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Nuketown is tiny, but its makers still snuck a detail past the map's own boundaries. If you go into spectator mode and pan the camera out, there's a clock tower sitting off in the distance that's actually a doomsday clock, counting down toward the end of the round rather than any real time of day.
During the mission Their Land, Their Blood, Reznov tells you to use your 'Molotovs' - except historically it's unlikely any Soviet soldier would've used that term, since it was actually the Finns who coined the nickname during the Winter War. Black Ops apparently fixed this line two years later.
Imran Zakhaev's plan starts to unravel for real once his son Victor is killed during the campaign. It's that loss, more than the lost arm or the lost war, that pushes him to threaten launching the remaining missiles at the United States.
Franklin's final choice lets players kill Trevor, kill Michael, or talk the whole crew into fighting their enemies together instead. For over a decade Rockstar left it ambiguous which ending actually 'happened', with fans piecing together clues from GTA Online, until a later in-game update finally confirmed once and for all that the option where everybody lives is the canon outcome.
On the multiplayer map Derail there's a blue freight train engine sat on the tracks. Take a look at the number painted on its side and you'll spot 1337, a little wink to the old internet slang for 'elite'.
Protecting the Abrams tank named War Pig gets you 'Save the Bacon.' Cutting the power gets you 'Dancing in the Dark.' Carrying an injured MacMillan gets you 'Piggyback Ride.' Whoever wrote the achievement names was clearly having fun with it.
Production designer Mark Scruton has explained that the gargoyles carved into Nevermore Academy aren't random, each one was designed to represent a specific outcast group at the school, so you can spot vampires, gorgons and sirens if you look closely at the stonework.
Before Ghosts existed, there was a scrapped Neversoft project called Call of Duty: Future Warfare that never saw daylight. Some assets from that cancelled game apparently found their way into Ghosts, and eagle-eyed fans noticed the protagonist of Future Warfare shared a surname, Walker, with Logan and Hesh Walker in the finished game.
Adult Swim rolled out Rixty Minutes before it actually aired on TV, splitting it into 109 separate 15-second clips posted to Instagram. Nobody had done that before, which technically makes it the very first television episode premiere to happen on Instagram.
That unsettling stillness the Enderman has, staring you down before it snaps into a rage, wasn't an accident. Notch has acknowledged the mob's look and behaviour were shaped by Slenderman, the tall, faceless internet legend that was already spreading through horror forums when the Enderman was designed for the game's Adventure Update.
