the thing about development hell is that often there is no "the game as originally envisioned" to be pined for or found with "just a little more time"
a lot of times you end up in development hell because the core vision is vague, contradictory, keeps changing, has big holes in it. It's not that those games fell short of their original ideals so much as they were trying to build a brick house on a swamp
sometimes, if you're lucky, you firm it up in the right places and it stabilizes
other times it just sinks
I just finished a three-year stint on a AAA game project that has been "in development" for at least six years. This client has now gone back to essentially pre-production. One of the things they're struggling with is carrying around a huuuuge amount of technical debt for games that never shipped.
We're talking things like an inventory system (built two games ago) that was never fit for purpose stacked on top of a backpack system (built three games ago) that was a colossal hack, which has to interact with "pockets" (built one game ago) for the player character to put their weapon in. Except that the inventory system is on an entirely different backend than the pocket system and doesn't replicate equipped weapons correctly, so the UI team (that's me!) has to assign a weapon picture directly to a player weapon slot based on their pocket index.
Throughout the project, I would poke the lasagne only to find it rotten all the way through. There was no "original vision" to RETVRN to. The vision was always inspired by whatever game was currently in vogue. As a UI programmer, I was constantly asked to display information to the player that simply did not exist. But because it was always for an "important demo," my team would have to fake the data themselves. This was a very bad idea (and I told them as such!!) because it meant that upper management would look at the game and see massive improvements while it was just another layer of load-bearing paint.
Or: When and why did Japanese culture divorce the bunnysuit from the Playboy company and turn it into more of a General Thing? As an eminent bunnygirl myself, this is of course important scholarship for me.
I had always been under the impression this was an 80s thing--indeed, a friend of mine recently mentioned she thought it took off with the Daicon 4 opening animation (1983) (figure 1). But then I saw someone post a screencap (figure 2) from an episode I'd apparently seen once but completely forgotten about of JAKQ Dengekitai (1977), and I got to wondering.