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Commander in Chief Kong, a Marine leader who barely got screen time even in the original anime, shows up as a name and logo tucked into the end credits, a small hat-tip that most casual viewers would sail right past.
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.
The teaser for the second season opens and closes with the mournful cry of Laboon, the giant whale who guards the entrance to the Grand Line, a nod fans of the manga picked up on immediately given how central that whale becomes to the crew's journey.
During the filming of the Rohirrim's charge, one rider actually fell off the back of his horse mid-shot. Every single horse charging behind him somehow missed or dodged him, and he walked away without a scratch.
Early drafts of Amumu's backstory described him as a mummified human child rather than a Yordle, which is a considerably darker starting point than what shipped. Riot eventually softened the concept, but even as a Yordle he's still stuck wandering the world alone, cursed and crying, so it's not exactly a cheerful ending either way.
Those rusted-out, exploding cars scattered across the Commonwealth aren't random Bethesda design - they're modeled on the Ford Nucleon, a real 1950s concept car that would have run on a small nuclear reactor. It fits the franchise's whole retro-futuristic vibe a little too perfectly.
Hang around too long without progressing an objective and the game starts lobbing grenades at you constantly - it's especially brutal on Veteran difficulty and is basically Treyarch's way of telling you to stop hiding behind that crate and push forward.
Curie starts life as a Mr. Handy-style robot before transferring her mind into a synth body so she can properly research what it means to be human. It's a lovely arc on its own, but there's a weirder wrinkle buried in the game's lore: every generation 3 synth, Curie included, is built from genetic material derived from your character's son, Shaun.
Leftover game files reference multiplayer versions of the AC-130's 25mm, 40mm, and 105mm guns, suggesting the gunship was at one point planned as a killstreak-style reward you could call in online. It got cut before launch and wouldn't actually show up as a multiplayer reward until Modern Warfare 2.
Before Annie became the tiny fire-wielding girl with a bear, she took cues from Lina Inverse, the explosive teenage sorceress from the anime Slayers. Riot originally planned for Annie to be a teenager too, but they eventually settled on a younger child instead, and looking at her now it's hard to imagine her any other way.
