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The Gravemind almost always speaks in a distinct poetic meter, trochaic heptameter, and when Cortana challenges it on this habit, it explains that it carries the memories of countless poets from cultures far beyond human experience, giving it both the vocabulary and the quickness of mind to compose verse as it speaks rather than labour over words.
San Andreas's map dwarfed everything the series had done before, packing in three full cities and twelve smaller towns across roughly 17 square miles of countryside. It was, by a wide margin, the biggest playground GTA had ever built up to that point.
The production originally planned to film the Monaco Grand Prix sequence on location before that year's actual race, but F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone pulled the offer, so the crew ended up building their own racetrack set in a studio parking lot in Downey, California instead.
The Prodigal Explorer wasn't just plucked out of thin air. He's named after Colt Hallam, a Riot Games staffer who's gone by the nickname Ezreal for years, and who worked on some of the earliest systems in the game, including the original ARAM mode.
When skillcapes launched in 2006, Jagex just needed to find an existing NPC in the right spot to sell each one. That worked fine for 21 of the 22 skills — but one skill was so underused that the devs couldn't find a single fitting character anywhere in the game, and had to invent a brand new NPC purely to sell that cape.
The last two dragons Aang and Zuko meet aren't named randomly. Ran roughly translates to 'burn' or 'ignite' in Chinese, and Shaw carries a similar meaning around blazing or combustion, which fits since the pair end up teaching the boys that firebending doesn't have to come from rage.
Halo 3 introduced Forge, an in-game object editor that let players reshape multiplayer maps by moving, adding, or removing pieces of scenery and weapons. It was far more limited than a full PC map editor, but it laid the groundwork for the custom map culture that would define Halo's multiplayer community for years afterward.
One of the bounty hunters Geralt runs into over in Skellige goes by the name Djenge Frett. Say it out loud a couple of times and it's not hard to hear the wink at Star Wars' Jango Fett.
Harmon and Roiland have admitted there's a huge, detailed backstory for Rick worked out behind the scenes that fans will probably never see in full. They've said they deliberately only drip-feed small pieces of it through the show, because they think the mystery is funnier and more interesting than a full explanation would be.
Present Mic's civilian name, Hizashi Yamada, is thought to be a small nod to Yamada Hisashi, a well-known Japanese radio DJ. It fits, considering Present Mic's whole hero persona is basically 'radio host with superpowers.'
