Blizz Culture Meets Pop Culture
I love it when game designers are given the freedom to be a little bit cheeky and creative with their projects, particularly when the outcome isn’t a Hot Coffee inclusion, but a clever reference to the trends of the real world. No gaming genre is more suited to this kind of pop culture assimilation as MMOs, who feature regular updating and fan bases connected enough to their game that the humorous little bytes of data won’t go unnoticed.
Mental Floss recently published a list of 14 Pop Culture References in World of Warcraft, showing repeated usage of names and ideas from classic movies like Silence of the Lambs and The Princess Bride. A much larger list of Easter eggs and pop references exists at BlizzPlanet.com, some of which are tremendously clever and wonderfully obscure. Some examples from the Mental Floss article:
- There’s a kitty at the start of the Naxxramas instance whose name is Mr. Bigglesworth… AKA Dr. Evil’s cat in the Austin Powers movies.
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There’s a blacksmith in the town of Darkshire who sometimes mumbles about hearing the lambs scream. Her name just happens to be Clarise.
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…In the Alterac Mountains, there’s a non-playable character named Nancy Vishas. This is likely a nod to Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, whom he stabbed to death in 1978.
- Read more…
And from BlizzPlanet:
- Bankers in Stormwind are named Olivia Burnside, Newton Burnside, and John Burnside — that’s Grease actress and fitness guru Olivia Newton John.
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Caretaker Alen(The Argent Dawn) at Light’s Hope(Eastern Plaguelands) whispers: “Sigh … Why, oh why did I take the blue pill?”. Similarly, when you ask a guard in Ironforge for directions to the Alchemist Trainer: “Why, oh why, didn’t I take the blue potion?”
- Star Trek: The Next Generation’s reliable chief engineer, Geordi Laforge is forever memorialized as Jhordy Lapforge, a gnome engineer in Gadgetzan, by the teleporter
- Read more…
Via | GameLife
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POSTED IN: Culture, World of Warcraft
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