Page 165 of 269
Before Robert Downey Jr. ever tried on the suit, Tom Cruise was circling the role back when Iron Man was stuck in development at New Line. Nicolas Cage, a lifelong comic nerd, was also floated at one point. Wild to think how differently the MCU could've kicked off.
In the Black Ops II zombies version of Nuketown, if you walk up to the fallout shelter door in the yellow house's backyard and knife the door, you'll hear Marlton Johnson, a character from the TranZit storyline, muttering complaints from inside about the dust and radiation. He's not doing anything else on the map, he's just stuck in there, reusing lines from a completely different level.
The writers apparently drafted a bunch of dialogue for Tony's goodbye scene, but Downey pushed back hard and insisted the moment land better with Tony saying nothing at all. It's part of why that scene hits as hard as it does - the silence does the work.
When 343 built ODST's Master Chief Collection season, they'd originally planned an unlockable nameplate styled after an NMPD police lightbar, tying into the city police force you run into throughout the campaign. It got cut before launch out of sensitivity to the real-world conversations happening around policing at the time, in 2020.
After you free Cash and Dr Kellerman from the laughing gas trap, look back through the glass into the room they were held in. Rocksteady snuck in a not-so-subtle nod to the much-maligned 1997 Batman & Robin film here, poking fun at one of the franchise's lowest points at the time.
Start the campaign level Gravemind on Legendary difficulty and watch the opening cutscene closely. Once the camera pans across the crowd of Grunts inside High Charity, there's a barely visible 2D cutout of a man in gym shorts standing among them with his hands behind his head. It's actually Bungie co-founder Jason Jones, and fans nicknamed him the Half-Naked Guy long before anyone confirmed who he was.
All seven of the Great Evils, including Diablo himself, were originally born from the seven heads of a single primordial dragon named Tathamet. Three of those heads became the Prime Evils, and the other four became the so-called Lesser Evils.
A sequel to Extinction actually got into prototype stages, reportedly featuring base building and RTS-style elements, with a story where humanity turns out to be an offshoot of the Cryptids and a character named Samantha Cross becomes the villain. It never made it out, since Infinity Ward apparently didn't want 'aliens' cluttering up the space setting of the next game, and the idea gave way to a Zombies mode for Infinite Warfare instead.
Turning into Vecna wasn't a quick job. Jamie Campbell Bower estimates he clocked around 70 hours across the season sitting in the prosthetics chair, wearing custom contact lenses and dentures so he could still act through all the latex. Season 5 actually required less coverage than before since only his head, shoulders and one arm needed prosthetics, with the rest handled through a tracked bodysuit and digital effects.
Sometimes the Cemetery of the Forsaken swaps its usual Defiled Crypt for one called Development Hell, and every single monster inside is named after a real Diablo III staff member. You can literally fight lead director Jay Wilson in there.
