Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines/Shout-Out

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Shout-Outs in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines include:

"Forget it, boss. It's Chinatown."

  • In the Hell Hotel level, obviously an Homage to The Shining, the ceiling has collapsed right in front of Room 217 (which was replaced in the film by Room 237).
  • The dialogue option of "Did I just fight a landshark?" is a pretty obvious reference to the old SNL skit.
  • The ship the Elizabeth Dane is the name of the Leper Ship in John Carpenter's The Fog.
  • There are several references to being shot like "Old Yella".
  • The flamethrower runs on burninator-brand fuel.
  • In a minor side-quest in Hollywood, LaCroix asks you to make a critics review of an Italian restaurant to be a bad one. If you are playing Malkavian and have enough dots in Dementation discipline you can use "Maggots. You are eating maggots." Line from '87 movie about vampires: The Lost Boys.

Tommy Flayton: This place will pay for this! As sure as my name is Tommy Flayton, they'll never serve food in this town again!
Malkavian Player Character: How could they do that to you? I bet they didn't get that idea from a movie.

  • Mitnick the computer hacker is a reference to Kevin Mitnick, previously one of the world's most notorious social engineers. He now runs an IT security consulting service.
  • The clock in the Player Character's apartment had a brand name printed on it, said brand name being "Zaphod".
  • There's also a reference to Traffik: a cool, afroed Jive Turkey sends you on a mission to retrieve a briefcase, with "beautiful" unknown contents.
  • There's a reference to Futurama in the Santa Monica health clinic: if you examine the patients' files on the doctor's computer, one of them suffers from frequent bouts of sexlexia.
    • You can also use Zapp Branningan's classic pick-up line--"I find the most erotic part of a woman is the boobies"--on a would-be Blood Doll in Hollywood. It works about the same as it did for Kif.
  • Also in the Santa Monica health clinic's computer, you find a listing of doctors, including a Dr. Roberts, who has never lost a patient. The file notes that "No one can succeed like Dr. Roberts."
  • And, of course, the Italian Giovanni's desire for an "endless night".
  • Perhaps more subtly, if you choose to save Heather Poe by giving her your blood, the cutscene goes through the exact motions of the scene in Interview with the Vampire (The Movie) where Lestat Embraces Claudia.
  • There's also a one armed man named "Gimble" who turns out to be a serial killer. Sound familiar?
  • "Nobody expects the Malkavian Inquisition."
  • A radio ad for a brand of butter called "I Thought it was Margarine" (all the crappy taste of margarine, with all the saturate fat of butter).
  • When enduring the Mandarin's experiments, his verbal notes call the squad of commandos you kill "The Belmont Squad".
    • The experiment right before that, which tests if a cross can repel you, is given the name of Dr. Van Helsing from Dracula.
  • Malkavians are full of this: