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Years after Destiny 1 ended, Bungie revisited the Cosmodrome loot cave as the setting for the Grasp of Avarice dungeon in Destiny 2's 30th Anniversary Pack, spinning the community's favourite exploit into an in-universe story about a fireteam corrupted by greed.
One of Altaïr's marks, Conrad of Montferrat, really was murdered in history, just not in 1191, the year the game is set. Ubisoft's researchers spotted the mismatch during development and decided the story worked well enough to run with it anyway.
Rockstar toyed with letting players switch between multiple playable characters way back during San Andreas, but the hardware of the era just couldn't handle it. The idea got shelved for nearly a decade until GTA V finally pulled it off with Michael, Franklin, and Trevor.
Once Harley drops the elevator in Intensive Treatment, you can find one of Scarecrow's hidden lairs - walls covered in surveillance photos of Batman pinned above a map of the asylum. It turns out he'd been quietly studying his target the entire time, long before the fear-gas nightmare sequences kick in.
Jagex didn't exactly give players time to get hyped. Dragonwilds went from official announcement to a surprise Early Access launch in just 15 days, which is unusually fast for a spin-off carrying this much weight on its shoulders.
When Loki turns up in the Gobi Desert right at the start of the show, the shot is staged to echo Tony Stark's landing after escaping the Ten Rings in the very first Iron Man film. It quietly puts Loki in that same "I just survived something huge" headspace Tony was in back in 2008.
A different ending was actually filmed as a bonus feature for the final season's DVD release, framing the entire series as a dream had by Hal — Bryan Cranston's character from Malcolm in the Middle. It never made it to air, obviously.
Lily Tomlin voicing Aunt May keeps a weirdly specific streak going. Rosemary Harris, Sally Field and Marisa Tomei all played May in live action and all picked up Oscar nominations at some point in their careers, and Tomlin herself was nominated for Nashville decades earlier. The writers apparently had her in mind the whole time they were writing this tougher, more no-nonsense version of the character.
Sergeant 'Soap' MacTavish is one of the series' most recognisable faces now, but in his very first appearance he was a silent protagonist. He didn't get an actual voice actor until Modern Warfare 2 came along.
Not every map made it to launch. A pair called Favela and Invasion were cut from Call of Duty 4's Variety Map Pack, but Infinity Ward clearly didn't want to waste the work, because both eventually resurfaced in Modern Warfare 2 instead.
