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Draven, Jax, and Vel'Koz all come out of the same voice actor's mouth, which is a genuinely tough one to spot given how different those three characters sound and act. Play their voice lines back to back for someone who's never touched the game and see if they can guess.
Same bedroom, another hidden reference: a poster reading 'Starlight Savage 2: Coming Soon.' Starlight Savage is the fictional comic series Ellie is obsessed with in The Last of Us, quietly tying the two worlds together on a kid's bedroom wall.
The old black-and-white film reel of Howard Stark that Tony watches at the Expo is staged very much like Walt Disney's original filmed pitch for EPCOT. A nice bit of irony considering Disney had only just bought Marvel a few months before this movie hit cinemas.
Pay attention to the thugs during the Protocol Ten sequence and a handful of them are wearing masks that look suspiciously like Scarecrow's. It's never explained outright, whether it's meant to hint that some of his followers ended up locked up in Arkham City too, or whether it's just a leftover asset that got reused. Either way it's a fun little detail to spot mid-fight.
When Vince Gilligan was shopping the idea around, he summed up the entire concept in one line: a mild-mannered chemistry teacher turning into Scarface. Somehow that tiny pitch became one of the most acclaimed shows of the century.
The entire gambling-soaked Las Venturas chapter, and its big casino heist storyline, draws heavily from Martin Scorsese's 1995 film Casino. It's one of several crime classics Rockstar leaned on to give each San Andreas city its own distinct cinematic flavor.
Wander into Fort Scinia and you'll find a long-dead skeleton called Gran Struthe. Say it out loud a couple of times and it starts sounding a lot like Grant Struthers, who was part of the seven-person World Art team credited on the game. Bethesda clearly liked hiding little tombstones for their own staff around Cyrodiil.
Brotherhood was the first entry in the series to let Ezio recruit and train his own roster of assassins, sending them off on missions across Europe. It's a small addition but it's the one that really cemented the idea of Ezio as a leader rather than a lone wolf.
