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  • Colbert Bump: After a long time coming, this game finally gained a mainstage spot in the reworked online edition of EVO 2020, following the tournament's in-person cancellation due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Afterwards, the game's activity on Steam saw quite a sudden rise compared to a few weeks prior, and several new streams of the game on Twitch also appeared compared to before the game's inclusion at EVO. This all likely came from both new players discovering the game for the first time, as well as older players getting ready for the big online tournament. Unfortunately, EVO 2020 was later on cancelled entirely due to multiple allegations of sexual misconduct by its co-founder (among others), meaning this game once again missed out on getting a main spot. This has finally been averted as of EVO 2022, where Skullgirls earned a main spot.
  • Contest Winner Cameo: This was one of the rewards in the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. It became popular enough to result in the announcement of two new stages, simply to show everyone's characters. Keep in mind that each of these people had to donate $1,500 or more to get their characters into the game:
    • Matt and Woolie, Zone-tan, ZONE's mascot, and Sanshee's mascot all appear as background characters in the River King Casino and Glass Canopy stages.
    • One notable NPC is a double whammy—the young man in the Glass Canopy stage wearing royal garb and a crown. That's Duckator, two-time EVO champion and so-called "King of Skullgirls." So not only does he get an NPC for backing the Indiegogo campaign, he gets to put in that specific NPC for being really good at the game.
    • Legendary fighting game player SonicFox has their fursona make a cameo as a replacement for Mrs. Victoria in the training stage. They previously won EVO 2015's Skullgirls side tournament and has been a fan for a long time.
  • Descended Creator: Mike Z, lead combat programmer, originally voiced the Real Soviet Announcer, along with several side characters in story mode.
  • Development Gag:
    • One of Ms. Fortune's alternate colors is based on her original design.
    • Many of Double's transformations involve animations and concepts not used by the final designs of each character.
    • Samson, the DLC character, was based on the original concept for Filia, in which he had eaten her body from the inside out and was using her as a Meat Puppet; as well as early scripts where he was quite a lot darker than his current incarnation and manipulating Filia into becoming the Skullgirl.
    • Much of Fukua's moveset is remnants from back in the alpha stage of development, where the only three characters were three versions of Filia: a rushdown version (the "proper" one), a zoner version (who would later become Peacock), and a grappler version (who would later become Cerebella). Her projectile move and command grabs were taken from the latter two. This is all referenced in her "backstory."
    • Cerebella's birthday is April 11, the date of the game's Xbox Live Arcade release.note 
    • Fukua started off as a typo made by a Lab Zero animator during a Twitch stream. She quickly evolved into her own character.
  • Doing It for the Art: The game has regularly been called a "labor of love" by Mike Z, and it shows:
    • Even after getting laid off, the development team decided to make some sacrifices and start the crowdfunding to be able to continue growing the game. And for a limited time, offering what they make for free. Production for the game continued into 2017: patches were released frequently, developers talked to the fans, and the artists streamed the animations they created for the DLC characters.
    • This even extends to the fandom. When the background characters submitted by high-paying backers were first shown, Mike Z stated that they weren't going to have any animation, since that wasn't in their budget. Several talented fans offered to create animated versions for them, even after Mike explicitly said that Lab Zero couldn't afford to pay them.
    • When Skullgirls: Encore was released for PlayStation Network, only a handful of consumers who bought the original got their vouchers for the updated version from Sony as they are no longer handing them out. However, this wasn't going to stop Lab Zero Games from getting the vouchers from Sony and hand them out themselves for those that already have the game but not the updated version.
  • Dummied Out: Originally, each character except for Double would have two endings, based on a choice made by the player after defeating the endboss. They have been found in the game's data, and they were as follows:
    • Filia: Filia, against Samson's warnings, wishes for the return of her memories. The Skull Heart chastises her for her selfishness and transforms her into the new Skullgirl.
    • Cerebella: Cerebella wishes for Vitale to love her. When she returns to him, she finds that he has murdered the other circus performers so he could be with her. Feng kills him in self-defense, but he revives as a monster.
    • Ms. Fortune: Fortune wishes for the return of her old friends in the Fishbone Gang. The Skull Heart abides her wish, reviving them to serve her, the new Skullgirl.
    • Painwheel: Painwheel wishes for "freedom". The Skull Heart grants her wish, rendering her free from "the needs of mind, body and soul...of memory, reason, and morals...", and transforms her into a Skullgirl of unprecedented power.
    • Parasoul: Parasoul destroys the Skull Heart. Umbrella is caught in the ensuing explosion and is fatally wounded.
    • Peacock: Peacock wishes for all of the world's oxygen to be turned into chocolate. When the Skull Heart is unable to abide her wish, she wishes for everyone to become puppies, which the Skull Heart also refuses to grant. The two get into an argument, ending with the Skull Heart declaring Peacock the worst wisher ever.
    • Valentine: Valentine weakens the Skull Heart's power enough that she can seal it and return it to Lab Zero. Brain Drain accepts the Skull Heart, but punishes Valentine for betraying him and killing many of his forces, including Christmas, by implanting her with a mind-control device.
  • Exiled from Continuity: Juju became this because her creator broke a non-disclosure agreement only a couple of hours after she was accepted. Her role (being the sniper of the Black Egrets and the one behind Parasoul's Silent Scope) still technically remains, but Juju the character is gone and will never be mentioned by that name.
  • Fake Nationality:
    • Parasoul, who speaks with a light French accent and has several French voice lines, is voiced by the Canadian-American Erin Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald does actually fluently speak French, however.
    • There's both versions of "Real" Soviet Announcer, with the Americans Mike Z and Gary Schwartz voicing as a Russian commentator, although this case can be explained away as Rule of Funny.
  • God Does Not Own This World: Lab Zero Games did not own the Skullgirls IP as it belongs to the publisher, Autumn Games. During the Mike Z controversy, Autumn Games and Hidden Variable ended their relationship with the company and took over all further development of the core game and mobile game, respectively.
  • Milestone Celebration: For the game's 10th Anniversary, Hidden Variable announced the final DLC character for the Season 1 Pass in spite of Black Dahlia's ongoing development: Marie Korbel, the titular Skullgirl herself.
  • One for the Money; One for the Art: While Skullgirls Mobile still has a lot of effort put into it, it's clear that it was made to secure income for continued development of the base game.
  • Promoted Fanboy:
    • As noted on the trope's page, Skullgirls has several of them on the staff already. But in the case of the game's own fandom there is the message board at Skullheart.com, which has cut a deal with Lab Zero to become the official forum of the game.
    • From the game's own fandom, Skullheart news writer Kai Kennedy (better known as Night Phyre) ended up auditioning for the role of Beowulf and got the part.
  • Role-Ending Misdemeanor: In 2020, Mike Z became the center of several controversies that resulted in the majority of Lab Zero Games' employees leaving the company, the company itself shutting down, and the end of his involvement with the game.
  • Rule 34 – Creator Reactions: The announcer has voice acted in a Skullgirls porn flash on Newgrounds submitted by Hentai creator "ZONE-SAMA", who is a fan of the game. Later on, ZONE was hired to work on the game as an animation contractor.
  • Saved by the Fans: The massively successful Indiegogo campaign allowed the game's development to continue for a while.
  • Saved from Development Hell: With considerable help from the Indiegogo campaign.
  • Screwed by the Lawyers: In an attempt to avert it, Marvelous AQL required Lab Zero to change the color of any red cross on a white background (to avoid possible trademark infringement with the International Red Cross) when the Japanese release of Encore was coming about. Naturally, this primarily affects Hospital Hottie Valentine, who had the color of her crosses changed to... purplish-pink. The developers have outright said they're not happy with the decision, but they didn't have much choice.
  • Star-Making Role:
    • This game allowed many voice actresses to make names for themselves, in particular Danielle McRae, Christine Marie Cabanos, Kimlinh Tran, and Sarah Anne Williams.
    • Rich Brown could usually be heard narrating videos for GameTrailers. Big Band was his first voice acting role, and Brown had already developed a fandom before the character was released.
  • Troubled Production:
    • After the game's first patch premiered on PSN with a different developer logo on startup, the developers released a statement explaining the long delay: the entire Skullgirls development team had been laid off by Reverge Labs six months earlier, and had only just finished setting up a new studio (Lab Zero Games) in collaboration with their publisher (still Autumn Games) to continue work on future patches and DLC.
    • The team was laid off due to the massive legal issues that Autumn Games and Konami were involved with due to Def Jam Rapstar, a game that otherwise did not affect Skullgirls' development in any possible way.
    • The team had some issues with a patch size limit on the Xbox 360; the memory needed for the patch was over 100 times the size of the limit. It eventually came out.
    • And then Lab Zero decided to legally cut all ties between Skullgirls and Konami so that there wouldn't be major headaches regarding patches for the console versions (other than the Japanese PSN version, which has a different publisher). While this cutting of ties was successful, it led to a major side effect: Konami requested that Skullgirls be delisted from PSN and Xbox Live Arcade on the 17th and 31st of December, respectively. Did we mention that L0 was only notified of this secondhand, after it was already approved by Sony? The issue was quickly settled, however, and the game was re-released (for free to previous owners) as Skullgirls: Encore, transferring publisher rights from Konami to Marvelous AQL (the same publisher as the PC release) and finally getting Squigly out on consoles (along with plans to release any new characters concurrently with the PC release). The move to the Encore edition will also release the game in Japan for Xbox 360, under Marvelous AQL's publisher ownership.
    • Lab Zero just couldn't catch a break. Within only a few days of announcing the plans for the Encore edition, the Japanese publisher of the PS3 version (which, up until the Encore release, was the only console version of the game available), CyberFront, was closed by its parent company. Skullgirls, being rather popular in Japan, was scheduled to get an arcade release there through a separate publisher. What this meant for the future of the game in Japan was uncertain at the time, but NESiCA — the arcade publisher — made a point of featuring Skullgirls Encore in its presentation at JAEPO 2014, including a taped message from Mike Z and Alex Ahad.
    • After a few months of generally good times (involving the release of Encore on both consoles and Big Band), the problems started up again: Lab Zero was forced (by Marvelous AQL) to alter the color of any red cross on a white background that appears in the game (including Valentine's default palette) in an attempt to avoid getting sued by the Red Cross and get the Japanese PSN version of Encore out on time. As noted above, the developers weren't happy with the change.
    • Then in August 2020, employees of Lab Zero started resigning from the studio after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against Mike Z arose, and he refused to resign from his position in response. By September 2020, all remaining staff had been laid off, causing the studio to close due to its lack of workforce. Autumn Games retains the Skullgirls IP, and has stated it intends to continue development on Skullgirls with former Lab Zero staff if possible. Later on, they would collaborate with Future Club, a studio formed by Lab Zero’s employees.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • There's concept art for things like Supermodes and Filia having a bobby-pin sword.
    • Filia was originally going to be nothing more than a shell that Samson had consumed from the inside-out, with concept art of her Super Modes showing her transforming her into Venom-like forms. This concept was split off into its own character and developed into the DLC Candidate version of Samson, while Filia was redrafted as having a more mutualistic relationship with Samson.
    • Originally, Umbrella and Squigly were supposed to be part of the initial eight characters, but some technical difficulties and the story's need for some villains in the roster led to their spots being reassigned to Valentine and Double. They would later be confirmed to be the first DLC characters. However, while Squigly was released, Umbrella was replaced with Big Band as the second character. Umbrella was featured as a possible DLC character in the fan polls but lost both rounds to Eliza and Beowulf, respectively. She finally got her chance five years later when a new round of DLC characters were announced, with her being the second of four, right after Annie.
    • It was mentioned on a few occasions that, originally, the custom assist function would actually be able to register Super Moves. It didn't take them much experimentation to find this was a Game-Breaker. Later, when more Special Moves were being made to be usable as assists for a patch, several moves were added and then removed due to being "too good". A good example would be Cerebella's Pummel Horse move.
    • During development, Ms. Fortune had a palette based on Tira's costume from Soul Calibur V. In fact, a sizable number of palettes didn't make it into the final game, as the marketing guys realized they could sell color pack DLC later on.
    • The amount of planned characters for the game was around 36. Unfortunately, the budget problems made it so the other 28 characters would be candidates to be released later down the line as DLC, of which only two ever saw the light of day. See also Troubled Production.
    • Parasoul's sniper (who helps her out in one of her Blockbusters) originally had an entire character behind it named Juju (Parasoul referred to her as this rarely, any other time her name would be Number 13), but there were a lot of legal issues because she was created by a fan of the series, so Lab Zero technically didn't own her. After one of the artists took interest in her, she was available as a possible DLC character until the original creator signed the NDA, and then violated it within two hours by posting about this in a public forum, which the development team regularly read. Needless to say, her existence was wiped off the face of the Earth, and she's now basically retconned out of canon permanently.
    • Originally, Peacock was to be voiced by Marin Miller.
    • Filia's Time Over lose animation originally had Samson rip her shirt off in anger, exposing her breasts while Filia tries to cover herself up. It went unused due to objections from Lab Zero.
    • Big Band was supposed to have a robotic voice, but that would take away Rich Brown's smooth voice.
    • According to a Q&A, it is said that if Skullgirls wasn't going to be a fighting game, it was going to be an RPG or Beat 'em Up.
    • In a way, Double subverts this: she has several move animations taken from other characters that would have otherwise never even appeared in the game (for example, Bandwagon Rushdown was originally an idea for Peacock's pre-fight intro).
    • Fukua somewhat subverts this using data from a "Zoner" Filia who would later be the basis for Peacock and a "Grappler" Filia who would later be the basis for Cerebella. She also uses several of Filia's unused animations in her attacks.
    • Eliza was originally conceived with a gameplay mechanic where whenever she got damaged by the opponent, she would leave pools of blood, which can damage the opponent later. Between bumping the ESRB rating from Teen to Mature if this was fully implemented, and the fact that Eliza has a bunch of other mechanics to work with, such as having bodyguard assist characters, Sekhmet and even musical mechanics similar to Squigly and Big Band, the blood mechanic was initally cut. However, when Annie was added as the first DLC character, the mechanic was brought back in an altered form. As opposed to pools of blood, large droplets are used instead, and in place of damaging opponents, the move instead acts as a way to heal Sekhmet (who no longer drains the player's super meter, but instead their health) when she is active.
    • While she's currently the second youngest and second shortest playable character in the final game (With only Umbrella beating her out on both accounts), Peacock's initial character design looked older, was about as tall as Valentine standing up (not counting Peacock's hat), and had a narrower profile because her skirt didn't flare out as much. This may have been done for balance reasons, so she wouldn't have such a ridiculously large hitbox.
    • The original plan was for the cast sans Double to have two possible endings in their story mode, but time and resources constraints scrapped that idea. The script of those scenes can still be found in the game data.
    • The game was supposed to have a "true" ending, which is alluded to in Double's ending and which would be unlocked when Umbrella, Black Dahlia, and Marie were playable, but their Indiegogo drives didn't get enough funding. As a result of this, and key members moving onto other projects, the game will likely have no canon ending. However, now that all three of the aforementioned characters have appeared as DLC characters, there may still be hope.
    • Squiggly was initially conceived as being of partial Asian descent (possibly from what would eventually become the Dragon Empire) and a martial artist rather than an opera singer. She also was going to have a more antagonistic rivalry with Filia.
    • Filia and Ms. Fortune originally meant to be partners of sorts, as seen in this concept art of them hanging out and escaping from Peacock in a car chase. Speaking of Peacock, she and Filia are frequently seen fighting in concept art and early promotional art, indicating that they were going to be rivals. In the final game, Filia has no relation to either of them.
  • Word of Gay: While the webcomic showed Molly and Roxie being infatuated with each other, the game's Twitter account fully confirmed that the two are indeed a couple.
  • Word of God: An extensive amount of information on the game's world has only been revealed by Alex Ahad in streams and the like. For example:
    • The game takes place in fall (which was implied with the trees in Maplecrest).
    • In terms of climate, the Canopy Kingdom is based off the northern U.S. and northern California specifically - mostly "whatever looks cool".
    • Worshipers of the Trinity are called "Trinitists".
    • The crosses in Valentine's eye designs are a result of drug use in Lab 7. An accident in Lab 7 damaged the bandaged eye to the point of apparent uselessness; Valentine's failure to replace it (which the Labs could do for her) is an aesthetic choice on her part.
    • The children in Lab 8 are various orphans with conditions that would make them have trouble leading a normal life without the lab's help. One of the reasons they went rogue was so they could help people in ways besides turning them into weapons.
    • The No Man's Land is a collection of small countries and territories that fell into chaos when the three kingdoms quickly stopped their war to fight the Skullgirl. Bandits were easily able to acquire military hardware and human trafficking became common. Marie and Peacock are from Rommelgrad, a town in the No Man's Land.
    • Not all the members of the Cirque de Cartes are aware of the fact it's backed up by the mob; Hubrecht is the most commonly cited example.
    • Annie's TV show is similar to The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!: it contains live-action sections in between cartoons, with cartoon counterparts of the live-action hosts.
    • Some groups face extensive discrimination, such as Ferals like Ms. Fortune and Parasite hosts.
    • Valentine's real name is Valerie.
    • Feng is not in love with Cerebella, but rather sees her as a Cool Big Sis.
    • The Mother of the Trinity is not Queen Lamia, at least not in the way most fans think she is.
    • Everyone who's used the Skull Heart has become a Skullgirl since wishes are inherently selfish.
  • Characters' voice lines (and sound effects):
  • Character heights, weights, blood types, and measurements:
    • Filia/Fukua: 5'4", 142 lbs, AB, 34C-26-39
    • Cerebella: 5'6", 130 lbs, B, 32D-23-36
    • Peacock: 4'6", 94 lbs, B, 18A-17-20
    • Parasoul: 5'10", 156 lbs, A, 34DD-24-38
    • Ms. Fortune: 5'8", 127 lbs, B, 32B-23-34
    • Painwheel: 5'1", 375 lbsnote , SGnote , 21B-18-23
    • Valentine: 6', 160 lbs, A, 36E-25-40note 
    • Double: Varies, varies, none/all, varies
    • Squigly: 5'3", 118 lbs, Embalmed (formerly A-), 28B-21-38
    • Big Band: 7'8", 5000 lbs (only 95 of which is organic), B♭note , 170-160-150, 57 diameternote 
    • Eliza: 5'11, 160lbs (on average), Any, 36DD-24-41 (on average)
    • Beowulf: 6'7, 287lbs, O, 55-38-42
    • Robo-Fortune: 5'6, 440 lbs., 10w-30 synthetic oil, 32B-23-34 (adjustable)
    • Annie: 5'1, 110 lbs., AB, N/A
    • Umbrella: 3'10, 60 lbs., O(?), N/A
    • Black Dahlia: 5'8", 350 lbs (only 100 of which are organic), O, N/A

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