Michael Jackson was originaly suppost to do the music for Sonic 3 before Sega dropped him due to "The allegations". MJ's prodution team picked it up instead. Word is, some of the music is MJ's original concepts anyway.
The original concept for the NES was going to be 16bit but Nintendo found that the prodution cost of the cartridges would be to expencive at the time and made it 8bit.
I think it was intentionally called Donkey Kong. The Monkey story isn't true (according to an issue of Edge's Retro).
The true story is that Miyamoto wanted the name of of the beast to echo an animal that was typically stubborn. Thus Donkey Kong.
Universal Pictures tried to sue Nintendo for trademark violation of King Kong. However Nintendo's lawyer Howard Lincoln went onto prove that Universal themselves had demonstrated that the King Kong brand was public domain in a previous lawsuit against RKO Pictures which led to the 1976 remake. Lincoln later went onto become Chaiman of NOA.
However Universal did successfully convince Coleco to pay royalties for their port of Donkey Kong on their Colecovision console. This was before Nintendo got the case kicked out. When it was kicked out, Coleco no longer had to pay the royalties and the money Uniersal had received in the meatime was given to Nintendo!
The name of id software originally came from their time working for on the Gamers Edge disc magazine for Softdisk, where there business cards said 'Ideas from the Deep'.
The first id games released on Shareware were some of the Commander Keen titles which were programmed whilst they were still working for Softdisk.
The first 3D game created by the id team was not Wolfenstein 3D, but was Hovertank 3D in which the player controls 'Brick Sledge'. This was released for Softdisk.
Wolfenstein itself was not id's licence. The first two Wolfenstein games were completely written by Silas Warner for the Apple II back in 1981 and 1984. id loved the games and just decided to make a sequel without any approval (although Warner later played the game and loved it - giving id his blessing).
The name Quake and Daikatana come from the D&D games that John Carmack created and played with the id team during their early days together. Quake was Carmacks all powerful character who wielded a giant hammer and the Daikatana was the weapon of ultimate power that they all sought. The original vision of Quake was to be a complex adventire game along the lines of the D&D RPG, before Carmack scaled it back to a straight forward FPS.
Another World on the Megadrive has a very interesting link to Half Life. Complete Another World and at the end sequence the main character marries the love of his life - Betty Freeman. Betty has a brother by the name of Gordon Freeman. Around that time he has just been offered a job at a secret government testing. The main character then advises him from doing any dodgy experiments...after all that’s how the guy got transported to "another world". Gordon nods his head and the game ends.
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