Using the slogan "Feel True Power," Microsoft is teasing its E3 reveal of the next generation "Project Scorpio" Xbox in a set of videos. A Twitter user has gone through the videos frame by frame—because truly, there's no way you'll ever notice these things at full speed—and discovered that the videos do a bit more than merely whet our appetites for the hugely powerful new Xbox that will be out later this year.

First, a little Sony-trolling seems to be going on. A funfair scene shows the text "6 > 4" on a tent. This is presumably a reference to the compute power of Scorpio: its 6 teraflops of claimed GPU-based number crunching power is indeed greater than the 4 teraflops found in Sony hardware. Fifty percent greater, in fact.

Second, and even more obscure, is a string of text in an enormous crowd scene, reading "X10S101-317." "X10S" might be a reference to the Scorpio itself; earlier this week, a NeoGAF user found a European trademark application for a stylized S registered in the field of video game consoles and computer game software. Don't be shocked if "S" is very likely to be part of the Scorpio branding in some way.

The 10 in "X10S" would be a big numerical upgrade over the Xbox One (though still 350 worse than Xbox 360, so Microsoft still has plenty of catching up to do). That said, the codename might offer some branding synergy with the Windows 10 operating system that runs on the console. Even more radically, the 10 could be intended as binary, making this the Xbox 2 in decimal.

This leaves "101317," which looks a lot like a date: October 13th, 2017. That's a Friday, which would be consistent with Xbox One's Friday launch. This is a little surprising, though, since Friday the 13th has come to be regarded as particularly unlucky over the last century or two. Western superstitions around the number 13 have even led Microsoft to skip that number in past product versions. For a gaming product, though, perhaps the hint of date-based edginess that comes from launching on such a superstitious day is a good thing.

Listing image by Microsoft