Highlights
- Starfield continues Bethesda's tradition of including pop-culture callbacks, with a wide variety of movie Easter eggs, including a Lord of the Rings reference to Samwise Gamgee's love of potatoes.
- The potato reference in Starfield is a testament to the staying power of a meme that originated from Peter Jackson's movie adaptation of The Two Towers and peaked in popularity around 2008.
- This Lord of the Rings reference is not the only Easter egg in Starfield, with the game also including subtle callbacks that fans debate whether they are intentional references or mere coincidences, like a possible Dead Space throwback.
One highly attentive Starfield fan spotted a somewhat obscure reference to The Lord of the Rings franchise in Bethesda's latest game. Their discovery adds to the already substantial list of Starfield Easter eggs that the fandom has uncovered since the RPG hit early access on September 1.
Pop-culture callbacks are nothing new for Bethesda games; many of the best Easter eggs in Fallout 4 referenced classic films such as Alien, Titanic, and Jaws, as was the case with The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Fallout 76, and the company's other RPGs.
Starfield proudly continues that tradition with a wide variety of new movie Easter eggs, some more obscure than others. One such callback that's particularly easy to miss was recently spotted by Reddit user turntrout101, who realized that the in-game description of a potato is actually a throwback to a famous line from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The remark, uttered by Sean Astin's Samwise Gamgee during an exchange with Andy Serkis's Gollum, sees the hobbit exclaim his love of potatoes by listing some of the many ways of preparing "taters."
While the 2002 movie took that line word-for-word from Tolkien's eponymous 1954 book, the quote only reached meme status among the fandom following the release of Peter Jackson's movie adaptation of The Two Towers. Its popularity peaked circa 2008, when YouTuber AlbinoBlackSheep authored a viral EDM song Mashed Taters that was essentially a remix of Serkis and Astin's exchange from the film. Bethesda's latest potato description is yet another testament to the meme's staying power, adding to the already long string of Starfield Easter eggs referencing everything from Skyrim to Blade Runner.
Starfield is far from the first Bethesda game to include a reference to The Lord of the Rings. That title belongs to the company's first-ever RPG, The Elder Scrolls: Arena; the seminal 1994 title included several callbacks to Tolkien's classic fantasy novels, with its "random" name generator frequently suggesting monikers that were essentially the names of famous LOTR characters with hyphens in between syllable intonation changes: Ara-gorn, Lego-las, Gan-dalf, Sau-ron, etc. Many names associated with Greek and Roman myths also received the same treatment from TES: Arena.
While even some LOTR fans might miss the inspiration behind Starfield's potato description, this newly spotted reference is hardly the game's most obscure Easter egg. In fact, some of the RPG's callbacks are so subtle that the fandom can't even decide whether they are actual references or merely coincidences, as underlined by a recently emerged discussion on a New Atlantis structure that some Starfield players suspect is actually a Dead Space throwback.
Starfield launches September 6 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.