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Wander around long enough and you'll hear civilians drop lines like 'you can sail the seven seas' or 'there's no need to feel down.' They sound like throwaway barks, but they're actually nods to Village People lyrics.
The Mahjarrat originally hail from a plane called Freneskae, and according to the Wise Old Man himself, almost nothing concrete is actually known about it beyond its nickname: the realm of perpetual warfare. Even the spelling of the name is described in-game as only an approximation.
Reporters Without Borders realised that in countries where the free press gets blocked, Minecraft servers often still slip through the firewall. So they built The Uncensored Library, a genuinely massive structure made from over 12.5 million blocks, packed with banned articles and books from places like Russia, Egypt and Belarus, giving young people a sneaky way to read what their governments don't want them to see.
Magne, a trans woman in the League of Villains, is voiced by a cisgender man in both the original Japanese track and the English dub. It's one of those casting choices that still gets brought up whenever people talk about how anime handles trans representation.
Vice City's waters actually have sharks patrolling underneath, though most people never clock them because the water's murky enough to hide the detail. They're far more visible in the original PS2 release than on later remasters, where the clearer water almost works against the secret. They don't attack you, they're just quietly there.
The bubbly, anime-inspired take on Peni Parker that this movie made popular is actually a pretty big departure from her original comic version, who was written as much more solemn and serious. This film's cheerier, more genki-girl interpretation ended up sticking so hard that it shaped how she's been written ever since, showing up again in the sequel and later in games like Marvel Rivals.
The Mister Sandman perk, which lets you kill sleeping targets silently, takes its name from the 1954 song of the same name by The Chordettes. Given how much of the game's soundtrack and quest naming leans on 50s and 60s music, it fits right in with everything else going on around it.
Sanji is spotted wearing an apron featuring Doskoi Panda, another one of Oda's recurring in-universe mascots, while cooking aboard the Going Merry, a small but deliberate touch for readers who know to look for it.
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.
Skyrim's Dragon language, Dovahzul, wasn't planned out as a full language from the start. It was originally created just to give the game's choral theme song, 'Dragonborn,' an ancient, otherworldly sound, and new words were only invented afterward whenever the writers needed to describe something new in-game.
