Page 124 of 269
Obsidian only had about a year and a half to build the entire game, which is nuts when you think most RPGs of that size take three or four years minimum. Director Josh Sawyer has said a couple of those months were eaten up just on early planning, so the actual build time was even tighter. It's honestly a big part of why the game shipped a little rough around the edges, but also why the writing feels so sharp and focused.
Lux's horse, Starfire, actually broke a leg at some point in her backstory, the sort of injury that would normally end things for a war horse. Instead of putting the animal down, Lux kept Starfire around anyway, which tells you a fair bit about her character before she ever throws a single light bomb.
The comic-book look wasn't just a filter slapped over the CG. Every rendered frame got a hand-drawn pass from an artist afterward, and the directors wouldn't allow any panels, sound-effect lettering or word balloons on screen until after Miles gets bitten. On a normal animated film a team can knock out four seconds of footage in a week. Here it took roughly a month.
According to Game Informer, the written script used for the Dragon language was deliberately designed so its characters looked like they could have been carved by a creature with three front talons and a dewclaw, giving every rune a claw-mark shape.
GameStop, on its own, moved more than 500,000 copies of Halo 2 in the first 24 hours, which the chain said was more than any other game had ever managed on its opening day at their stores. Fans had been queuing outside some 7,000 retailers for up to 15 hours beforehand just to get their copy at midnight.
The relentlessly cheerful, slightly unsettling Yes Man is voiced by Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall and NewsRadio fame. His upbeat, chipper tone is exactly what makes Yes Man so quietly creepy, since he's happy to help you no matter which ending you're steering the Mojave toward.
During the frantic final Warthog dash off the exploding Pillar of Autumn, if you're brave enough to ignore the countdown and take a detour instead, there's a hidden side room with the word REX scrawled across the walls in blood, one of the more unsettling little secrets in the game.
Walter White isn't a random name — he's named after the poet Walt Whitman. His alter ego Heisenberg is a nod to real physicist Werner Heisenberg, the guy behind the Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics. Chemistry teacher turned criminal, named after a scientist known for unpredictability. Makes sense once you think about it.
Before Overwatch was even a concept, Blizzard spent years building a totally different game called Titan — a sprawling MMO where you'd clock into a day job and then run secret-agent missions at night. It just never came together, but a chunk of the character art and environments got recycled straight into Overwatch once Titan got the axe.
The huge gong you bang to open Ahn'Qiraj has a proper origin story. The bronze dragon Anachronos made it at the end of the War of the Shifting Sands by turning a local scarab into a metal disc, then paired it with a scepter so mortals could re-open the wall if they ever needed to.
