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Penn Badgley has openly connected Joe Goldberg to his old Gossip Girl character Dan Humphrey, calling Joe a warped version of what Dan might have become. He's pointed out that Dan always saw himself as an outsider looking in on privilege, when in reality he was already firmly on the inside the whole time.
Composers Jeremy Zuckerman and Benjamin Wynn deliberately avoided the usual animation-composer playbook, instead learning to work with instruments like the guzheng, the pipa, and the duduk to match the show's Asian-inspired world. That's a big reason the soundtrack sounds nothing like a typical 2000s Nickelodeon show.
After the loot cave was patched, Bungie left behind a pile of charred Hive Thrall corpses at the site. Interacting with the remains triggers a distorted voice line about a million deaths not being enough for Master Rahool, a cheeky nod to how many enemies were farmed there for Cryptarch decoding.
Millie Bobby Brown let this one slip on the Beyond Stranger Things aftershow: in the earliest Season 1 scripts, the parallel dimension wasn't the Upside Down at all, it was 'The Nether'. Way more gothic sounding, sure, but nowhere near as catchy or as easy for a bunch of kids on bikes to yell across a hallway.
Todd Howard told PC Gamer that many of the gameplay changes made since Oblivion were directly inspired by Bethesda's work on Fallout 3, the game the studio released in the years between its two Elder Scrolls titles.
While exploring with Bill, you'll pass a house that looks strikingly familiar if you've played Telltale's The Walking Dead - it's built to resemble Clementine's home from the very start of that game, just left to rot a little longer. A nice bit of respect between two of the era's best story-driven survival games.
The name Billy Midnight is a reference to Robert Ford, the real outlaw remembered for shooting his own gang leader Jesse James in the back. He's one of several characters scattered through the game built around real names from Wild West history.
Right at the start of the game, in Sarah's room, there's a poster for Mortal Kombat II tucked among the other decorations. The kind of detail you'd only catch if you slow down and actually look at a teenager's bedroom instead of rushing to the next objective.
LifeInvader wasn't the only tech giant Rockstar decided to skewer. Fruit Computers stands in for Apple, complete with its own late founder who's clearly meant to evoke Steve Jobs, while Bleeter fills the Twitter-shaped hole, giving Los Santos its own fully formed, thoroughly mocked version of the modern internet.
Long before Red vs. Blue became a household name in machinima circles, Bungie slipped a hidden nod to Rooster Teeth's logo into Halo 2 itself, tucked away as a little easter egg for anyone paying close enough attention while exploring the game's environments.
