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Helen McCrory needed a rock-solid Birmingham accent to carry Aunt Polly, so she went straight to the source and studied hours of interview footage of Ozzy Osbourne to get the cadence right. Considering how iconic her performance became, it clearly worked.
In an old EGM interview, co-president Evan Wells admitted the ending boss fight was shaped by the confines of the island they'd already built, and that a bit more time might have let them do something flashier. Amy Hennig chimed in too, noting games often struggle with escalating to a climax the way movies don't have to.
Dominic Monaghan isn't much of a smoker, so before filming the scene of Merry and Pippin puffing away at Isengard, he'd drink milk beforehand just to keep from getting sick on camera.
If you go for the Catwoman ending where she leaves Arkham City, right after the credits roll on the way back to the game there's a garbled audio clip that sounds like nothing at first. Run it in reverse and you'll hear Joker's voice clearly say 'Thank you for the entertainment, Bats.' Somebody at Rocksteady had way too much fun hiding that one.
If Skingrad's castle looks oddly familiar, that's because it's a visual copy of Bran Castle in Romania, the real-world fortress popularly (if not entirely accurately) known as Dracula's Castle. Bethesda didn't exactly hide who they were borrowing the silhouette from.
Some details in Arcane don't line up perfectly with existing League of Legends lore, and creator Christian Linke has been upfront that these aren't meant as retcons. The team saw them as small adjustments made purely to serve the strongest possible story for the show, even if it meant bending a few established facts from the game.
The Red Rocket truck stop that shows up in the episode 'The Radio' is a genuine easter egg for players, since it's the exact type of gas station where you first meet Dogmeat in Fallout 4. To pull it off, the crew transformed a real petrol station in Nyack, New York into the iconic red-and-white design in just three days.
Arthur's slow decline from tuberculosis wasn't just chosen for dramatic effect. Co-founder Dan Houser has since said it was personal to him, his own grandfather contracted tuberculosis before antibiotics existed, not long after Dan's father was born, and that piece of family history shaped how Arthur's story was written to end.
Henry Avery isn't a Naughty Dog invention. He's built on the real historical figure Henry Every, a 17th-century English pirate whose exploits were so notorious that he became one of the most wanted men on the planet.
