Trivia / Saints Row

Index: All Games | Saints Row (2006) | Saints Row 2 | Saints Row: The Third | Saints Row IV | Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell | Agents of Mayhem | Saints Row (2022)

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• Actor Allusion:
  • This isn't the first time Michael Clarke Duncan plays an influential Kingpin who can instill fear in the hearts of others. However, he's more benevolent than the Kingpin in that film.
  • Phil Morris, who plays Ambulance Chaser Legal Lee, previously played Jackie Chiles in Seinfeld. Lee appears in the in-game radio commercial for the café Grounds For Divorce, alluding to Chiles' first appearance.
• Cast the Expert: Aisha, an R&B star, is voiced by actual R&B singer Sy Smith.
• The Danza: Philip-Anthony Rodriguez voices Victor Rodriguez.
• Troubled Production: The development of Saints Row was rather bumpy. The game was met with opposition within Volition, much of it came from devs who were reluctant about being associated with a gang simulator. It shifted from the PlayStation 2 to the Xbox 360, which caused additional issues as the provided documentation for the system was incomplete and the final hardware specs were not known. The studio exceeded its budget of $8-9,000,000, and when development finished, they were asked to write postmortem documentation; negative views of the game were common and management was criticized.
• What Could Have Been:
  • There were plans to put it on the Nintendo Gamecube, but the Wii was recently released, so this idea was scrapped.
  • The game was originally going to be ported to the PlayStation 3 and PC (with enhancements) but development on the ports was canceled so the team could better focus on the sequel.
  • The game originally began life on the PS2 in 2003 under the working title "Bling Bling."
  • The final cutscene of the game was supposed to be much different originally; the scene with Julius originally had him being chased into an alley. When the scene was animated, the result came out poor, forcing them to re-use the animation of Aisha checking her watch. Had the scene been redone, the plotline of the second game would likely be drastically different.
    • The YouTuber mrsaintsgodzilla21 asked Steve Jaros on Twitter if he had someone else originally planned to set the bomb in the original script. Jaros said no, but also said that the original pitch he made was for Saints Row 2 to be a flashback taking place in the 70s and focusing on Julius and Ben King and at the very end it would show Playa coming out of the water pissed-off, having survived the bomb.
• Working Title: Bling-Bling.