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Spider-Man 2099's home turf, Nueva York, was styled after Syd Mead's illustrations, the same kind of sleek, glassy futurism Mead brought to films like Blade Runner. It gives Miguel's world a cold, almost sterile beauty that fits his buttoned-up, rules-first personality.
During production the crew used the working title Rory's First Kiss to throw people off the scent. It wasn't a random phrase - Rory is the name of Christopher Nolan's son.
Inside the Assassin Tomb beneath Santa Maria della Visitazione, if Ezio stares into the water near the first lever for about a minute, a cutscene plays showing a giant squid swimming past. Look again and a tentacle nearly slaps him.
After the trilogy wrapped, Peter Jackson gifted a One Ring prop to both Elijah Wood and Andy Serkis, and each of them genuinely believed his was the only one out there. Sorry to break it to you two, but you were both had.
Zuzanna Szadkowski, who played the Waldorf family's maid Dorota, said in an interview that she genuinely believes her character would have made a better final reveal than Dan. A lot of fans who found the actual ending underwhelming tend to agree with her.
While escaping Hel by boat, Atreus witnesses an illusion of Kratos locked in battle with Zeus, and the camera briefly snaps into first-person as he recoils in horror. It's a direct callback to the ending of God of War III, where you see Zeus's death through Kratos's own eyes, and it's the only time the whole game breaks from its usual perspective.
The title of Arbiter wasn't always an honour. It was originally handed to Sangheili warriors as a way to atone for failing the Covenant, and the missions that came with it were basically expected to end in death. Thel 'Vadam only gets the rank in Halo 2 because he let humans destroy the first Halo ring, and for most of the game he's stripped of his own name entirely, only ever addressed as 'the Arbiter' as a mark of disgrace.
Sony didn't just ship the game and move on, they put out twelve short documentary segments covering how Naughty Dog actually built the thing, going into the motivation behind the story, the tech powering it and the acting process behind the mocap. The first batch shipped on the disc itself, with the rest trickling out online afterwards.
Development quietly kicked off back in 1999, but the game wasn't revealed to the world until a European trade show on September 2, 2001, just days before the September 11 attacks reshaped the news cycle. Fans at the reveal were actually expecting an announcement about StarCraft II and were caught completely off guard when Blizzard said it was making an MMO instead.
