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The pirate utopia at the heart of the game's plot is drawn from old, mostly unverified legends about a real pirate colony called Libertalia, said to have been founded in Madagascar and run on ideals of liberty shared among its outlaw residents.
Wander into Silvermoon City and you might bump into Kraes of Immersang, a troll NPC billed as a self-proclaimed prince. His flavour text piles on every over-the-top backstory cliché roleplay servers are famous for, right down to a throwaway line about fighting a personal war against a random player named Joshua Fuesting. It's Blizzard gently poking fun at its own community.
Getting Taweret into the show properly took some stubbornness from showrunner Jeremy Slater, who has said he spent a full week staring at a poster of the goddess in the writers' room before he was fully convinced she needed a proper role and a whole underworld episode built around her.
The bank heist that opens the game takes place somewhere you can never actually walk to during normal play. The only way to even glimpse the area is by getting a Dodo airborne and flying over it.
Game FM wasn't voiced by actors doing a bit, it was hosted by actual New York DJs Stretch Armstrong and Lord Sear playing versions of themselves, banter and all. It gave the station a completely different feel from the rest of Liberty City's more parody-heavy radio lineup.
The massive portal battle where every hero shows up at once took roughly 1,400 visual effects artists working flat out, and they only had around sixteen weeks to pull it off. Given how much is happening on screen in that sequence, that's a genuinely wild turnaround time.
The numbers broadcasts driving Project Nova come from a Soviet spy vessel called the Rusalka, anchored in Cuban waters and secretly acting as the surface cover for an underwater submarine base doubling as the real transmission point. Mason's mission to stop the broadcasts culminates in an airstrike against the ship itself.
For a while Jagex was quietly working on a follow-up project codenamed 'MechScape,' aimed at an older audience and built around a sci-fi setting rather than fantasy. It used the same engine tech that powered RuneScape, but the project eventually got shelved and never saw a proper release under that name.
Look closely at the stickers plastered on Marshall Lee's guitar case in Fionna and Cake and you'll spot a bunch of cheeky riffs on real punk band names, like X-Ray Pex standing in for X-Ray Spex and Daikini Kill standing in for Bikini Kill. It's a fun little detail for anyone who grew up on that scene.
