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On the original release of the game, a spray-painted face is tucked into a rock edge on Mount Chiliad's northern slope, and it bears an uncanny resemblance to Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad. It has nothing to do with the Chiliad mural conspiracy and serves no purpose whatsoever, and in the enhanced version of the game it was quietly swapped out for a drawing of a rooster instead.
The finished cut only came together around four months before the premiere, with Gore Verbinski reportedly putting in 18-hour days in the edit suite to get it done in time. Given the chaos on set, it's a small miracle the film even made its release date.
Dragonwilds wasn't a solo Jagex effort. Co-development studio Virtuos worked alongside the team to build out the game's UI architecture, including the crafting menus, compass, health and stamina readouts, and the interactive map.
Gwent proved so popular that CD Projekt Red spun it off into its own free-to-play card game, and later into a single-player story campaign called Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. What started life as a way for Geralt to kill time between contracts ended up becoming a whole franchise on its own.
While a Marvel production was shooting nearby, Samuel L. Jackson wandered onto the Los Pollos Hermanos set fully dressed as Nick Fury and asked if he could sit in the background as a joke cameo. Vince Gilligan had to turn him down — no Nick Fury eating fried chicken while Walt and Gus have their standoff, sadly.
Within a week of its first three episodes dropping, Arcane had a 100% Tomatometer score and a 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, edging out Squid Game's numbers at the time and setting the record for Netflix's best-reviewed original series to that point.
Before Halo turned Bungie into a household name, they were a respected but fairly niche studio best known for the Marathon and Myth series. Halo was the game that catapulted them from cult favourite to mainstream giant almost overnight.
Fallout 4's first piece of concept art was made in 2009, about a week after Fallout 3's final DLC wrapped up, meaning the game had already been quietly cooking for roughly seven years by the time it launched in 2015. Lead artist Istvan Pely stuck with the Fallout concept work rather than moving onto Skyrim with the rest of the team.
At one point during development, the team experimented with a targeting system similar to Fallout's V.A.T.S, letting players pause combat and aim at specific body parts. It never made it into the final release, and honestly it's hard to picture the fast, fluid swordplay working any other way.
Nicolas Cage grew up reading comics, so getting a call about Spider-Man Noir was a dream gig for him, especially once the filmmakers told him to just have fun with it. Since Noir is a hard-boiled 1930s detective rendered in black and white, Cage leaned on Humphrey Bogart for the clipped, fast-talking delivery, figuring it would land with both noir fans and kids discovering the genre for the first time.
