In Chapter 4, during Susie and Noelle's conversation in the Holiday manor's basement, Noelle mentions being reminded of "this guy that gets really mad about games... and he made this goofy horror series... about this bucket with ICE-E's face that tries to kill him?" This references two different web shows by YouTuber James Rolfe: The Angry Video Game Nerd, in which the title character profanely reviews video games of oftentimes poor quality, and Board James, one episode of which depicts the title character and Mike Matei being menaced by a sentient version of the toy Mr. Bucket.

The in-game version of the 2025 Jamie Paige & OK Glass song "BIRDBRAIN", first created for UNBEATABLE's DLC pack THE JAMIE PAIGE CONTENT COMPANION and later featured in Fortnite, is based on a radio edit that Paige put together for her appearance on the WNYU series Vocaverse. While the song is mostly identical between the radio edit and in-game edit, replacing all instances of "fuck" and "shit" with chicken noises to abide by FCC and ESRB guidelines, the censored version of the song's bridge is re-recorded for the in-game rendition. In the radio edit, Paige notes that the Vocaloid voice bank used for the song, Kasane Teto, "can't say ['my penis'] on the radio... unless it's in Australia," referencing an incident where the uncensored version of "BIRDBRAIN" was played on Australian radio station Triple J. The in-game version, meanwhile, has Paige scold Teto by pointing out that "this is a video game, the ESRB will have our heads," referencing a prior instance where music in UNBEATABLE had to be censored to avoid an M rating.

World of Warcraft: Forever was developed following the observation of several players of World of Warcraft Classic electing not to move on to "The Burning Crusade Classic" expansion, instead wanting to experience new content at the original Level 60 cap. The "Season of Discovery" expansion to Classic was also created as a means of seeing what could be done and added with the Vanilla level cap. According to World of Warcraft Classic lead designer Tim Jones, four main pillars guided the design philosophy for World of Warcraft: Forever:

• New additions had to be in the spirit of Classic as opposed to novelties (i.e. no Flying Mounts or Level Scaling); Azeroth remains dangerous; difficulty is derived from player preparation and cooperation as opposed to arbitrary difficulty
• New content should be available for all levels of play, and not all stories are about saving the world
• No level cap increase; leveling is only way to catch up
• Trying to stay aware of how quality-of-life changes can affect how players socially interact with one-another

While developing the plot for Batman: Arkham Knight, Warner Bros. Games concluded from a ratings analysis that certain scenes would cause "issues", so they requested a Mature rating from the Entertainment Software Ratings Board. Rocksteady Games founder Sefton Hill was initially surprised and scared by this, as the game didn't include "gratuitous blood or swearing" and he believed the rating would take away the team's creative freedom. After a phone call with WB Games' vice president of production Ames Kirshen calmed these fears, Hill agreed to go forward with the M rating.

The rating was likely triggered by scenes such as the player as Batman interrogating a Militia grunt by using the wheel of the Batmoblie to torture him for information, the Professor Pyg sequence with blood being splattered all over the room, and unarmed characters being shot in cutscenes and while playing as Spoiler:the Joker. Hill was aware that this meant certain people would not be able to play the game, but he stated that he didn't want to compromise any of the game's content despite not writing the game with that rating in mind.

A random encounter that one may come across is a pipe sticking up out of the ground emitting a gas with a corpse holding a note that reads: "PIPE IS LIFE". This was originally a joke idea that level designer Zachary Wilson proudly put in as "some nonsense [he] made at 8PM on a Wednesday at the end of the project when no one was looking."

According to planner Atsushi Tomita, the team originally planned for the final boss Apocalypse to be human-sized, but eventually decided against it due to the lackluster reaction to Thanos as a boss in the previous game, and because of the effort and memory capacity it would take to create. Instead, they decided to make him huge to save on space (by giving him minimalistic animations) and to surprise fans. The freed up space was used to add Cammy into the game.

In November 2005, the watchdog advocacy group MediaWise (controlled by the National Institute on Media and the Family) joined by United States senator Joe Lieberman published their annual report on offensive content in video games. At the press conference to present their findings, they highlighted games featuring cannibalism, and particularly criticized F.E.A.R. and Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse as games to avoid out of concern that they would be harmful to young children, despite the games being aimed at a mature audience. Developer Wideload Games fired back with a humorous response claiming the watchdog group was arguing semantics, as Stubbs ate brains not because he was a cannibal in the vein of a serial killer, but because: "Stubbs is a zombie. [...] Zombies eat brains. That's what they do."

The African Kingdoms expansion added to Age of Empires II: HD Edition in 2015 would draw ire from some fans due to the inclusion of the Portuguese as one of the four new civilizations, as Portugal was not an African civilization, but European. This culminated in the creation of "Alberto Barbosa", a meme originating from 4chan's international imageboard which took artwork of an African man on the expansion's cover art and edited the modern-day flag of Portugal over his turban.

Of the original 13 civilizations featured in the game, only the Britons completely lacked any gunpowder units or Bombard Towers. However, they would quickly be joined by the Aztecs and Mayans, which were introduced in The Conquerors expansion pack in 2000.

In a pre-release interview with director Bruce Shelley, he described how a civilization's distinct bonuses helped differentiate them, specifically citing that Shang villagers moved faster. However, in the final release of the game, this bonus was instead given to the Assyrians and Yamato. The Shang bonuses would instead turn out to be cheaper Villagers and more HP for their walls.

Following the release of the Game Boy Advance port of Aero the Acro-Bat in 2002, series creator David Siller expressed interest in bringing the other two games in the series, Aero the Acro-Bat 2 and Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel, to the handheld, possibly in a single collection called the "A-Z Force". However, these ports would never be released.

Mandy's ultimate attack, in which she smiles at her opponents and causes them to explode, is a reference to the season 5 episode "My Fair Mandy". In this episode, it is revealed that whenever Mandy smiles it leads to cataclysmic events.

The Italian mobsters operating in the Buca De Faggoncini are an obvious homage to the cast of the 1999 TV series "The Sopranos", specifically Tony Soprano, Christopher Moltisanti, Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero, Silvio Dante and Paulie Gualtieri. Classi at one point even describes them as "Tony Soprano-looking motherfuckers".

The longtime fan term "Eeveelution", which refers to the various evolutions of the Pokémon Eevee, first appeared in the 2001 Nintendo Power Player's Guide for Pokémon Stadium 2. It was first used within an official game in 2008's Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia.

The American release of Pokémon Stadium 2 has a two-toned cartridge, with the front being gold-colored and the back being silver-colored in line with the background of the game's box art. This is a reference to Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver, which could transfer information to the game using the Nintendo 64 Transfer Pak.

The American release of the game has an exclusive spelling error, where two Ninetales cards are mistakenly spelled "Ninetails." However, Ninetales is spelled correctly in one of the cards' description texts. This was fixed in the European release.

Within the data of Chapters 2, 3, and 4 is a variable for the TP meter titled "shit," which is set to 1 whenever the global.tensionselect variable (used to indicate the amount of TP required to cast the currently selected spell) is uninitialized. Under these conditions, the game is programmed to play the recurring splat soundbyte. In Chapter 5, this variable is renamed "toylet." The purpose behind this variable is to bypass an issue where Game Maker crashes when trying to call a variable that hasn't been initialized yet; consequently, the "shit"/"toylet" variable serves as a means of highlighting such errors without disrupting gameplay.