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Black Ops II's epilogue features Jimmy Kimmel playing himself, hosting a fictional episode of his own talk show within the game's near-future setting. It doubles as some pretty shameless self-promotion on Kimmel's part, but it fits right in with the game's habit of blending real celebrities into its 2025 vision of the world.
Before GTA III, the whole series was top-down. This was the game that dragged Liberty City into full 3D, and honestly it's the reason the franchise still exists in the shape it does today.
Elena Fisher wasn't always the blonde journalist players remember. Early in development she was designed as a short-haired brunette, and it was only fairly late in production that the team switched her over to the look that stuck for the rest of the series.
Andrew Scott's Moriarty was originally only meant to pop up briefly as Molly's boyfriend 'Jim from IT' in The Great Game. The writers were so impressed by him that they hurried to write in the swimming pool confrontation at the end of the episode, and that tense exchange between him and Sherlock was actually lifted straight from Scott's original audition script.
Doug Cockle actually grew up in the US in a Marine Corps family before eventually settling in the UK with his wife back in 1999, where he still lives and works today. He holds both American and British citizenship.
There was originally a scene in The Great Game laying out exactly why Mycroft and Sherlock don't get along, tied to some childhood incident Mycroft blamed on his brother. It got cut in the end, with Moffat and Gatiss deciding the rivalry worked better left a mystery.
Long before world borders were a thing, players who walked far enough from spawn in older versions would hit the Far Lands, a stretch of terrain around 12.5 million blocks out where the game's math simply broke down into towering, glitched cliffs. It took a YouTuber a legitimate ten-day walk in 2020 just to reach it, since the spot got patched out of normal generation years earlier.
The Western Ghats hub area that Chloe and Nadine drive through wasn't just a bigger version of Uncharted 4's jeep sections, at the time of release, Naughty Dog described it as the largest open space the studio had ever put together for a game.
Take a proper look behind the counter at the Saint Denis general store and you'll spot the Undead Mask from the first game's zombie-themed Undead Nightmare expansion sitting on a shelf. It's purely a display piece this time around though, you can't pick it up or wear it.
Years later and hundreds of miles away, Niko's still floating around the GTA universe. If you look closely at Jimmy's laptop in GTA V, he's got Niko Bellic's LifeInvader profile pulled up, complete with Roman on his friends list. Jimmy also seems to be following Burger Shot on the page, which plays as a cheeky nod to how eating burgers was how you healed up back in Liberty City.
