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Head into Bluewater Marsh after dark and you might come across a crying woman, or grim little scenes of bodies strung up in the trees. Get too close to either and the Night Folk will crawl out of hiding to come after you. Anyone who played the original game's Undead Nightmare DLC will recognise the vibe instantly.
The Mister Sandman perk, which lets you kill sleeping targets silently, takes its name from the 1954 song of the same name by The Chordettes. Given how much of the game's soundtrack and quest naming leans on 50s and 60s music, it fits right in with everything else going on around it.
Examine your familiar War Tortoise closely and you'll spot a pretty blatant Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reference tucked into its design, which feels like a fun bit of cross-pollination for a summonable pet that's supposed to just be a tank on legs.
The Riddler really went all out for the sequel, hiding a total of 440 Riddler Trophies across Arkham City on top of 40 separate riddles to solve. Some of them are set aside specifically for Catwoman and glow a different colour, since Batman gets electrocuted if he tries to grab those ones himself. It roughly doubles what Arkham Asylum threw at players, which tells you a lot about Rocksteady's confidence in the bigger map.
Wander through Little Haiti and you'll find the Romero Family Funeral Home sitting right next to Romero Family Butchers, which is exactly as morbid as it sounds once you look closer. There's a tombstone in the funeral parlour window naming a real level designer from the team, and round the back there's an unmarked grave and a skeleton. The butchers next door has a box labelled human organs and an arm resting among the cuts of meat. Subtle it is not.
Hathaway went into her meeting with Nolan convinced she was reading for Harley Quinn, not Catwoman, and even dressed the part. It wasn't until partway through the audition that Nolan told her she was actually there for Selina Kyle. Whatever she did clearly worked.
Before it became its own thing, Assassin's Creed was pitched internally as 'Prince of Persia: Assassin', meant to be a spin-off of Sands of Time. The story drifted so far from the Prince that Ubisoft eventually cut it loose to stand on its own two feet.
Before Nolan ever got his hands on the franchise, Darren Aronofsky (yes, the Black Swan guy) was attached to reboot it with a wild pitch: a homeless teenage Bruce Wayne working in a Gotham garage, an elderly Clint Eastwood as Batman, and Hong Kong standing in for Gotham City entirely. Warner Bros passed, and honestly, fair enough.
Getting the Kraken's tentacles to move convincingly was a nightmare for the animators. The solution came from an unlikely place: the animation director had his team study the octopus fight scene from the 1962 classic King Kong vs. Godzilla for inspiration.
It turns out the radioactive spider that bit Miles back in the first film actually wandered in from a completely different dimension. That makes Miles what Miguel calls an anomaly, someone whose entire existence as a hero was never part of any universe's proper canon to begin with.
