The twist that the real Brahms was alive and there was nothing supernatural is what made it work, but The Boy II bizarrely goes out of its way to undermine all that. It posits the real Brahms was nothing but a puppet for the doll, and the character seemingly died following the events of the original.

Curiously, Brahms: The Boy II goes in the complete opposite direction of its predecessor and states that the Brahms doll is unequivocally evil. The end of The Boy hints that the living Brahms might still be alive, but that's no longer the case.

The US renaming of "noughts and crosses" to "tic-tac-toe" occurred in the 20th century. In 1952, OXO (or Noughts and Crosses), developed by British computer scientist Sandy Douglas for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge, became one of the first known video games.

Rota, from the latin word ROTAE for 'wheel' is believed to be an ancient roman game of Tic Tac Toe.