The Lost Levels

Hot Coffee Controversy
Finding a few discarded bits of sprite art and unfinished levels in Super Mario Bros. 3 seems relatively harmless. But publisher/developer, Rockstar discovered that leaving unused data like this in the final version of its product can lead to disastrous consequences. We assume that you’ve heard about that thing called Grand Theft Auto and the infamous Hot Coffee mod scandal. But in case you’ve been living in a cave with no wireless internet for the past three years, we suggest you check out all the gory details in our Top 7 PR Disasters feature.

Army of Two’s Blood Brothers
Sometimes cut content is best left on the cutting room floor. Before the final version of Army of Two released, the game featured a much-talked about minigame, where one player would heal his partner’s bullet wounds with a tampon. It led to much snickering on gaming sites and forums across the internet, but Army of Two’s assistant producer Matt Turner is confident that removing the tampon minigame was the right decision, as it "broke the flow" (get it?) of the game. “It was a great idea and we loved it. But we felt that the mini game not only grew tiresome after the 8th, 9th, 10th times doing it but it also really took the player out of the combat experience and broke the flow of the game,” said Turner in an interview on 20pGaming.

Below: If you’re sad that the tampon game got cut, take solace in this video featuring the minigame

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