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Before Naughty Dog settled on Among Thieves, the sequel was floating around internally under the working subtitle Something Mysterious and Cool, which is a very Naughty Dog placeholder if ever there was one.
Before you even hit start on the campaign, you're strapped to a chair being interrogated. Rock the triggers back and forth fast enough and you break free, wander over to the terminal in the corner, and can type in a bunch of commands. One of them just loads up Zork, the 1977 text adventure Activision happens to own the rights to, complete with its own achievement for getting eaten by a Grue. It's a proper, playable version too, not some stripped-down tribute.
Numbani's payload didn't always go to a museum for mystery cargo — it used to be the Doomfist gauntlet itself, headed to an exhibit dedicated to the three men who'd worn it over the years. The cargo got swapped out later, likely because the gauntlet ended up back in the hands of the third Doomfist, Akande Ogundimu.
Alongside Michael Dorn, Fallout 2's voice cast quietly pulled in Jeffrey Jones, Peter Jason, Kevin Michael Richardson, and Star Trek: The Next Generation's own Dwight Schultz. At the time, video game voice work was still seen as a bit of a novelty gig for actors, so landing this many recognisable names for a 1998 CRPG was a genuinely big deal.
Marcus started out as a super mutant soldier from the original Fallout's war, but by the time you meet him in Fallout 2 he's settled down as the sheriff of Broken Hills, a town where mutants, ghouls, and humans all try, awkwardly, to live side by side. It's a quiet bit of world-building that shows just how much the wasteland has changed in the decades between games.
The barrel-riding stunt performer Desirée LaFlamme nods to two unrelated sources at once, Annie Edson Taylor, the real woman who survived going over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1901, and Tauriel from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
The very first teaser trailer, released December 1st 2008, showed almost nothing, just Drake reaching out for a dagger in the middle of a snowstorm, rendered in the actual in-game engine rather than a flashy pre-rendered cutscene.
Uncle Iroh was voiced by Mako Iwamatsu for the first two seasons, but Mako passed away from cancer in the middle of production. Greg Baldwin, who'd been doing scratch dialogue and impressions of Mako for years, stepped in to finish out Book Three so the character wouldn't have to change entirely.
Early concept art for 8-Ball labels him as 'Mullan' rather than the name that ended up in the finished game. That name never resurfaced in any later GTA title, so it's just a little fossil from development.
The game's anima-based magic system lets players summon a spectral axe that fells trees instantly, turning what's normally a slow survival-game grind into a quick bit of casting instead.
