Naughty Dog added a dead rabbit Easter egg to The Last of Us 2 to honor the viral clip of streamer and voice actor Emme Montgomery, aka Negaoryx, reacting to the rabbit hunting scene in the first game.
Here's a quick refresher for anyone who may have missed or forgotten this tidbit of internet history:
You've probably seen this clip around, either through edited memes or perhaps as a TikTok effect. It was hugely viral for a time and still gets mileage to this day, and apparently it caught the eyes of Naughty Dog at one point. As Montgomery told Kotaku (as part of a longer piece about the effects of her virality), The Last of Us 2 co-directors Anthony Newman and Kurt Margenau told her that they added a dead rabbit to the game as a direct reference to her viral clip. We've never seen an Easter egg highlighted as a reference to the self-described "rabbit dying meme girl," but it sounds like a fitting tribute.
"Anytime that an anniversary of it comes up or if a brand makes a new video with it, and I retweet it, I always get multiple comments from people being like, ‘I watch this anytime I’m having a bad day, and it always cheers me up and gives me a laugh’ – little things like that," Montgomery says of the meme today. "That’s so freakin’ cool. It’s so cool to know that you can genuinely have a positive impact on people like that in a way that is so hands off – not because I stream every day, but because of one little sliver of content I created two years ago."
Speaking of newly discovered The Last of Us tidbits: apparently there's a rarely seen animation for Ellie plucking ammo out of the dang air.
