This was last of the canonical Resident Evil titles to use the names of actual gun manufacturers (excluding Magnum) and firearms within the game. All the subsequent Resident Evil titles (Resident Evil remake, Resident Evil 0 and Resident Evil 4) used generic or made-up names for their weapons (i.e: Silver Serpent, Broken Butterfly, Blacktail).
In the basement of the torture room (where you get the piano scroll), there are four statues. They carry a sword, a helmet, an armor and a shield respectively. This is a reference to the decoration on the four keys that were used in the Mansion in Resident Evil (1996).
This is the first Resident Evil game to take place internationally, and not in Raccoon City, because of the city's destruction. The initial setting, Rockfort Island, was long assumed to be located in the South Pacific (based on the Prisoner's Diary stating that it is "far south of the equator"), although some claimed it was near the coast of Europe. It was finally revealed in Biohazard: The Darkside Chronicles (2009) that Rockfort Island is indeed in the Pacific Ocean, off the west coast of South America.
In this game, the virus that mutated the residents of Rockfort Island and Antarctica isn't the T-Virus, it's the T-Veronica Virus. In-game files reveal that the Ashford family created the T-Veronica Virus by injecting viral genes found inside an ant queen's DNA into the mother virus (the original virus that was also the basis for the T-Virus). This makes this the only game to contain the T-Veronica Virus.
Alfred and Alexia Ashford were both born in 1971; this is also the password used to access Alfred's secret house.