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Once you're loose from the interrogation chair, typing DOA into the CIA terminal drops a full top-down zombie shooter called Dead Ops Arcade into your Zombies menu. It plays like a twin-stick Smash TV knockoff, and getting through the opening sequence just to reach it was such a rite of passage that later ports kept the exact same trigger-mashing intro untouched.
Tommy Vercetti was a proper turning point for the series since he was the first GTA protagonist to actually talk, voiced by Goodfellas star Ray Liotta. Before that, series heroes like Claude in GTA III were completely silent, so giving the lead a real personality and a Hollywood name attached to it was a big deal at the time.
Rourke didn't want Ivan Vanko to just be a snarling one-note bad guy, so he pitched the idea of giving him a pet cockatoo to soften him up a bit. When he had to fly back for reshoots, Jon Favreau even gifted him his own bird, so there are technically two different cockatoos in the finished film if you look closely at the crest markings.
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.
Game director Josh Sawyer built his own personal mod, unofficially nicknamed JSawyer, that rebalances a lot of systems and fixes issues he felt never got resolved before launch. It's essentially his own director's cut of the game, made purely out of passion rather than any studio mandate, and fans still use it today when they want the experience closer to his original vision.
Codsworth can recognise and say almost a thousand pre-recorded player names, which is already a lot of work for a video game companion. On top of the published list floating around online, the developers quietly snuck in a handful of extra names players only discovered through trial, error, and a lot of save-scumming.
When Kaya reads a newspaper about Luffy's first bounty, sharp-eyed viewers can spot the Revolutionary Army's logo printed in the corner, and if you zoom in further, the name Monkey D. Dragon is legible too.
The smooth-talking gangster Benny, the man responsible for putting a bullet in the Courier's head at the start of the game, is voiced by Matthew Perry. It's a genuinely different kind of role for him compared to the sitcom work he was best known for, and he leans into the sleazy charm really well.
Across the whole trilogy, the team spent 998 working days just shooting miniatures and bigatures. Add it up and that's roughly four years of someone's working life spent filming models.
