The No Man's Sky community has been given a cryptic gift by Hello Games.
Over the past week, audio cassette tapes have been delivered to 16 different moderators from the No Man's Sky reddit page.
The cassette tapes apparently contain several different musical cues and hints in them and are slowly being uploaded to the internet by the mods.
The tapes, numbered between 1 to 16, apparently contain a ten-minute piece of synth music on side A, each introduced by a robotic voice saying the tapes number. Side B is a pattern of distorted noises seemingly at random.
Along with the noises on both tapes, the moderators have found a coded message when running side B of each tape through a spectrograph, shown to be "706s7274616p." Members of the No Man's Sky community have deciphered the code using an ROT13 substitution cipher, which transforms the code into a hexadecimal value of 706f7274616c. When translated through ASCII, it makes the word "portal."
Thus far, three cassette tapes out of the sixteen have been deciphered, each of them thus far saying the word "portal" in their hidden code.
The No Man's Sky reddit page has created a thread for the cassette tapes, which has been continuously updated for the past few days. Thus far, only seven tapes have been confirmed to be in the hands of known moderators. The whereabouts of the remaining nine tapes is currently unknown at this time.
Currently, speculation believes that No Man's Sky will get a third update involving the currently defunct portals in the game, which were shown as active and usable in pre-release footage of the game.
This is the first mention by Hello Games regarding No Man's Sky since the release of the Path Finder update back in March. The Path Finder update added new vehicles to the game, along with a photo mode and other objects and fixes to the title. Hello Games has been heavily criticized for the title since it's release in August of last year but has continued to support the game despite a mixed reception.
What are your thoughts on all of this? Do you think No Man's Sky will show up at E3? Leave your comments below!
