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Your Dark Brotherhood initiation quest, A Knife in the Dark, shares its title with a chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring - and it's not just the name. Both involve someone very nearly being murdered in their sleep at an inn, which is about as close a callback as you can get without lifting dialogue outright.
For one key Season 5 scene, the visual effects crew didn't just rely on computers. They 3D-printed a full-size Demogorgon corpse, cast it in silicone and rigged it with an articulated frame so it would flop convincingly. The finished thing weighed close to 200 pounds and needed a stretcher and four crew members just to carry it around set.
Early on, the plan was to set the sequel in the real city of Miami and call it exactly that, GTA Miami. Somewhere along the way Rockstar decided a fictional stand-in gave them more freedom, so they built Vice City instead and pushed the timeline back to 1986, well before the events of GTA III.
MW3's story was co-written by Paul Haggis, the Canadian screenwriter behind Crash and Million Dollar Baby, and the only writer to date to pick up back-to-back Best Picture Oscars. This was his first time writing for a video game.
Cain's 'Stay awhile and listen' became so iconic that Blizzard actually had his voice actor, Michael Gough, record a full rap song built around the line. Not something you'd expect from a wise old scholar NPC, but Blizzard leaned into it.
Before launch, Bethesda talked up Radiant AI as a system where hungry guards could wander off duty, letting opportunistic NPCs steal from unguarded shops and spark full-blown street fights the player might stumble across later. In testing it caused way too much unpredictable carnage, so a lot of that ambition got quietly dialled back before the game ever shipped.
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.
Fall in the water in Vice City and Tommy just sinks, no swimming animation, no rescue, just a quick death. Rockstar addressed it directly in an interview with PSM2 at the time, basically saying that programming proper swimming would have taken too long and that watching a hardened gangster paddle around wouldn't have looked especially cool anyway. Swimming didn't actually arrive in the series until San Andreas.
Commercially this one was a monster. Drake's Deception shifted more than nine million copies worldwide, putting it up there among the best-selling games the PS3 ever had.
