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When the brothers head into Brooklyn's sewers to fix a burst pipe, the music playing underneath is a callback to World 1-2 from the original Super Mario Bros, the very first underground level in the series. There's even a sign behind Luigi labelling the area Level 1-2, just to make sure nobody missed it.
When Thor confronts Loki up on the cliffside, two ravens can be seen scattering as the Asgardians land. They're a nod to Huginn and Muninn, Odin's ravens from Norse mythology and the comics, who fly across the world gathering information and reporting back to him - basically Odin's own surveillance system keeping tabs on his sons.
Look closely at the red-and-gold sash tied around Atreus's waist right at the start of the game. It's got the same geometric pattern as the loincloth Kratos wore back in Greece, so it seems Faye repurposed a piece of his past into something for their son to wear.
Long before it became one of the biggest shows on the planet, Stranger Things was turned down by roughly 15 to 20 different networks and studios. Execs weren't sure what to do with a story mixing kids, adults, sci-fi and horror all at once, and some even suggested reworking it into either a straight-up kids show or an adult mystery centred on Hopper. The Duffers held their ground and kept pitching the version they actually wanted to make.
Charlie Cutter was originally supposed to stick around for the whole story, but his voice actor Graham McTavish landed a role in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy partway through production. Naughty Dog had to rewrite the back half of the game to write him out, which is why he vanishes from the plot the way he does.
A lot of the team behind this game had also worked on the original trilogy back when they were younger, and came back to it as parents themselves. Christopher Judge has described playing Kratos in this story, a father learning to actually show up for his son, as something close to an apology to his own children.
Tucked behind a pile of garbage in the far corner of the New Reno gun shop's basement is an actual, literal Easter egg item. It's the kind of dry, self-aware joke the writers loved sneaking in, naming an item exactly what it is and hiding it where almost nobody looks.
The Prodigal Explorer wasn't just plucked out of thin air. He's named after Colt Hallam, a Riot Games staffer who's gone by the nickname Ezreal for years, and who worked on some of the earliest systems in the game, including the original ARAM mode.
The trophy/achievement title 'Dial B for Bomb' is a riff on Dial M for Murder, the 1954 Hitchcock thriller. It's the kind of joke that only really lands if you're a bit of a film nerd, which, fair enough, describes a lot of the writers at Rockstar.
Deep in Oasis, at the northern edge of the map, you'll find Harold, a ghoul who has literally become one with a tree, now known as Bob. Harold first appeared as a mutated ghoul in the original two Fallout games, and his transformation into a sentient tree is one of the series' longest-running character arcs.
