Heroes of the Gamingverse:
The original name of New Game was going to be Heroes of the Gamingverse. I thought this name was a bit clunky though, and New Game was a much better fit, shorter and to the point. Heroes of the Gamingverse was first created in 2017, and was changed to New Game in 2018 when I first began writing.

No Master Mind:
The very first concept of New Game didn’t have Master Mind at all. In fact, there wasn’t really a main villain. The original plot still had Bowser stealing a jewel and teleporting video game characters to the real world, but all the villains just did their own thing, not part of the same team. Bowser specifically got the people of Earth to treat him as a leader of sorts, and part of the plot would have been dethroning Bowser.

Master Hand:
The second concept for New Game involved a team up of Master Hand and Crazy Hand from Super Smash Bros with Polygon Man from PlayStation All-Stars. The series would have had them polygonizing both heroes and villains, like Peach and Bowser, and using them to control their armies, which would be Toads and Koopas in this case. This concept was a little messy though and I feared it wouldn’t allow certain characters to shine since they’d be polygon minions. The combination of these villains have also been done a lot, so I scrapped the idea.

Mario’s Friend:
The prologue also has the first scrapped character in the series: Mallow from Super Mario RPG. He didn’t have an actual episode planned, but instead was meant to meet Mario at Peach’s castle instead of Toad. There was going to be an episode featuring Mallow later on, but that never came to fruition.