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Wander into the Ruined Cistern and you might run into a group of elite Berserkers named after actual New York Giants players, including Jacobs the Gigantic and Bradshaw the Behemoth. No idea who on the dev team was the football fan, but they had fun with it.
Early in production, Chris Pratt tried out a voice for Mario that leaned much harder into a New Jersey accent. It ended up sounding so close to Tony Soprano that the directors had him dial it back and blend it more with the Italian-American, Brooklyn-flavoured voice that made it into the finished film.
At the end of what looks like a dead-end hallway in the Scarlet Monastery cathedral there's a hidden room holding High Inquisitor Fairbanks. In life he survived the Culling of Stratholme, tried to warn the Crusade about what he'd seen and was killed by the knights of the Scarlet Crusade, who claimed he showed signs of plague. Others who believed him broke away to form the Argent Dawn.
This was the very first comic book movie to cross a billion dollars worldwide, a milestone that feels almost routine for superhero films now but was completely unheard of back in 2008.
During the flashback mission, Captain Price mentions the events are happening a decade after the Chernobyl disaster. Do the maths on that and it quietly places the whole flashback in 1996, years before the rest of the campaign takes place.
The Jaximus skin has a genuinely heartfelt story behind it. It was created to raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation after a young patient visiting Riot named Jax as his favourite champion, and every so often Jax will still say "here's to you, kid" as a small tribute to him.
The Fight Kiln throws multiple TokHaar-Jads at you across its later waves, which sounds like an absolute nightmare, but there's a known positioning trick where standing at a specific corner of the central rock stops the second Jad from ever being able to reach you, letting you fight them essentially one at a time.
Among the grim row of severed heads on spikes at the end of season one, one of the prop heads was made in the likeness of George W. Bush. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have confirmed it was intentional, tucked in among the beheading scenes for anyone paying close enough attention.
For the first time in the franchise's history, Black Ops 4 shipped without a traditional story campaign at all, putting everything into Multiplayer, Zombies, and a brand new battle royale mode instead. It was a genuinely risky move for a series that had built its reputation on cinematic single-player set pieces.
