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General Tullius, voiced by Battlestar Galactica's Michael Hogan, is the Imperial commander overseeing the botched execution at Helgen that opens the game, tying the political Civil War storyline directly into the very first cinematic players see when Alduin attacks the keep.
A couple of Witcher 3's silver swords are quiet nods to other classic RPGs. Azure Wrath echoes Azurewrath, the angelic blade wielded by the fallen angel Izual in the Diablo games, while a sword called Daystar borrows its name from the weapon guarded by a lich in Baldur's Gate's city of Amn.
In the comics, Jarvis is Howard Stark's loyal human butler. The film turned him into an AI partly as a nod to that legacy and partly to dodge the obvious comparison to Batman's butler Alfred, since a wisecracking computer voice reads pretty differently on screen.
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.
General Shepherd was originally meant to go out in a proper boss fight staged on a version of the Rust map, but it got swapped for a simpler scripted cutscene before launch. If you pay attention during the actual ending, Rust is still sitting there visible in the background, a leftover trace of the fight that never made the cut.
Pull up the map or grab a helicopter and look down at the lake in Middle Park (Liberty City's answer to Central Park) and, if you squint a bit, the shoreline actually forms the shape of an alien head. Whether it was deliberate or just a happy accident of level design, it's stuck around as one of those 'huh, never noticed that' moments for longtime players.
Michael Dorn, best known as Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation, voiced the super mutant Marcus in Fallout 2 back in 1998. When Marcus showed up again in Fallout: New Vegas more than a decade later, Dorn came back to voice him again, making Marcus one of the very few characters in the franchise to keep the same actor across that big a gap.
He's a fully playable melee assassin in Heroes of the Storm, built around a trait literally called Fresh Meat. Over in Overwatch, Roadhog has a Butcher skin, and one of its unique voice lines is, of course, 'Fresh meat!'
In Uplift Reserve you'll find a Warthog with a medic trying to calm down a marine who's completely losing it. That's the same panicking soldier from the Floodgate level in Halo 3, so if his reaction feels oddly specific for a random NPC, it's because he's already had one very bad day before this one.
The bubbly, anime-inspired take on Peni Parker that this movie made popular is actually a pretty big departure from her original comic version, who was written as much more solemn and serious. This film's cheerier, more genki-girl interpretation ended up sticking so hard that it shaped how she's been written ever since, showing up again in the sequel and later in games like Marvel Rivals.
