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Screenwriter Philippa Boyens only added the scene of Pippin singing for Denethor after hearing Billy Boyd's voice at a cast karaoke night. She handed him the lyrics straight from the book and left him to write the melody himself.
While the bulk of Naughty Dog was heads-down on Drake's Deception, a second smaller team inside the studio was quietly working on something completely different in the background. That project turned out to be The Last of Us. It's the first time in the company's history they'd split like this, and it's kind of wild to think both games were cooking at the same building at once.
Several pieces of construction machinery scattered around Los Santos are decorated with designs and paint jobs that closely resemble Claptrap, the excitable robot companion from the Borderlands series.
NASA has actually partnered with Minecraft Education on more than one occasion, first getting kids to plan and launch rockets in an Artemis-themed set of worlds, then building out interactive modules based on real James Webb Space Telescope imagery so students can piece together star formation and galaxy types for themselves. It's one of the more surprising ways a block-building game has ended up doubling as a genuine STEM classroom tool.
During the campaign, players can enter a garage containing a list of cars that's only visible under ultraviolet light, a clear homage to the target vehicle list from the heist film Gone in 60 Seconds.
The development team designed Skyrim's world around a philosophy they called 'epic-realism,' a deliberate break from what they saw as Oblivion's more generic 'classic' western-fantasy look, aiming for a grounded world with room for stranger, more unique creatures and conflicts.
Mortensen got so attached to Brego, the horse he rode as Aragorn, that he bought him from the production once filming wrapped, and picked up a second horse so Brego wouldn't be lonely.
During the jackal fight at the end of episode two, a double-decker bus rolls past with the number 32 on it (another Werewolf by Night nod) plus an ad for the Global Repatriation Council — the same organisation the Flag Smashers were causing chaos over in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
The game picked up recognition well beyond gaming's usual circles, landing nominations at the BAFTA Games Awards for Best Performer for both Claudia Black and Laura Bailey, plus nods from the Annie Awards, the Visual Effects Society and The Game Awards.
GTA V recouped its enormous budget almost instantly, generating more than $1 billion in revenue within just three days of launch and setting multiple entertainment industry sales records in the process.
