The Trials games are full of mysteries Trials HD/RedLynx

Brad Hill knew what the jumbled letters represented, but he had no idea where they would lead. A handful of players had started finding strange things in Trials HD, a game released in 2009 by Finnish studio RedLynx in which you drive stunt bikes over outlandish obstacle courses.

The mathematical patterns and cryptic messages discovered in the game’s more hard-to-reach places hinted at something beyond high scores. One player uploaded a screenshot of some brass plaques he had found strewn on the ground after crashing his bike through a trapdoor. They were covered in what looked like a coded message and the player wanted to know what it meant.

But it wasn’t a message, it was a bit of DNA code. “It just clicked with me from a biology course years ago,” says Hill, who is now better known as Professor FatShady from the University of Trials, a YouTube channel he runs that provides tips for beating the game. “That’s how I got sucked into the whole process.”


Developers have been hiding things in games for decades. Known as Easter eggs, they are often just brief messages or joke items. One of the earliest appeared in Adventure, released in 1979, which contained a secret room where programmer Warren Robinett had written his name.

Nowadays developers across the board are hiding increasingly complex puzzles. As a result, people are getting together to play in a new way. Online communities with hundreds of members are spending years picking over new releases, chasing up obscure references and cracking codes. A few developers are even hiding whole games inside others.

Parisian cliffhanger

That first clue Hill came across turned out to be just one of a series of mind-bending puzzles hidden in Trials HD and its follow-up Trials Evolution that would ultimately take a few dozen people years to find and solve. After months of lucky breaks and dead ends, the Trials Evolution puzzle culminated with a message saying that the final solution would be revealed beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 100 years’ time.

Despite the enormous cliffhanger, Hill regrets nothing. His account of how all the clues were pieced together unfolds like a Dan Brown novel. “You’ll be daydreaming about it on the train and thinking about it at night,” he says. “Some days, your mind is just messed up. It’s been amazing.”

And the game keeps giving. Only last week, Hill uncovered a clue hidden in a secret level of Trials Evolution that the group had missed several years ago.

“Hidden elements are a great way to keep your most loyal players engaged,” says Damien Brett at one-person studio Blunt Games in Sheffield, UK. “It is very exciting to notice something that no one else may have seen.”

There is also a strong social element. The more complex Easter eggs can pull in hundreds of players, working together and sharing clues. There are even rival communities that race to uncover everything a game has to offer.

The hunt begins

When Trials Evolution came out, players were ready. “We expected something was going to be there,” says Hill. “A forum thread was created before the game was released. The second that people found stuff we knew what to do.”

What they gradually uncovered was a puzzle involving not only multiple layers of clues and coded messages, but also a string of GPS coordinates that marked the real-world locations of four buried boxes in Helsinki, San Francisco, Sydney and Bath, UK. Inside each box was a key. The players who now have those keys have been told that one of their number – or rather one of their descendants – will receive the final solution to the puzzle in 2113.

Hundred year wait to reveal the mystery Trials Evolution/RedLynx

Hill’s office is close to where the Sydney box was buried, but he was working somewhere else on the day the coordinates were found. He doesn’t care too much, however. For him, the thrill came from the many small breakthroughs on the way. He remembers the night the group discovered a hidden song that played only when you followed a precise series of steps – including muting the game’s music.

Hill copied the track onto his phone and listened to it on the way to work the next day. With headphones, he could suddenly hear very faint beeps in the background. “It was actually Morse code,” he says. Using spectral analysis software to visualise the song’s soundwaves revealed an encoded message that unlocked the next section of the puzzle.

At the time, it alerted the group to how well hidden some of the clues were going to be. But such tricks are becoming commonplace. “These days, you’d jump to Morse code pretty quickly,” says Hill.

Dots and dashes

Morse code has been a key feature of puzzles in the Battlefield games, for example. The novelty comes from how the code is concealed. Like Trials, the Battlefield games often contain hidden puzzles that have taken even dedicated players months to unravel. One of the most notorious is known as the Dragon Valley Easter egg in Battlefield 4. The search began when one player spotted a skull symbol on the back of a pillar. Other players then noticed that a nearby lantern was blinking erratically. The blinking turned out to be Morse code.

This kicked off an Easter egg hunt involving five tiny switches hidden across the game. The last was discovered inside a tree and was only accessible by blowing up the trunk and hovering above the stump in a helicopter. The switches turned out to be part of a complex logic puzzle. Turning on an exact sequence of lights in a building revealed a hidden keypad, another coded message and finally a number – unique to each player who bothers to complete the puzzle – that unlocks a special outfit for their character.

“I love that one because it’s pointless,” says Hill. “It’s a fricking slightly different coloured outfit. But arguably all video gaming is pointless.”

For Hill, the appeal of Easter eggs is that they offer an extra layer of challenge for especially dedicated players. The solutions to most visible puzzles are now typically posted online days after a game’s release. “YouTube spoils everything,” says Hill. But Easter eggs remain hidden until someone cares enough to find them.

It’s that kind of player that Damien Brett is now banking on. Late last year, he released Drones, the Human Condition, a top-down shooter in which you have to survive waves of rogue robots. But this fast-paced action is only half the game.

Secret recipe

Brett’s official blurb makes no mention of it, but hidden in the computer files that control the game is a set of puzzles that amount to a separate game entirely. Combining clues from both games, you can unlock more levels or power-ups in the shooter and move ahead in the Orwellian narrative of the hidden game. Brett says he has also concealed other things, including a recipe for Scotch pancakes. “What started out as a few silly Easter eggs soon grew,” he says.

Brett was inspired by stories of developers leaving notes in a game’s files for hackers to find – and hoped his own game would get pirated. But things didn’t quite go to plan. Drones did end up being pirated on the day it was released, but the hacker missed Brett’s messages. For now, the hidden game remains hidden – and most players have yet to notice that there is even a puzzle there at all. Brett plans to drip feed clues until someone bites.

Easter eggs bring fans closer to the people who make their favourite games. Video games today are designed for the masses. When a blockbuster title hits the shelves, it is a highly market-tested product. But secrets tend to slip in under the radar, created by one or two developers who work on them in their spare time. “This isn’t about the company,” says Hill. “It’s a way for developers to have a personal connection with the players, to put their own stamp on a game.”

Even the extended riddles of the Trials and Battlefield games were created by just one individual at each of the studios behind them. The first hidden message in Battlefield 4 simply says, “Did you miss me?” – a note from Julian Manolov, the developer at Dice who had hidden puzzles in the previous Battlefield games. The Trials puzzles are the work of Antti Ilvessuo, RedLynx’s creative director. “After the game was shipped, he had to take one of his co-workers out to lunch to tell him the answers to the puzzle in case something happened to him,” says Hill.

Ilvessuo has also made specific arrangements for next century’s big reveal, as he won’t be alive to finish what he started. “He has assured me this is absolutely happening, there is no gimmick,” says Hill.