It's pretty much common knowledge at this point that a lot of video game artists in the '80s and '90s would frequently pull reference material from whatever films, TV, and comic books they were enjoying at the time.
We've lost track, for instance, of the amount of Arnie lookalikes we've had to play as over the years, or the hordes of Giger-esque aliens we've had to blast away in the hopes of clearing a stage and moving on to the next level. But not every example is quite as blatant as the kinds we've outlined above, with some artists instead deciding to be a bit more subtle in how they pull inspiration from other sources and incorporate it into their game.
A great representation of this is an incredibly obscure Easter Egg in the original Final Fight, which was recently brought to people's attention 35 years after the game's release by the BlueSky user Kaelan Ramos, and has seemingly gone unnoticed in all that time.
The Easter Egg can be found in the industrial area of the 1989 arcade classic and sees a Capcom artist paying homage to the cover of the second volume of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga, by recreating the steel panel that is depicted behind the character Tetsuo as a reoccurring background element in the stage.
Like we said, it's not exactly the most in-your-face Easter Egg, which is possibly why it has managed to escape recognition for all these years, but it is something that we can imagine some people will get a kick out of and has also interestingly gone on to appear in other Capcom games too.
As the blogger named Noe. V noted, for example, in Kaelan Ramos's replies, the panels recently reappeared in Street Fighter 6's version of Metro City, with most players, we're betting, having no idea that they originally started off as a homage to the legendary manga.