing but water there. This indicates that Governors Island was going to be visitable but it was cut.
 * Saints Row the Third had several plot threads, alternate endings and story ideas scrapped during development, which explains why the game feels a bit rushed story-wise, you can read the details here.

Non-Video Game Examples

 * If you poke around The Best Page in The Universe's pages' HTML source, you'll find a variety of commented-out bits.
 * Using the "Edit" button on some pages here at All The Tropes will reveal commented-out lines in the wiki markup (lines which begin with %% are comments).


 * That Other Wiki, frequently leaves messages specific to certain pages by commenting them out, using the markup . This allows editors to leave more-than-boilerplate messages about persistent problems with the page—usually ones that lead to Edit Wars and Flame Wars—in the article itself—rather than on the talk page, which is frequently ignored.
 * As a non-computer-related example from genetic biology, we have so-called "Junk DNA", more properly known as Noncoding DNA, which makes up a huge proportion of the genetic structure of virtually all living organisms. While some of them do indeed have a function (e.g. deciding when and where certain genes are expressed), these segments of the genetic code do not encode for protein sequences and the most obvious reasons for their presence are historical. They were responsible for the production of proteins in our ancestors, but are no longer needed.
 * Parts of the non-coding section of the genome appear to be deactivated, mutated copies of modern genes, eg. for different versions of the blood-related protein called hemoglobin. Since these genes are possibly functional (or nearly so), yet inaccessible by the usual human gene expression system, they're dummied out similar to a developers' test level. This supposed "junk" makes up the majority of the human genome and is still not fully understood.
 * Disney Theme Parks contain many remnants of attractions that were never finished, such as the dragon-shaped rock and castle bridge intended for Beastly Kingdom, and the ravens in the Haunted Mansion that were supposed to be the narrator.
 * "Ramps to nowhere" are bridges or highway ramps that dead-end in midair, intended for aborted freeway projects. For example, the ramps of the cancelled R.H. Thomson Expressway near Seattle's Washington Arboretum, and until 1990, the I-5 / I-90 interchange. SR-520 ended in a similar fashion for several years. The Alaskan Way viaduct also has dummy ramps that were meant to connect with I-90.
 * Another example of this is the Korean War Veterans Parkway in Staten Island, New York, where it was supposed to connect to the Staten Island Expressway on another part of the island. Due to protests from residents and environmentalists, the construction projected was canceled and the parkway ends at a dead end with grass growing over the unfinished portions of the road, directing traffic to the side streets as drivers reach the highway's end.
 * Interstate 180 is a 13 mile offshoot of I-80 leading to the tiny town of Hennepin, Illinois, originally built so a steel plant there could have easy Interstate access. Unfortunately, the plant went out of business almost as soon as 180 was completed. 180 still stands, and is one of the least travelled pieces of Interstate in America... and in a fit of circular logic, this has been used as justification to scuttle a proposed extension to the more metropolitan Peoria, where an on-ramp and section of Interstate-grade highway meant to connect with it instead dead-end in the middle of a field.
 * Also in Illinois is the Amstutz Expressway, a 2.9 mile four-lane highway which is known as the road-to-nowhere. The Amstutz was originally planned as a connecting route for the downtown area of Waukegan, but the critical link between the neighboring village of North Chicago was never built, and the factories the expressway was designed to serve have since closed. Fewer then 15,000 vehicles use this route as a result, because it's used so little, the Amstutz is often used for filming in movies such as Batman Begins, Blues Brothers, Groundhog Day, and The Ice Harvest.
 * Ditto for Interstate 170 (US 40) in Maryland. The ghost ramps were scheduled for demolition in summer 2011.
 * Then there's the ghost ramps of I-275 in Florida.
 * There's a double example southwest of Ann Arbor, Michigan, resulting from two expressways that were planned but never built. One would have run along the path of M-52, which to this day still has an extra-wide right-of-way to accomodate the extra carriageway of an expressway. The other would've run closely to US-12 (which was US-112 at the time), but it was pretty much scuttled once I-94 was built only a few miles north. Despite the changes in plans, there is still visible grading for what would've been a cloverleaf exit between the M-52 and US-112 expressways.
 * Some examples from the Netherlands:
 * There's a 30+ km long 2-lane road between the Dutch cities of Haarlem and Leiden that was originally planned as a 4-lane road (40 years ago). The bodies of sand for the 4 lanes are present, and despite being only a 2-lane road, this stretch is raised, with bridges and onramps like a highway, unlike most Dutch 2-lane roads and many 4-lane roads which have traffic lights at intersections. At the north end, near Haarlem, there's a curious turn in the road, and you can see the body of sand continuing ahead for a little while (but not too far, because the north stretch of the road is blocked by other developments)
 * Likewise, between Delft and Rotterdam there is a huge undocumented park that was originally planned to be a highway. It will finally be created after nearly 50 years of discussion...
 * If you look at the outskirts of the national airport Schiphol on satellite pictures (Google Maps) you can spot the remnants of a never created road stretching along the southern edge westwards right through the city of Hoofddorp. The only true proof that you can see on the ground is a rail bridge crossing the non-existing road, some obvious gaps in dykes, and a ditch.
 * Stephenson Road in Perth, Australia is a 4 lane, 1 km stretch of road originally intended to be part of a much longer highway - the other part of Stephenson Road can be found considerably further south. The likelihood of this highway being completed now is slim - a wetland that the road would pass through has now been restored and houses abut the road reserve (which is still clear).
 * Like freeways, subways also contain many areas that were never finished or decommissioned early on, for example, the easternmost part of Aldwych Station.
 * Kymlinge station on the Stockholm Metro is another one. The area was supposed to be developed into a suburb, but such plans were eventually scrapped. By then, planning of the line the station was on was already well under way, and the station was built but left intentionally unfinished and unopened. There are also stories about the station being haunted.
 * The New York Subway has plenty of these as well. Perhaps the most infamous example is the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan. This was intended to be a replacement for the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue Elevated line, but it's fifty years since the El was removed and there's nothing built yet but a few unused tunnels, one of which was rented out for a wine cellar. There are also tunnel headings, unused station shells, and in one case an entire stub line (now used for the Transit Museum) which had been intended for the never-built IND Second System.
 * In the Rio de Janeiro subway system there's an underground semi-made station between two active ones which is very visible as a gigantic cave for whoever goes through that route. It also had a planned elevated station that was never built, which results in an enormous way of about 1.2 miles between two stations.
 * There was originally going to be one through Cincinnati. The project was scrapped, but several tunnels were constructed before hand. One is visible near the Norwood lateral on ramp. It's blocked by a three story tall slat fence. That wasn't always the case. There were no tracks, but the tunnel was finished and the atmosphere just screams get out. Even during the day.
 * Lougheed Town Center station of Vancouver's SkyTrain had a third platform and a series of switching tracks built for the Evergreen line.
 * MIT's Building 9 originally had a corridor that connected to Building 7, but when the Rotch Library was added on to Building 7, it took up that space and the connection had to be removed. This resulted in Building 9 having a corridor which has a short flight of stairs leading to nothing but a dead end. In 1998, some clever anonymous hackers put a mural there of a painted tunnel with Wile E. Coyote smashed into it, and it's been there ever since.
 * Seattle's Ballard Bridge has a mysterious stairway to nowhere (now fenced-off) on its south end. It might have been used for access to a section of the Emerson bike trail that was closed off due to that space becoming private property. Now it dead-ends in the mud, water, and bushes.
 * Occasionally, Transformers toys will have features taken out during production.
 * One of the most famous is Hoist from Transformers Armada, which was intended to have a geared gimmick similar to that of Cyclonus.
 * Voyager-class Starscream from Transformers Cybertron has space for batteries and a speaker, and even some of the circuitry for sound effects, but in all of its releases, the mold has never featured sound effects.
 * On the topic of Voyager-class Starscreams, the Revenge of the Fallen Voyager Starscream was originally meant to have hinges in his hands that would allow them to fold over on themselves to hide them in vehicle mode, and joints that would allow his arm-mounted weaponry to fold further out. While neither of these exist on the final toy, both are visible in his instruction sheet.
 * The Generation 1 toys that were derived from the Diaclone series had "pilot seats" meant for the mini-figures that were included with the original toys. Many of the missile launchers, especially on the reissues, were weakened or disabled.
 * Many MOD music files have unused or hidden patterns, sometimes accessible by skipping beyond the position where the song ends or loops.
 * Older model car kits, particularly by Tamiya and Fujimi, sometimes had battery-powered or friction-drive motors. These were removed in the rereleased versions, but the cars retain the battery and/or motor compartments. Likewise, many kits have unused parts, ususally left over from other variations of the model.
 * In a Log Book for One Piece, a series of sketches were printed, one of which was Chopper with Robin's arms, legs, and eyes on his back. When asked about this, Oda said he was originally intending on Robin to transport the unconscious crew via this method at the end of the Skypiea battles, but he realized this would be such Nightmare Fuel for his younger readers that he replaced the idea with something simpler. Still, it brings up an untapped idea of how Robin could easily expose of enemies without using her basic "Clutch" attack.
 * Seen frequently in shopping malls, which often cover up vacant storefronts with temporary walls. This is more obvious when a department store vacates a mall, often resulting in a hallway that abruptly dead-ends in a wall. In some cases, the vacant anchor is even torn down, creating a more glaring vacancy.
 * Other times, a hallway is intended to end in an anchor store which is never built in the first place. For example, Kyova Mall in Ashland, Kentucky was supposed to have six anchor stores, but two were never built and to this day, the mall has two hallways which lead only to grassy fields.
 * In extreme cases, an entire wing is walled off so that the public cannot access it.
 * In a particularly unusual example, the "Winner's Circle" Bonus Round on Pyramid was originally intended to have 10 categories instead of 6. After it was deemed too hard, a board was hastily nailed over the slots where the bottom 4 boxes on the triangular board would have gone. This remained until the set was redesigned.
 * The 501-503 Construction Project in Russia. This was intended to be a railroad from North Urals to Igarka near Yenisei's mouth. A part of this railroad was built in Stalin's times using gulag inmate labor, but work stopped when Stalin died. For several decades the rails just sat there in the tundra, unused. Then part of the railroad was disassembled, and part reclaimed by Gazprom and repaired back into use. But most of the 501-503 still sit there and rust.
 * An interesting example would be in Star Trek: The Next Generation where an early model of the Ambassador Class is visible in the conference room as a mural of all the Starfleet ships named Enterprise. The final Ambassador design was very different, but the ship in the mural was never changed. Other examples may be present in the various models of ships found on desks of officers; leftovers of models that were going to be used but never were.
 * A rare tabletop RPG example: the Avalon sourcebook for Seventh Sea has a Destiny Spread that grants the character a "1 Point Druidic Secrets Advantage." But Druidic Secrets didn't make it to the printed book.
 * An earlier iPod touch model had room for the yet-to-be-included camera.
 * Work had already started on a new shopping centre in Bradford, England when the recession hit. A large chunk of the city had already been demolished and the foundations had been dug when the money ran out and the work halted. The site has been fenced off to the public and has been known as Bradford's big hole ever since.