Scarab was always quite the strange company. The most obvious example of that is producing Battle Monsters for the Saturn, but there was also their 1993 arcade fighter Survival Arts, which took the approach to live-action fighting games and made it a 6-button set-up with a throw reversal system, combo links and sprites the size of those you'd find in Art of Fighting.
It also has a weird penchant for having its assets reused in some of their other games. Enter their 1995 snow skiing effort, Extreme Downhill. It looked pretty unassuming at first, if a bit shockingly simple, but something seemed fishy about the up-close portraits that looked really familiar, and sure enough, all of them are edits of actors that previously showed up in Survival Arts two years earlier.
We'll be taking a look at the shots that are obviously lifted from Survival Arts, although down the line a complete rip of every character will likely be included here.
The starter For Beginner character is edited from Viper as played by Jon Walter:
Survival Arts had ending shots that were completely static. The interesting part about this is that this is essentially an animation of the same shot. Note that he 'fixes his tie' even though he no longer has one.
His 'world cup challenge' portrait is also taken from another frame in his ending:
The Speed Course character is a bit more difficult to spot:
Vaguely familiar looking, but not an animation or shot in Survival Arts to speak of. However, his world cup challenge portrait gave away his disguise as it is Brian Creech as Gunner heavily (and poorly) edited to be what looks like the Slim Jim mascot:
This would mean his victory animation wasn't used in Survival Arts at all, so it's merely extra footage of the actor.
The Winding Course character doesn't use any ending shots, but rather the animation that plays when a character in Survival Arts is selected, and I immediately spotted that this is Hideaki Takahashi as the alien dad Kane edited to be a bespectacled human who still seems to be yelling viciously at the player, which is an odd way to celebrating a skiing victory.
Lastly the All-Rounding character uses both selection and ending shots for her animations. This is Monica Brown as possibly time-traveling desert nomad Hanna.
The ending shot trace is probably the most transparent of them all:
If she looks a bit glum about being challenged to the world cup, it's because the original shot was used to describe an ending where after she avenges her family's death at the hands of the game's villain, she realizes it'll never bring her family back so she resigns to living an empty, lonely life for the rest of her days.
Y'know, fun!
Thanks much to VGJunk and VGMuseum!