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Rockstar's sense of humour is very literal sometimes. Down near the VCN building in Downtown there's a window you can jump through, and inside is a proper brown chocolate easter egg, sat on its own little pedestal like it's the most important artefact in the game. It does nothing. It's just there because the joke was too good to pass up.
Before he was cast as Legolas, Orlando Bloom actually tried out for Faramir, the character who debuts in The Two Towers. That role ended up going to David Wenham instead.
San Andreas's map dwarfed everything the series had done before, packing in three full cities and twelve smaller towns across roughly 17 square miles of countryside. It was, by a wide margin, the biggest playground GTA had ever built up to that point.
Revelations almost didn't exist in the form we got. Ubisoft had announced a Nintendo 3DS exclusive called Assassin's Creed: Lost Legacy back at E3 2010, which would've had Ezio travelling to Masyaf to dig into the Holy Land. It got quietly canned a few months later, but the story wasn't wasted, lead writer Darby McDevitt basically took that same premise and folded it straight into Revelations.
In the Strangers and Freaks mission 'The Last One', Franklin meets a hunter who claims he's been chasing a Sasquatch for nine years. That's a deliberate reference to GTA: San Andreas, released exactly nine years before GTA V, where rumours of a Bigfoot sighting first took hold of the community.
One of the extra Loki variants hanging around in the underground vault is a dead ringer for the version of the character from the 2016 comic run "Vote Loki," right down to the look. Easy to miss him among the crowd of horned, sunglasses-wearing alternates.
The clunky, armored Iron Might suit that shows up later in the series isn't just a random support-item design. Horikoshi grew up drawing giant robots, and the suit is basically his love letter to old-school mecha anime like Mashin Hero Wataru from his childhood.
Rather than lean on gameplay footage, Halo 3's centerpiece 'Believe' campaign built a physical diorama over 1,200 square feet in size, a miniature war memorial populated with hundreds of hand-sculpted human and Covenant figures at one-twelfth scale. Fans could pan across the entire model on a dedicated website, and the ad series went on to win gold at Cannes Lions the following year.
Peter Jackson has admitted he thought the Army of the Dead were too unbelievable and wasn't keen on including them. He left them in anyway because he didn't want to let down fans of the books.
