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Charlie Cutter was originally supposed to stick around for the whole story, but his voice actor Graham McTavish landed a role in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy partway through production. Naughty Dog had to rewrite the back half of the game to write him out, which is why he vanishes from the plot the way he does.
Der Riese isn't just a random zombie map - lore-wise it's the actual main base of operations for Group 935, the shady organisation behind the whole 115/zombie experiment storyline. The name translates to 'The Giant,' and it's set near Breslau in what's now Poland.
One of Sojourn's sprays, 'Old Soldiers,' is a shot-for-shot recreation of that famous arm-wrestling handshake between Dutch and Dillon in Predator. If you've seen the movie, it's instantly recognizable — if you haven't, it just looks like a really intense high-five.
The trio of massive robots stomping around the Origins map aren't just nameless set pieces, they're called Freya, Odin, and Thor, and each one can crush zombies or knock down players unlucky enough to be standing under a descending foot. Getting caught in the wrong spot when one steps down is one of the map's more brutal running hazards.
Look closely during the hospital scene with Harvey Dent and you'll notice the Joker isn't wearing his gloves for once, and there's makeup smeared on his fingers. Heath Ledger came up with that detail himself, on the idea that the Joker applies his own face paint and would naturally get some on his hands.
Mason's mission to decode a mysterious numbers broadcast isn't just a Hollywood invention. Numbers stations are a genuine Cold War phenomenon, shortwave radio channels that read out strings of digits believed to carry coded messages to field agents, and some have never been officially explained even decades later.
Let the credits roll, go back home, and choose to sleep, and you'll get one extra scene: Thor shows up on the doorstep in the middle of a violent thunderstorm. It's a quiet little tease for the sequel that plenty of players never bother sticking around to see.
Bethesda deliberately released Skyrim worldwide on November 11, 2011, exactly a year after announcing it at the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards on November 11, 2010, turning the memorable 11/11/11 date into part of the game's marketing and cultural identity.
The old Marco Polo minigame, first seen as a lighthearted moment between Nate and Elena back in Uncharted 2, shows up again here as a small optional distraction, a nice quiet callback for anyone who's been with the series a while.
Even though Reznov's role in Black Ops II is little more than a cameo, his dog tags are still obtainable as a collectible reward in the Kill Confirmed multiplayer mode. It's the kind of thing only die-hard fans of the character would ever bother chasing down, but it's a nice bit of continuity for a character who barely appears in the sequel's story.
