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To find the Joker, Heath Ledger holed up alone in a hotel room and then his own apartment for roughly a month before filming began. He later described it to Empire as reading every relevant comic he could find, then just sitting and meditating on the character until a voice and a laugh started to emerge.
Producers were initially ready to pass on Sadie Sink for Max because, at 14, she was a bit older than the rest of the Hawkins crew and they worried she wouldn't slot into the group dynamic. She refused to take the hint, pushed for more audition material, and once she got a chemistry read with Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin, the part was hers on the spot.
Ever notice how some monsters drop nature talismans while others drop chaos ones for seemingly no reason? Monsters in areas the game classifies as 'underground' are supposed to drop chaos talismans, but that classification hasn't been touched since 2003, so it's broken in all sorts of inconsistent ways across the map.
There's a mention of Blüdhaven tucked into the film, the neighbouring city that first showed up in 1996's Nightwing #1 comic. In the wider DC mythology it's where Dick Grayson eventually sets up shop as Nightwing, so it's a nice bit of world-building for anyone who clocked it.
The End Poem, that dreamy nine-minute scroll of text you get after beating the Ender Dragon, was written by novelist Julian Gough as a favour to his friend Notch. He never actually signed the contract handing the rights over to Mojang, and in 2022, after a falling out with the company, he released the whole poem into the public domain rather than let Microsoft claim it.
Several Warthog variants, including an arctic camo version, a proper transport model, and a small ATV, were all built for Halo 2 and then dropped before launch. They didn't go to waste forever though. The ATV effectively resurfaced as the Mongoose in Halo 3, and the arctic Warthog eventually made it into a Halo 3 map pack years later.
Dig into the language settings and Minecraft isn't just offering the usual list of real-world languages, you can switch your whole interface over to Pirate Speak, Shakespearean English, or even Klingon if you're feeling committed. It's a small detail that says a lot about how Notch wanted the game to feel silly and welcoming rather than sterile.
Back in April 2008, producer Leslie Benzies told The Times that GTA IV's production costs had climbed to somewhere around $100 million. At the time that absolutely smashed the previous record for game development spending, which had been set by Sega's Shenmue at roughly $70 million.
Up in Senior Scribe Neriah's lab on the Prydwen, there's a tray of experimental plants described as growing near rivers. Sound familiar? It's basically Fallout's version of Skyrim's nirnroot, minus the annoying chime. Thankfully you can harvest it without hunting down that sound for twenty minutes.
This one almost never existed as its own game. Naughty Dog originally pitched it as a piece of paid DLC for Uncharted 4, something in the vein of a smaller side story, before the team realised they had way more to say than a DLC pack could hold and turned it into a full standalone release instead.
