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When Machiavelli asks how Ezio recruited the city's guilds, Ezio credits "Virtù," a real concept from Machiavelli's writing on leadership. Later, Machiavelli jokes about writing a book on Ezio one day, a wink at Machiavelli's real, famously short work, The Prince.
Months before release, Bungie opened a public multiplayer beta to anyone who bought Crackdown. It wasn't just a marketing gimmick, in the space of three weeks the beta pulled in more than 800,000 unique players, effectively turning early access into one of the biggest live playtests in gaming history up to that point.
Inside the cable car lift station at the top of Mount Chiliad, players can find a strange painted mural showing a UFO, a cracking egg, and a figure using a jetpack. The mural fuelled one of gaming's longest-running community investigations, spawning an entire subreddit dedicated to decoding it.
Beneath the iconic wizard's tower of Karazhan, the developers hid a giant smiley face in the terrain. It's normally buried, but relogging near the tower or clipping through rubble at the right spot reveals it grinning back up at you.
