There's an achievement called "Live With the Hot Ones" for setting enemies alight with the flame thrower. This is a direct reference to an obscure line in the EA code of conduct. Every employee at EA is contractually obligated to "Live With the Hot Ones". No one had any idea what it meant, so it became something of an in-joke at EA.

At the end of the game, it is revealed that Spoiler:Nicole Brennan committed suicide before you even started your adventure. If you look back at the first letter of each chapter in the game, the letters spell "Nicole is Dead".
Chapter 01: New Arrivals
Chapter 02: Intensive Care
Chapter 03: Course Correction
Chapter 04: Obliteration Imminent
Chapter 05: Lethal Devotion
Chapter 06: Environmental Hazard
Chapter 07: Into the Void
Chapter 08: Search and Rescue
Chapter 09: Dead on Arrival
Chapter 10: End of Days
Chapter 11: Alternate Solutions
Chapter 12: Dead Space

Dead Space started production as an Xbox game. The game was later re-purposed as a next-gen game ultimately releasing on the Xbox 360 and PS3.

To come up with ideas for the Necromorph enemies, developers studied the carnage of car wrecks. Ideas for the scares were conceived by watching various horror movies.

On the options screen, some symbols can be seen on the left side of the screen. These symbols are Unitology symbols and translated hint Spoiler: that the "Red Marker is man made."

If the main menu screen is left up for long enough, a cinematic of the game's death scenes will play to a very startling rendition of the song "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."

Completing the asteroid gunning section in Chapter 4 with over 50 percent of the ship's shield still remaining gets you a trophy/achievement titled: "Don't get cocky, kid."

This is a line spoken by Han Solo in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope during a similar scene.

The background images of the title screen and menus are actually real footage of a dead goat. The development team bought a goat from a local butcher and spent the day taking various shots of the carcass and innards to further the unsettling atmosphere of the game.

In Chapter 1: New Arrivals, when playing on a completed save, if the player breaks the light air vent on the left side from a different room from the Flight Lounge, a Necromorph will suddenly appear, but will not trigger a cutscene, causing the game to glitch and allowing Isaac to humorously lead the Necromorph around the Flight Lounge as the crew does not notice the intruder.

During Chapter 3: Course Correction, after going through a brief Zero Gravity section on the way to the Engine Room, you have to proceed through a tunnel featuring blasting steam, flashing lights, and an extremely dense, loud noise lasting all throughout the room, referred to by some players as one of the scariest rooms in the game. According to series creator Glen Schofield in a 2019 Ars Technica interview, this sound originates from a recording of the trains in San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system.

For decades, BART trains were infamous for producing a "high-pitched squeal" during turns that stemmed from a conscious design choice when engineers started building it in the mid-1960s to make the train wheels solid axle (connected) so that they rotated at the same rate. This made the trains relatively quiet on straightaways, which make up a majority of BART's tracks, but because of the design, one of the wheels ended up dragging against the rail on turns, with this friction causing the noise.

During Dead Space's development when this was still an issue, audio director Don Veca recounted his experience riding a BART train to Schofield (the following quote paraphrased by him):


The next day, Veca brought a microphone with him to record the noises. According to Schofield, the developers loved the resulting recordings, because it showed them a new way to use sound even more in the game's design by helping them realize how they could only use sound to scare people without relying on any enemies or other planned horror elements:


As for BART, they finally remedied the noise issues between October 2017 and February 2019, when they gradually replaced every train wheel in its fleet with new wheels designed to reduce the noise by as much as fifteen decibels, effectively making the riding experience "many times quieter than before".