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Right at the start of Chapter 9, after Nate and Cutter have their scuffle, Cutter mutters something that sounds oddly literary: 'Next you'll be standing behind me with a gun, telling me about the rabbits.' It's a direct nod to Of Mice and Men, dropped in so casually most players run straight past it without clocking the reference.
In its first week alone, the game sold through more than 2.7 million copies worldwide across disc and digital, making it the fastest-selling first-party PS4 title released up to that point.
Victor Zsasz went from a quick tutorial fight in Arkham Asylum to a proper side mission in Arkham City, and it sounds like he was originally supposed to get even more attention than what shipped. Digging through the game's data turns up a full written bio for him that never made it into the finished product, suggesting Rocksteady had bigger plans for the character before time or scope got in the way.
Walk up to the two houses on Nuketown and you'll notice the mailboxes are stamped with the names Mason and Woods, the two characters you spend the campaign playing alongside. Flip into spectator mode and cross to the far side of the barbed wire fence and there are even more mailboxes with names nobody's fully pinned down, suggesting Treyarch dressed the whole set more than most players ever bothered to check.
Ride near the train tracks in northern Lemoyne around 3am and your horse might start acting spooked for no obvious reason. Stick around and a ghostly train comes barrelling down the line before fading away. It's never explained in-game, but a fair few players reckon it's a wink towards the phantom train boss fight from Final Fantasy VI.
The poster Tony's eyeing for his workshop wall looks a whole lot like the famous 'Hope' image from the 2008 Obama campaign, which was originally created by artist Shepard Fairey.
The Chronokeeper's name isn't some deep lore riddle, it's a nod to Tom "Zileas" Cadwell, one of Riot's early design directors. He'd previously worked on Warcraft III and World of Warcraft over at Blizzard before helping shape League's champion roster, so the studio basically named a time-bending sand wizard after their own guy.
Notch didn't spend years agonising over the first version of Minecraft, he banged out the alpha in just six days back in May 2009. It was barebones compared to what we play now, but the core idea of punching blocks and building whatever you wanted was already there, ready to snowball into a global obsession.
Jinx's voice actor Ella Purnell had already built a solid resume with Yellowjackets, Army of the Dead and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children before Arcane, and went on to headline Amazon's Fallout as Lucy MacLean not long after. Jinx is generally seen as the role that really put her on the map for mainstream audiences.
Across the whole trilogy, the team spent 998 working days just shooting miniatures and bigatures. Add it up and that's roughly four years of someone's working life spent filming models.
