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Then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg was such a fan of the show and its effect on the city's image that he officially declared January 26th 'Gossip Girl Day' in New York, and he even popped up with a small cameo in one of the later seasons.
Geralt's combat animations weren't just hand-keyed by animators. CD Projekt Red actually brought in a professional swordsman to perform the motion capture, and he found that a dance-like flow through each strike and parry felt far more natural than stiff, mechanical swings. That's exactly the fluid, almost balletic combat style that made it into the finished game.
Deathwing had technically existed in Warcraft lore for years, but Cataclysm was the expansion that finally let him take centre stage, bursting up through Stormwind's streets and setting the world on fire in the announcement cinematic. It marked one of the few times an expansion's central villain had already been a fully established character rather than a brand-new threat introduced from scratch.
Open up the wheel customisation menu at any Los Santos garage and a surprising number of the designs are lifted straight from real cars. 'Duper 7' matches the Nissan GT-R, 'Lozspeed Mk.V' is the Ferrari 458 Italia's rims, and 'Diamond Cut' comes straight off a pre-facelift Porsche 997 Turbo, small details most players drive right past without ever noticing.
In the farmhouse near the end of the game, when Joel and Tommy are combing the place for Ellie, there's a baseball poster tucked away in one of the rooms featuring a face fans might not recognise straight away - Daniel Kinnard. He was a Naughty Dog developer who sadly passed away while the remake was being made, and the studio quietly wrote him into the world as a lasting nod to his work.
When Ra's takes his own life falling from Wonder Tower, his body ends up skewered on the huge Arkham City sign. Finish the game and go back to that spot afterwards, though, and the body's gone. All that's left is his sword, sticking straight up out of the ground where he landed, like the world's grimmest little memorial.
Vacant got its own full multiplayer remake eventually, but a chunk of the original map is also tucked away near Port on the Verdansk map in Warzone, for anyone who fancies a nostalgic detour.
The guard line mocking players about a stolen sweetroll is rooted in a character-creation question going all the way back to 1994's The Elder Scrolls: Arena, where a gang of children demand the player's sweetroll in an alleyway, a scenario that shaped starting stats and later resurfaced across nearly every mainline Elder Scrolls game.
The storyboards for the movie were drawn up by Genndy Tartakovsky, the creative mind behind Dexter's Laboratory and Samurai Jack, who'd go on to direct the Hotel Transylvania films.
