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Before principal photography even started, a fire tore through one of the sets in September 2002, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Thankfully nobody was hurt, but it was a rocky start to an already nervous production.
The actual animation isn't done in-house, it's handled by a Canadian studio called Bardel Entertainment, who also work on shows like The Dragon Prince and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Fittingly weird bonus detail, their CEO happens to genuinely be named Rick.
Joe's ill-fated neighbour Natalie in season two is a TV-only invention. Because the show diverged so far from the ending of the Hidden Bodies novel, the writers needed a fresh obsession for Joe once he landed in Madre Linda, and Natalie filled that gap instead of the librarian character from the books.
The franchise's signature line gets a proper callback in the season one finale, first spoken by Barb during the Vault-Tec conspiracy meeting, then echoed two hundred years later by Cooper, who's clearly quoting her without the audience even realising it until that second use lands.
Peter B. Parker going through a messy split from Mary Jane is actually a nod to an unmade Sam Raimi script. Raimi had once planned for Peter and MJ to be married and later divorced in a fourth live-action film, after Peter's affair with Felicia Hardy came to light. Raimi eventually backed away from that storyline because it made Peter too unlikeable, and the project got shelved when Sony wouldn't give him time for a rewrite. This film quietly resurrects the idea as a joke.
Keep your ears open during the plumbing commercial scene, because when Mario's phone goes off, the ringtone is the Nintendo GameCube startup chime. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it audio gag that only really lands if you grew up with the console.
There's no loading screen and no hard cut for the entire 20+ hour campaign. Director Cory Barlog wanted the camera to feel like it never looks away from Kratos, so gameplay bleeds straight into cutscenes and back again without you ever noticing the seams.
In the original RuneScape Classic, what we now call the purple partyhat was actually called the pink party hat, and it genuinely looked more magenta than purple. When RuneScape 2 launched, Jagex nudged the colour slightly and renamed it, and the pink version just quietly stopped existing.
Land a single 105mm round in just the right spot during Death From Above and take out five enemies at once, and you'll pick up the achievement Straight Flush, a small but satisfying nod to how brutal that cannon can be when it lines up right.
Long before New Vegas existed, Black Isle was working on a game called Van Buren that got cancelled. A surprising amount of that scrapped project made it into New Vegas anyway, most notably Caesar's Legion, which was originally written for Van Buren. Even the Big Empty from Old World Blues traces back to an early Van Buren location idea.
