The photo of C.W. Longbottom holding his Nebula Award is a photoshopped image of actor F. Murray Abraham holding his Oscar for Amadeus (1984). This was later retconned into actor Josh Brener holding the award, who portrays the young C.W. in the episode "Backstory!"
The creators wrote in the show's bible that, under no circumstances, can Ian Grimm and Poppy Li have a romantic relationship or fall in love with one another. "One of the things we wanted to stress in this series is that a man and a woman can both be adults and be best friends with each other, with zero romance. We have evolved enough as a society where that is now ok, and we wanted that to be one of the bedrocks of the series," said co-creator Megan Ganz in an interview.
Ashly Burch, who plays the game tester Rachel, is no stranger to the video game industry: she has been a voice actress in more than thirty games, including Borderlands 3 (2019), Fortnite (2017), Horizon Zero Dawn (2017), Final Fantasy XV (2016) and Fallout 4 (2015).
The cinematic clips of the Mythic Quest game are actually from multiple games, including For Honor (2017); Kingdom Come Deliverance (2018) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) as well as a short clip from Assassins Creed Origins.
While inspired by many game developers, the character of Ian Grimm is mainly based on Jason Vandenberghe, former creative director of Ubisoft. The beard, bracelets and speech patterns are direct homages.