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- Many items of loot, especially the "junk" objects, have humorous text upon being examined. And much of that text is a shout out to various franchises, or specific people. For example:
- A human heart's description: "YOU kickstarted this heart. Thanks again for that!"
- One piece of junk is a Control Chip #13 that according to the description is an exceedingly rare item designed for controlling water systems.
- One can find a beat up action figure of Wesley. For some reason, his face is all torn up.
- The original NES Power Glove shows up. The description: "It's so bad!"
- You can find the Necronomicon. The description says that you try reading it but it just makes your head feel funny.
- The Phillips CD-I, Sega Genesis and other consoles are quest items.
- Whenever someone is outfitted with mechanical prosthetic, they are powered by energy cells - implanted in their chests and glowing blue.
- "Fix it!", handyman manual, written by Guy MacVer.
- There is also entire box of MacGyver VHS tapes in the Ag Center. Since none of your characters remember the show, they assume the guy must have been the owner
- One of the wrecked cars that are around The Rail Nomands Camp is the V8 Interceptor. And just like in the second film, it's booby trapped.
- The Ag Center has a young man named Sue in its employ.
- In Damonta, you can find mechanics named Magee and Hopi.
- Doctor Lawson at the Ag Center complains about killer tomatoes (and killer everything else).
- In Silo 7 you can insert "Joshua" into launch computer and play (or decide not to) a round of Tic-Tac-Toe. The computer will greet you as Professor Falken and if you refuse to play, it will inform you that the only winning move is not to play, afer which a safe containing unique WOPR Blaster will be opened.
- Lexcanium is a Warhammer 40,000 fanboy and names himself after the In-universe name for dictionary.
- You can also find 999 old ET cartridge in a cache in Arizona - all of which are worth $0. But there's a guy in Rail Nomad who will give you S1000 for one. The rest can be dumped right outside his place.
- One quest requires you to find a CD-i and give it to the quest giver.
- On the menu in the Ranger's cantina is egg and bacon, egg sausage and bacon, egg and rat, egg sausage and rat, rat egg sausage and rat, rat rat rat egg and rat...
- Jean Rambeau counts too, but not just his name. If you show him a pocket knife that you found inside a toaster earlier, he gives you possibly the best bladed weapons in the game a knife literally called This is a Knife.
- The opening area features a goat named Aberforth.
- The Steam achievement you get for getting three goats to follow you at once with the Animal Whisperer skill is called "Goat Simulator".
- One of the Night Terror's idle banter is: "I'm helping! I'm helping you! We're friends!"
- The explosives expert with missing fingers is named Lieutenant Tan.
- Ranger Team Able's members go by the names of The A-Team's lead actors.
- All the Contest Winner Cameos are this. The most notable ones are Highpool resident Alexey Chuklin
, AG Center farmer Honeydew Lewis (a reference to Simon Lane and Lewis Brindley specifically), and Mannerite John "Cynical" Bain. - Some of the junkies at the Rail Nomads Camp are grateful that they're at least not hallucinating babies crawling along the ceiling.
- One of the available helmets has the description "The goggles. They do nothing!"
- The Luchadore Belt trinket strongly resembles the WWF Intercontinental Title belt.
- A sidequest involves locating a lost treasure on a lost plane. This turns out to be a collection of gold in a plane named "The Sierra Madre".
- One area features a group of cowboys sitting around a fire after having eaten too many beans.
- All the inhabitants of the dental clinic in California are called Bill. We have Kill Bill, Murray Bill and so on.
- Hotel California is an obvious one. Also, Don turns away a customer for for attempting to pay with bottle caps.
- A broadcast from God's Militia explains that the apocalypse was God's judgement of the debauchery of the 1970s and the 1980s, explaining that "men lay with men, women lay with women, aliens with glowing fingers came down from the stars and had unnatural congress with small boys".
- Amongst the possible random greetings that some merchants give is Buy somethin', will ya!"
- The Steam achievement for tipping over five cows is called Moo, I say.
- You can meet Isaac Leibowitz and handle him The Flame Deluge Canticle.
- The Pod People is a reference to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
- Casey Jones, named after a train engineer from a song. Bonus points for mocking the Topekans for their worship of Choo Choo Charlie, since Good & Plenty's commercials with Choo Choo Charlie were using jingle based on the song.
- The whole Rail Nomads settlement with its religion and iconography is a reference to actual major US railway (namely, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad) that had Indians on their logos, not to actual Native Americans; strictly speaking it would have been an actual background mythology of the tribes, and not a shout-out... if not for this song. Also, their prophet is John Henry - a folk hero and a luddite legend who'd drive spikes into the ground so well that he managed to defeat a steam-powered machine - only to die from the strain.
- The Neural Net Processor Manual, a book players may get from Sidney Kyle, is written by Miles Dyson on the subject of "Cyberdyne Systems Corporation Neural Net Processor maintenance".
- Scotchmo is a Hobo...with a shotgun
- In the storeroom under the Ag Center where Rose mentions they keep all their "failed experiments," a character with points in Outdoorsman can open two glass cases that both contain herbs. Once you open them both, you automatically mix them together to form a more potent healing item.
- In the same room there are plants with names like "Pikmin" and "8-Bit Pirhana".
- The infirmary in the Ag Center is full of corpses. "P. Isley" is covered in growing herbs, while "A. Holland" "smells like a swamp." Also, "J. Woodrue" has a skin infection, "like a Druid cast too many Barkskins on him."
- In the sequence before the final battle, Matthias' reaction to the sentient AI taking over him is nigh-identical to JC Denton's similar experience with Helios in one of the endings to Deus Ex.Matthias: I... I... We... We are... We are Cochise.
- In the first volume of The History of the Desert Rangers there is a quite dismissive reference to Fountain of Dreams, Wasteland's first Spiritual Successor/Sequel - game bad enough to be disowned by creators, players and press.
- You can find Necronomicon, with it's description clearly aiming at Evil Dead.
- There is a portable outhouse serving as a loot chest
- Dugan's portrait started out as unrelated fanart of RoboCain, which shows.
- One of the shrines is to "VECTREX: Preferable to its predecessors, superior to its successors." This is the Vectrex game console of the 1980s.
- In the Ag Center: "You wonder what kind of gods would put hair on fruit. And if the gods exist. And if they are crazy.
- The in-game description for the Pulse Rifle describes it as "A phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range."
- Vax's introduce himself as like this: "Hello, I am Vax, human/cyborg relations", an obvious reference to C-3P0 from Star Wars . And one of his battle cry is "Danger! Danger!" from Robby and the Forbidden Planet. Another one is "Resistance is futile."
- One of the random battle cry of a raider is: "Fresh meat!".
- One of the perks for the surgeon skill is Smooth Operator, which is the name of a song from Sade.
- Some clothes sold by a merchant will dress you up as the ¡Three Amigos! and there's an achievement for that.
