There are loads of Guardians of the Galaxy game Easter eggs to find, covering both classic and more obscure comics, and even the MCU and other movies. From the amphibian Asgardian Throg, to your teammates leaving notes about Sakaarian yoghurt, you could spend hours combing every location for small nods to Marvel's colossal archive of comic book characters and lore. We've picked up on plenty of these secrets as we played through Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, spotting nods to Venom, Infinity War, the X-Men, and more. Here are the best Guardians of the Galaxy game easter eggs for players to find.
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Venom's Klyntarian origins
As far as we know, Venom himself doesn't get name-dropped in Guardians of the Galaxy, but his gooey fingerprints are found in a few spots, albeit in a coy way. We spotted two: the main, obvious one is that when the Guardians are trapped in Lady Hellbender's Vault after trying to sell Rocket, she attempts to kill them with Klyntarian gas. Klyntar is the name of the symbiote homeworld! In fact, the biological name for the symbiotes - including Venom and Carnage - is the Klyntarians.
There's one other, sneakier nod to this species: when exploring Knowhere with the Guardians, some idle dialogue has them muse about what exactly cut off the Celestial's head, and Drax speculates that it must've been a very large sword. Well, he's right: according to Marvel Comics the Celestial was decapitated by the evil god of the symbiotes: Knull, who created the sword out of his own abyssal soul and chopped off that Celestial's head to make a forge out of. The sword itself would become the first symbiote, and later on Knull would get overthrown by the Klyntarians after a fight with Thor left him weakened. Others would find the rotting head and turn it into the scrappy space station we know and love in the game.
Wendigo and SWORD
The monsters on Maklu 4, the wendigos, are a little stranger than you'd think. The Wendigo is actually an old villain from Marvel comics, often associated with the Incredible Hulk, and typically manifests as a figure afflicted with an ancient, werewolf-like curse in which those who get bitten by the Wendigo will become one as well. Not only that, but the broken spaceship that they're seen clambering around has several documents lying near it that mark it as being a part of an organisation known as SWORD.
Who are SWORD? Well, they're a branch of SHIELD, one that deals with extraterrestrial and alien threats in their various forms. The implied backstory here is that SWORD found all the known Wendigos on Earth, loaded them into a spaceship and fired them off into the cosmos so that they wouldn't have to deal with them. It didn't work in Planet Hulk, but if at first you don't succeed... right?
Ruby Thursday and the Headmen
Nobody saw this one coming, to be honest. Push past the crashed SWORD ship on Maklu 4 and you'll find a woman in a fur coat with… red ball for a head? With arms coming out of it?
A glorious, pointless addition to the cast, this is Ruby Thursday, a Marvel comics villain who is about as D-list as villains get. A member of the villain team "the Headmen", Thursday Rubinstein is a fairly typical run-of-the-mill comic villain who replaced her head with this mechanical ball that can mimic all the functions of a real head while also growing arms, shooting energy bolts, and even detaching from her neck and moving around on its own. It's a hell of a gimmick, but the best part is this: Ruby Thursday canonically was once a presidential candidate. She got beaten up by the Defenders before she could see it through, but surely that was the animated What If? episode we all wanted to see?
Once you're done chatting with Ruby Thursday, look around the wreckage to find the document nearby that mentions Chondu and Nagan: she's talking about Chondu the Mystic and Gorilla-Man, two other members of the Headmen team.
Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity War Easter Eggs
We're not actually talking about the MCU Infinity War here - at least, not yet - but the Guardians of the Galaxy game draws a lot of inspiration from the 1991 Infinity Gauntlet Marvel Comics event, and its sequel, Infinity War. The connections range from overt references to subtle homages, but here's some that we found.
- The Soul Stone isn't ever directly called out as one of the Infinity Stones, but Mantis does allude to it being "one of the six." We all know what that means.
- Gamora mentions "Lady Death" in background dialogue while exploring Seknarf Nine, and optional dialogue around the Assassin's Ring Guardian Collectible reveals that at one point she saw Thanos talking to Death itself. The Infinity Gauntlet comic is about Thanos trying to win the affections of the Grim Reaper by killing half the universe in her name.
- The Magus has a bunch of contrary backstories in Marvel Comics, mainly so they can keep bringing him back after he dies. His character bio alludes to this tangled cluster of contradictory explanations, giving multiple possible explanations for his origins without actually committing to any of them. He might be from the future, a piece of Adam Warlock's soul, or a being that emerged as part of the Galactic War - all of these are references to ways he's come back in the comics.
- At the end of the original Infinity War comic, the Magus is imprisoned inside the Soul Stone itself. The fact that the game begins with him escaping the Soul Stone feels like a nod-and-a-wink to that event.
MCU Easter Eggs
There's no shortage of references to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the Guardians of the Galaxy game. Aside from the character and plot elements that were clearly inspired by James Gunn's take on the Guardians (such as much of the aesthetic, humour, and musical elements), there are also several cheeky nods to both those movies and the wider MCU in general. Here are some examples:
- In idle dialogue, the characters make reference to Vormirean Pox. Vormir is still a planet in Marvel Comics, but it's better known for being the location of the Soul Stone and Gamora's death in the MCU's Infinity War.
- While in some of the darker alleys of Knowhere, some two-legged little rodents will bounce past you. Though the design isn't a perfect match, these feel like a clear homage to the Orloni, the rat-like creatures that Peter is seen kicking at the start of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).
- If you find the Glamot Mask Guardian Collectible on Knowhere, you can talk to Rocket about it back on the Milano. He brings up Groot's past, mentioning that he was a baby when they met and Peter coos "aww, baby Groot!" Need we say more?
- While exploring Maklu 4, Peter is unphased by the challenges ahead and says "no mountain too high, no valley too low," referring to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" in the film's well-known soundtrack.
Marvel Comics Easter Eggs
Like with the MCU, little references to Marvel Comics are dotted all about Guardians of the Galaxy, either in terms of their history or their lore. Here's a few of our favourites:
- The Momentum/Combo ratings in combat are references to adjectives for famous superheroes franchises: Fantastic Four, Uncanny X-Men, Incredible Hulk, Amazing Spider-Man and so on.
- The Star-Lord comic book on Peter's childhood table has the Marvel Comics Group banner across it, a throwback to an older age of the industry where all Marvel Comics had that banner.
- Close to that, a partially-covered newspaper seems to be named "the Weekly Bu-", and is stylized exactly like the Daily Bugle in Spider-Man. What we can see of the headline suggests that a vigilante has evaded capture - likely some wall-crawling menace.
- Dazzler, a member of the X-Men who was also a popstar between hero work, has a poster on Peter's wall.
- The code to get into the Quarantine Zone is 0451. Recorder 451 is a robot who had a long-lasting presence in the Iron Man comics. It's also a reference to the Deus Ex games, which regularly evoke the number as a recurring joke.
- One of Nikki's modified robots is named Jocasta. In the comics, Jocasta was similar to Vision, a robot made by Ultron who ended up joining the Avengers.
- The Dweller-in-Darkness is a cosmic extra-dimensional monster from the realm of Everinnye, an alien dimension in Marvel Comics. Lady Hellbender also has some Everinnye metal in her vault.
- An off-hand joke from the Guardians in the background comments that Fin Fang Foom could wear tiny purple shorts, but in older comics, he really did.
