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One of the game's more macabre little jokes is a skeleton carrying a Firefly dog tag, the same faction symbol from The Last of Us. Nobody ever explains how it ended up in a remote corner of the Uncharted world, and that's kind of the fun of it.
According to the in-game lore, Hellhounds exist because Samantha's dog Fluffy got shoved into a teleporter during 'Test 6' instead of a human subject, and came out the other side as a zombie dog. Dark stuff for a mode that started as a joke minigame.
During young Luffy's flashback, while Shanks stitches up his cheek, there's a quiet instrumental of the pirate shanty Binks' Sake playing in the background. In the source material that song doesn't properly show up until way later, so hearing it here is a neat little nod that rewards long-time readers.
In the wake of the leak, Activision fired back with four separate teaser trailers on the same day, each one built around a different global hotspot from the campaign: New York, London, Paris and Berlin. It was a clever way of turning damage control into a marketing moment.
Rather than lean on CGI, Nolan had a full-scale Batcave physically constructed at Shepperton Studios in England, with rock formations cast from molds of real caves. The finished set stretched 250 feet long, 120 feet wide, and 40 feet tall.
The colourful satchels used in Creature Creation weren't the original plan at all — early versions of the update had them as actual lunchboxes decorated with little animal stickers. For whatever reason, that idea got swapped out for satchels at the very last minute.
Diamond City's noodle vendor Takahashi has exactly one line of dialogue, and it's lifted word for word, broken grammar included, from Blade Runner's noodle bar scene. Blink and you'll miss it, but it's one of several Blade Runner nods scattered around the game.
Caterina Sforza, one of the game's major allies and a romantic interest for Ezio, was the real illegitimate daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the same Duke of Milan whose assassination kicks off the story.
There's a noticeable lack of child characters wandering around the Mojave. Early on the team apparently planned to bring back Fallout 3's Child at Heart perk, but because so few kids ended up in the final game, the perk was left in as unused code that never actually gets triggered by anything.
In a 2007 interview with Edge magazine, Halo design lead Jaime Griesemer admitted that Halo 2's biggest shortcomings came down to a rushed final stretch of development that skipped the studio's usual polishing period entirely. It's part of why the campaign famously ends on a cliffhanger, with a chunk of the story quietly pushed into what became Halo 3.
