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Three years after Halo 2 launched, the Halo Theme MJOLNIR Mix was made available as a totally free download for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock on Xbox 360, letting players actually strum along to Steve Vai's guitar work note for note instead of just hearing it in cutscenes.
Leighton Meester is naturally blonde, and her first audition for the show was actually for Serena, not Blair. Producers liked her but felt she suited Blair better, so she dyed her hair brunette on the spot because she wanted the part that badly.
Juliette Lewis was originally lined up to voice Sage, a DJ on Radio X back in San Andreas, but she passed on it because she felt the character's dialogue was too crude even for GTA. She still ended up in the series eventually, though - in GTA IV she appears as herself, hosting on Radio Broker rather than playing a fictional character.
This one went unnoticed for years. A Reddit user eventually spotted that some pill bottles you can examine in Uncharted 4 are labelled as coming from Weston's Pharmacy, a location that shows up again in The Last of Us Part II, released five years later.
During a moment about loss shaping the different Spider-heroes, a still frame from Sam Raimi's 2002 film flashes by, including the iconic upside-down kiss between Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. Over twenty years on, it's still instantly recognisable even hidden in a busy background montage.
There was a point where the Duffers seriously floated the idea of moving each new season forward a decade, starting in the 80s and eventually landing in the present day by Season 5. It would have been a wild ride through changing fashion and pop culture, but they ultimately scrapped it because they realised the heart of the show was really the kids and their journey together, not the era they were stuck in.
Down in the tunnels beneath the Castle, you'll find General McGann's body next to a crate of wine and, just across the way, a skeleton sealed inside a bricked-up wall. It's a pretty clear nod to Poe's The Cask of Amontillado, and the wine even matches - it's Amontillado.
In Nate and Elena's daughter's bedroom hangs a poster for a fictional comic called The Last of Us: American Daughters, showing a red-haired, visibly pregnant woman holding a revolver. Fans latched onto the resemblance to Ellie and spent years speculating it was foreshadowing for The Last of Us Part II, though that turned out not to be the case.
John Paesano handles the score for Invincible, and outside the show he's the guy behind the music for the Maze Runner film trilogy and Marvel's Daredevil series, along with several Spider-Man video games. His work on Invincible earned its own soundtrack release, split across volumes covering the different seasons.
