Given that the movie is something of a love letter to the FPS genre, lots of shout outs to video games are a guarantee. But there's plenty more than just fellow games that get referenced. Some other examples include:
- In the opening scene in which Henry's arm is replaced, his new appendage is extremely similar to one in Texhnolyze; The lab is nearly identical, and Estelle looks quite a lot like Doc in her lab coat.
- When testing out some voices to give to the recently revived Henry, one of them is Darth Vader.
- The painfully shy, awkward geek Jimmy wears the same outfit as Wikus van der Merwe, Sharlto's first mainstream role, from District 9.
- The sequence where Jimmy dances with all his clones to demonstrate he can remotely control them is very similar to a scene with similar circumstances in Gamer, down to the same music.
- The punk rocker Jimmy is dressed up the same as the punk gracing the cover of Sunset Overdrive.
- If you have a sharp eye, you can spot the mask Jimmy uses in PAYDAY 2 in the drawer, where Henry gets a pair of pistols before the brothel shootout.
- Jimmy's hideout is basically the Chernobyl level from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. We're introduced to this while Jimmy's is in the form of Captain MacMillan, complete with stoic, gruff demeanor and a ghillie suit. Given that two of his other forms are a WW2 era Brit soldier and a thickly-accented badass with a big mohawk, it comes off as a big nod to the Call of Duty series as a whole and puts a nasty spin on the presentation of a trapped, crippled nerd living a vicarious existence through a bunch of badass avatars.
- As Henry attempts to ride onto a horse, the theme from The Magnificent Seven starts playing.
- After Henry brutalizes the rapist cops despite Ghillie Jimmy's insistence of not getting involved, Jimmy sarcastically tells him "nice job, Charlie Bronson", referencing both the actor's most famous role as Vigilante Man Paul Kersey and the famous prisoner's tendency to brutalize people on essentially a whim.
- When Henry breaks into Slick Dmitry's hideout, the first room he enters has tons of posters for all sorts of different movies and games, like District 9, It Follows, SUPERHOT and more. In a bit of a twist, SUPERHOT based two of its levels on the Bad Motherfucker music video, which was the spiritual prequel of Hardcore Henry. Also among the posters is the 1947 Film Noir Lady In The Lake, which itself was filmed entirely from a first-person perspective. Also counts as Lampshade Hanging that the concept of a P.O.V. Cam film is Older Than They Think.
- There's also one for PAYDAY 2, which did a crossover with the movie and has Jimmy as a Guest Fighter.
