News: The strangest secret of gaming history revealed
The most unbelievable easter egg of all of the history of gaming has been hidden in the Finnish-made game Trials Evolution. The last lock of the secret will only open in a hundred years from now. The mastermind behind the secret, Antti Ilvessuo, talks about his secrets and reveals the creative madness that has helped make Redlynx a studio known worldwide.
The hundred-year-long secret of Trials
On Friday the 11th of October 2013, the doorbell at the office of Pelaaja magazine rang. It was Markus Pylkkänen, who was the first to go searching for the treasure. The magazine's CEO Petteri Moisio opened the door, but had no idea why this stranger was asking for Redlynx's creative director Antti Ilvessuo. He then found out, that at the office there really was a mysterious packet, that Ilvessuo had brought earlier. It would lead to the treasure.
- That box was meant for someone I knew, but who didn't completely know what was going on, Ilvessuo later explains.
As we sit at Redlynx's new office, our curiosity is driving us crazy. Pelaaja was for a moment made part of a massive secret hidden in the game Trials Evolution, in which a group of active players hunt for mysteries hidden in the game and its addons with the help of spectography, ciphers, Morse code, knowledge of history and of course playing the game.
Helsinki, Finland. In addition to a metal plate, the packet left at Pelaaja's office included old parchments and a drawing leading to the treasure. Daniil Odarenko shared these pictures and a story of his hunt for the treasure on Redlynx's forums.
The past and the future
The hunt for the treasure started in Trials Evolution with drawings hidden in the game's tracks. Those looking for them had to ride to the right spots, stop for a while, wait and jump to surprising direction. Ilvessuo uses a projector to show the first hidden picture.
- It's the first drawing made by man.
The next easter eggs also follow the theme of history. They include art from the Japanese prehistoric Jomon culture and a precursor of modern writing, Harappa symbols. One of the pictures is of a for in the Turkish Göbekli Tepe temple.
- It's a strange place. The ruins get worse the newer they get. Locals have covered the older pictures, which were cooler, Ilvessuo explains.
The last of the pictures is of the crater lake of the supervolcano at the lake Toba. It erupting is thought to have a almost driven humankind extinct 74 000 years ago. Only a few thousand survived the volcanic mini ice age. As a whole these pictures are a third of Ilvessuo's riddle about time: he wanted to get the players to ponder our past and the people lost a long time ago, of whom we no longer know nothing.
The secrets continued in the game's first downloadable content pack. It included three caches, that require extremely precise riding and close looking to find. Two of them were used to hide pieces of braille, that when combined show the radio message sent from the Arecibo observatory. The message will arrive at the Messier 13 star cluster in 25 000 years. In another level a mechanical structure can be found, that is a copy of the Clock of the Long Now, also known as the 10 000 year clock.
- In 10 000 years it will ring, ding ****. It has no other purpose, Ilvessuo says.
The radio signal and the clock are both things and messages, the arrival and ringing of which none of us will be around to see. It's the part of Ilvessuo's message that describes the distant future.
If you back up at the seventh checkpoint of the track Reclaimed, included in the DLC Origin of Pain, you will find a copy of a 10 000 year clock.
The end of everything is coming
Trials secrets got out of control for good in the second DLC, in which the hunt moved from the game to real life. There were 12 pieces of code hidden in the game.
- The players photoshopped them together and it became a coded message. They haven't found the key yet, but apparently you can decode it by hand. I didn't think it was possible, Ilvessuo laughs.
The message tells you to turn down your game volume, ride the Scorpion on a specific track and stop at a specific point. A song will play, in the lyrics of which is the next piece of the puzzle. A lovely female voice sings of secrets that are hidden in the notes, secrets that can't be heard by the human ear. They need to be transformed to a visible form.
- At this point it got out of control. The song was there for half a year before anyone found it. It was composed for the riddle. The planning started 3-4 years ago.
The lyrics tell the players to analyze the game's music. The players found Morse code hidden under other sounds. The code lead to fixedpatterncodes.com, where there still was a message coded into graphic cyphers and a codealphabet made of the most important people in the history of sience to be solved.
- When you look into these, each of the images hints at a major figure or event, like Schrödinger's cat. This part was maybe a bit too easy, Ilvessuo explains.
The last secret of the webpage was solved by typing in a password, that refers to the ultimate fate of the universe: ”big freeze with no complete end” - the continued expansion of the universe leads to it approaching absolute zero. This again tells of the future that fascinates Ilvessuo, ”the endless end”.
- Everything expands and expands and breaks, and finally the only thing left are black holes, that disperse themselves in Hawking radiation.
Bath, England. Richard Mayneord and his two-year-old son, who live in Swindon, went looking for treasure: ”He was excited to go look for a real treasure. It was an adventure for both of us.
Hundred years' wait
The password opened a list of coordinates on the site, and the hunt was now about finding boxes hidden around the world. There were boxes hidden in Helsinki, San Francisco, Bath and Sydney. The hiding places were carefully chosen. The cache in Sydney was in an observatory, that was built for studying Halley's comet, but wasn't completed in time. There's a text saying how they'll meet again in 2061, when the comet comes near Earth the next time. The treasure in San Francisco was on a hill, around which the city was built.
In those boxes was hidden the last piece of Ilvessuo's riddle, keys and metal plates that tell the finders to meet in Paris in a hundred years. That's right, the Trials riddle won't be completely solved until the year 2113. Ilvessuo assures us that he's made sure there will be somebody to bring a box to the Eiffel tower, which one of the keys will open. Isn't he depressed that he won't be around to see his riddle be finally solved?
- There are a lot of things in the future that I won't be around to see. I will send the finders of the boxes letters, and I'll have ot made sure they're written on paper that won't disintegrate. If you'd print it on a normal piece of paper, it would fall apart in time. I advise to leave the key and the letter as heritage, that's why I need to make sure they won't fall apart. I chose Eiffel tower because it's a historically stable area.
The rest of us, that didn't get keys, get Ilvessuo's whole message. The first messages were about the past and the future, this last one is about the present, that we can't get rid of. It refers to one of the books that fascinate Ilvessuo, The End of Time by Julain Barbour, in which a British fysicist claims that time is merely and illusion. There is no present.
Be interested in everything
All this sounds odd, if you've never met Ilvessuo face to face. Why would anyone hide speculation of time and humanity in a simple bike game? Ilvessuo isn't a normal game maker. With his beard and hat he looks more like a celebrated artist. His business card is a coin, on one side of which is a grinning lynx and on the other a miniature copy of the golden plate attached to Voyager.
During the interview Ilvessuo switches quickly from topic to topic, thinks of new ideas and types them into his phone. It's useless to ask, if there's some one thing behind this treasure hunting, like a childhood game of pirates.
- You think of all kinds of things all the time. Maybe I've read a book and things have stuck in my head. What would it feel like to be alive when that 10 000 year clock finally rings? I think of everything all the time. Maybe because of my profession, or maybe I'm just this kind of person.
Ilvessuo thinks it's in general good to keep up a good attitude in life and to be interested in everything.
- Trials HD had secrets that made you think about what everything was for. That question was at the same time the answer. That you have the ability to ask and question things. If you never ask questions, you could just as well be a rock on the ground.
This says a lot about Ilvessuo's attitude on how he thinks games should be designed.
- I once read a book called something like ”How to become a game designer”. It was game theory and I thought ”damn, this is boring”. I wanted to make my own instructions. They go like this: make a hundred different things, I don't care what. After that you'll be a better game designer. Make balloon animals, play with clay, learn to navigate.
Even though Ilvessuo drops a lot of trivia during the interview, for example how hyenas have a higher percentage of success in hunting than lions (it's because of their paws – do your own research!), he explains that knowledgeisn't enough.
- The thing that's important is doing stuff, not just collecting information. You have to understand why things work before you can make them work better. If you make balloon animals, don't follow the instructions, do your own thing. In game design you magic is real, you can trick people in all kinds of ways.
This creative madness is part the reason why Redlynx is known worldwide as an odd game studio. Everyone who's been to their office remembers the wrestling mat.
- We got the wrestling mat when it got a little boring and I said suggested that we wrestle. I looked it up, a wrestling mat costs 500 euros in Ostrobothnia (Pohjanmaa). Someone told me that you couldn't order those. Why not? Then we wrestled. A foreign reporter once wanted me to throw him down onto the mat.
That's the reason why the Trials riddle also had to be made. Even though it's hard to believe, that even hundreds of hunters could find all the secrets hidden in the game, with a group effort it didn't take long at all.
- If you belive that people are smart, they'll figure it out. You just need to get people interested and then turn some switch that makes them think. Still I didn't have any sublime intentions. I thought it was cool, and that made me think others would be excited too. You should always do things that make you yourself excited. I sometimes think to myself how great it would be to find something like this, that someone has put a lot of time into.
That's why he now also gives this look behind the scenes.
- I would love to read about something like this myself. To calm down a bit. To think of things.
At the moment Redlynx is working on a new Trials game. Trials Fusion is coming out on the 16th of April and will follow the footsteps of Evolution on consoles, while Trials Frontier recently came out for smartphones. They both surely have their secrets.
San Fransisco, USA. Maurice Meyer found a box buried on a hill, but he started treasure hunting only because his family asked him to. ”Then I found out, that this is from games that I have played for years”, he explains.
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