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When Vince Gilligan was shopping the idea around, he summed up the entire concept in one line: a mild-mannered chemistry teacher turning into Scarface. Somehow that tiny pitch became one of the most acclaimed shows of the century.
Black Ops II's epilogue features Jimmy Kimmel playing himself, hosting a fictional episode of his own talk show within the game's near-future setting. It doubles as some pretty shameless self-promotion on Kimmel's part, but it fits right in with the game's habit of blending real celebrities into its 2025 vision of the world.
There used to be an NPC called 'Docky' who ran a boat between Port Khazard and Brimhaven for a small fee. When RuneScape moved from Classic to RS2, Docky himself never made the transition — but strangely, his actual boat did, and it's still sitting there in the game to this day.
The teleportation trinket you pick up from Icecrown Citadel, Jaina's Medallion, has a shape and colour scheme that lines up suspiciously well with the collar Scooby-Doo wears. Nobody at Blizzard has ever confirmed it outright, but once you notice the resemblance it's genuinely hard to unsee.
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.
Keep an eye out around Arkham City and you'll spot a green neon sign for something called the Black Canary in a few different spots. It's a nod to the character existing somewhere in this universe well before she actually shows up properly in Arkham Knight, tucked away for eagle-eyed players to notice years early.
By the time all the dust settled on the 2020 awards season, The Last of Us Part 2 had picked up more Game of the Year wins than any other game in history, knocking The Witcher 3 off the top spot it had held for years.
As if stacking a zombies map with horror actors wasn't enough, Treyarch also brought in George Romero, the filmmaker who more or less invented the modern zombie movie, to play Call of the Dead's undead antagonist. It's a fittingly on-the-nose casting choice for a map that's already dripping with genre homage.
The name Vice City is doing double duty, it's obviously winking at Miami Vice, the neon cop show the whole aesthetic is lifted from, but it's also just a literal description of the place. A city built almost entirely on drugs, corruption and greed genuinely earns the word vice without needing the TV reference at all.
The directors decided it wasn't enough for Bowser to just tell Peach he loved her, he needed a whole song about it. Jack Black co-wrote and performed 'Peaches' for the film, and the track actually charted on the Billboard Hot 100, giving Black his first solo appearance on the chart after decades in music.
