Cayde-6's blaming of the Guardian for his old stealth drive malfunctioning is similar to Mal blaming Kaylee for his not buying new parts for the upkeep of their ship at the start of Serenity.
The line "That Wizard came from the Moon" from the Alpha build. Bungie put it on t-shirts in their store.
Master Rahool being a cheapskate - when Bungie patched the game so engrams wouldn't give you worse gear than the engram implied, they joked that Cayde-6 asked him to decode a sack of doorknobs.
The original Loot Cave, located at Skywatchers in Old Russia. Now, when people venture into the cave, they find a charred pile of corpses, and interacting with them prompts a disembodied voice to say "A million deaths are not enough for Master Rahool", which essentially canonises the Loot Cave into Destiny lore.
Sparrow Surfing, the practice of glitching your Guardian so they're standing on their Sparrow (complete with use of the Dance emote) & proceeding to ride around like it was a skateboard, inspired Bungie to create the EV-30 Tumbler; a Sparrow variant where the standard emotes are replaced with motocross tricks whilst in the air, and also has the ability for any number of flips after taking flight from a jump.
After the game released, fans began joking about the Ghost being a fancy door key due to how many times it has to open a door in the campaign. When opening the door to Omnigul in the "Will of Crota" strike from The Dark Below, Eris Morn gets in on it too - in fact, her line doing so ("In its dying breath, the Traveller sent out the Ghosts... To open doors.") is something fans had actually said themselves.
Randal the Vandal, an unnamed level 8 Vandal in the Forgotten Shore on the Cosmodrome who, as the result of glitch, can spawn with an ultra you would find on a Nightfall mission. Killing many an unsuspecting player, Randal had reached Memetic Badass status within the community, and was briefly patched before being reverted back to his irregular stats after fan outcry. He was acknowledged in Bungie's 2014 end of the year update, and an unnamed major Vandal can spawn as a VIP Kill Target or in the last wave of drilling crews in public events on Earth and the Moon.
Randal would finally reach top ascension with the release of Rise of Iron and its raid Wrath of the Machine, as "Rahndel the Perfected", a Splicer Vandal with such insane amounts of health, even the full six-man team will take a while taking him down.
A Ghost fragment about the Crucible map, Shores of Time, acknowledges the common player strategy of taking points B and C, while avoiding A like the plague. This is due to a combination the spawning system and the control points being highly disadvantageous: Point A is a small cave, corralling all of its holding team into a small area where they can be easily contained, as well as the paths from Point A to B and C bottlenecking its holding team while Points B and C are relatively open which minimizes casualties.
Said fragment also acknowledges the strategy of keeping a tight hold on two control points, while leaving the third to the enemy team, as taking the third causes the enemy team to spawn from anywhere, potentially destroying any hold the winning team has.
Author's Saving Throw: Following a brief controversy where bans were handed out for obtaining the Intrusion Ghost Shell through glitching and the item itself removed from the game, Bungie quietly reversed this policy for all future exploits in the franchise; now, players are no longer directly punished for bug abuse, as Bungie considers it unfair to make the playerbase suffer for their own mistakes. Deletions only occur if it is determined actual damage was done to the game itself and not the economy, and Destiny 2 launched with infrastructure capable of immediately disabling any activity or item for glitches that get too out of hand.
Celebrity Voice Actor: A good amount of voice actors involved in this game are actually more known for their performances outside of video game voice acting.
The Ghost drone is voiced by Peter Dinklage, who usually performs in live-action, though as of The Taken King expansion, Nolan North replaced him due to Dinklage's Game of Thrones schedule conflicts.
Lance Reddick (Broyles) was Commander Zavala. Destiny was effectively his first foray into video game voice acting.
Shohreh Aghdashloo (Admiral Raan) is Lakshmi-2. She only has a few video games to her repertoire as a voice actress, in contrast to her extensive filmography and roles in television series.
Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres voice Cayde-6 and Ikora Rey respectively. Both actors' video game castings can be counted on one hand, and are much more active on live-action TV and movies.
Bill Nighy is the Speaker; one of the few times he does voice acting for a character unrelated to his roles on the big screen.
Peter Stormare voices Arach Jalaal, and like most of the examples above, has a filmography that greatly overshadows his appearances in video games.
Lennie James voices Lord Shaxx, and is interestingly his only video game voice acting role.
Development Gag: The Intrusion Shell, a black-and-yellow spine Ghost Shell, was meant to be obtained for use in Year 1 through a dead Ghost at the entrance to the Seraphim Vault. This was axed after people began glitching into the entrance area to pick up the Ghost before The Dark Below released. A year later, with the release of The Taken King, a Ghost using the Intrusion Shell appears as a key item to advance a secret quest, and is obtained by going far, far off the beaten path, similar to what the method of obtaining the original dead Ghost prematurely boiled down to. Coincidentally, both secrets were busted with glitches - but for the second time, Bungie planned ahead and made it so that the quest wouldn't work until players could find it legitimately.
Executive Meddling: An interview from Kotaku highlighted the behind-the-scenes of Destiny's delayed development, which included, among other things, an order from senior staff to do a complete revamp of the storyline a year before the game's release in 2014.
Not Screened for Critics: An odd example - Bungie asked for critics to wait to release their reviews until after the game came out not out of concern for quality, but because they believed the game's potential wouldn't be well-represented until the game gained a larger userbase, as they had emphasized that the game is a social experience. Once critics got their hands on the game, they largely enjoyed the title, though they expected more from it at launch.
The Other Darrin: Bungie announced that when The Taken King expansion is released, Nolan North will replace Peter Dinklage as Ghost's voice actor. All of Ghost's existing lines will also be rerecorded using North's voice.
Nolan North also replaced Nathan Fillion as Cayde-6 in the Destiny 2: Forsaken expansion.
In response to the infamous "That wizard came from the Moon!" line in the Alpha, Bungie released a t-shirt featuring said line with the proceeds donated to charity. The line came up again in their ALS Bucket Challenge video, which advertised that they would give 20% of all Bungie Store profits to charity.
Players who signed in during the Festival of the Lost (Destiny's equivalent to Halloween) received numerous quests from Eva Levante, which required wearing a mask whilst completing a specific action - such as "falling" off the Tower whilst wearing an Atheon mask, a nod to an early method to defeat the raid boss by using grenades & rockets to push him off the side of the platform he spawns on to.
When Joseph Staten revealed the story plans for the base game release to the higher ups they declared it too complex and linear, desiring a more open world approach, leading to most of the material to be dropped and Staten eventually left. Some of that material has filtered into later DLC and the lore, but this was the core reason the first year of the game was so underwhelming with its story as the focus was on refining the gameplay mechanics and Worldbuilding to a sharp point. It was said that the game was made without writers.
Marty O'Donnell took on an ambitious composing project to create unique musical environments called "Music of the Spheres," complete with getting Paul McCartney involved, but Activision rejected his ideas for a soundtrack release, and the gameplay reveal was made using other licensed music. This conflict eventually lead to O'Donnell being fired, he successfully sued them for wrongful termination and lost income for profit-sharing and stock options. By the time the game was launched Bungie ended up losing two of the most prominent members of the Halo crew.
Uncredited Role: Oryx and Shiro-4 are the two major characters in this game whose voice actors are never revealed by Bungie. Amusingly, Bungie put out a reply on the former's case, stating that the voice actor went to dark places when performing and prefers to be left anonymous.
Several involving raids, especially the Vault of Glass. The first, more straightforward legend was that opening the "troll chest" (a hidden chest in a secret chute that allows you to skip most of the Gorgons' Maze when heading for the other hidden chests, and happens to contain nothing but Spirit Bloom, a material for upgrades) inside the Vault would deny your chance at any exotics when opening either chest in the Gorgons' Maze. On a related note, there are various theories that shooting at least one particular chest in the raids would guarantee you a desired item, usually an exotic. The third and probably the most "out-there" legend was that there was a seventh chest in the Vault of Glass. None of these theories are true, nor are there any real parts of the raids and their loot that are related to them.
Bungie played with the last theory as the key item acquired from Paradox's secret ending is stored inside a chest. Inside the vault.
The MIDA Multi-Tool sports a compass on the side that points off somewhere. Players have claimed that this compass points towards chests or will light up when pointed in the direction of a chest in the area you're in. Other say that it's merely the reflection of light causing the compass to light up and pointed out that the compass just simply points at whatever it considers to be "North".
The game was conceptualized as a straight up fantasy game by Bungie but found they couldn't entirely leave science fiction behind. They ultimately elected to combine aspects of both genres.
According to this article, the initial concept for the three new subclasses were rather different:
The Warlock class was called "Arc Thrower" and its super summoned an orb of lightning.
The Hunter class was called "The Trapper" and its super was a void well that would suppress enemies.
Bungie's GDC 2013 panel has two interesting bits of trivia; the Last City was originally going to be a Mile-Long Ship, and that they had a concept for a cut race nicknamed Tiger Man!
Fate of All Fools, an exotic scout rifle with the same model as the Stranger's Rifle, albeit recolored blue. The gun was datamined & discovered to be tied to an exotic bounty relating to Trials of Osiris (which is itself an example of this trope, as the description of Trials in the bounty doesn't match the version introduced with House of Wolves, nor does it line up with the revamped version present in The Taken King), but was never publically released - the only person to have the gun was a player who was using Destiny in his recovery from brain surgery, and received it as a gift from Bungie. The Fate of All Fools' stat roll & exotic perk were recycled into the Jade Rabbit.
There are several Exotics that were included in the code with the release of The Taken King, but were never released to the general public. They were considered to be removed or Put on a Bus in Spring 2016, however the release of Rise of Iron put them into circulation for public use.
The European Dead Zone (or EDZ for short) was meant to be an explorable zone in the base game, but due to a mid-development reboot in 2013, it was delayed to become part of The Taken King. Then, that expansion also got a reboot in March 2014, so the EDZ wouldn't actually see the day until its sequel, where it is significantly more detailed than the snippets of trailers that were presented before the 2014 launch.
On the topic of The Taken King, Europa and the Pyramidion would have been explorable areas, but with the March 2014 reboot of the expansion, the Dreadnaught took center stage, and the Pyramidion's design was handed over to High Moon Studios, something which would ultimately come to fruition in Destiny 2; Europa was finally added into the game with Beyond Light.
Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: The Intrusion Shell was meant to be obtained in The Dark Below at the entrance to the Seraphim Vault. Unfortunately, people managed to glitch into the area during the preload and acquired the dead Ghost with the shell prematurely. People involved in the incident were banned, and the Ghost was sealed in a block of concrete until the expansion release. Now, attempting to revive the Ghost offers no in-game reward, only a Grimoire card.
The recasting of Ghost from Peter Dinklage to Nolan North. Fans speculate that the recasting was down to the negative fan and critical response to Dinklage's performance, and Ghost's silence during The Dark Belownote Aside from the PlayStation exclusive "Undying Mind" strike & House of Wolves expansions were the first hints that Bungie themselves were unhappy with Dinklage's performance. Bungie, however, have claimed that the recasting & Ghost being silent in the expansions was simply because of Dinklage's limited availability due to his busy acting schedule, whereas it's much more convenient to contact a career voice actor like Nolan North to schedule recording time.
On a more story-based note, the dragon-like creatures that can sometimes be spotted on Venus were eventually confirmed to be "Batadactyls", rather than living Ahamkara like many players had theorized.
Working Title: Destiny began its development in 2010 under the name of "Project Tiger", following Halo: Reach's release.
Other Trivia
With a total budget of about $500 million, Destiny has become the most expensive video game ever produced, with almost twice the budget of the previous record-holder, Grand Theft Auto V. Though Bungie later went on record stating that the game's budget itself isn't anywhere close to that total and that its more to represent Activision's long term investment in the title.
