In the end credits of the movie Fair Game (2010) some letters are marked. Blog reader Rossignol has now provided me screenshots that are very helpful for studying this code.



In 2014 blog reader Ralf Jäger made me aware of a little known crypto mystery: In the end credits of the movie Fair Game (starring: Naomi Watts and Sean Penn) a code is hidden.

After Ralf’s hint I bought a DVD of this movie. I ignored the main part and only looked at the end credits. It turned out that Ralf was right. Some of the letters in the end credits are marked yellow. According to the web site AboveTopSecret, the marked letters form the following sequence:

CES?OAPCHFHTEOPISFMNADAMECAOREDATN

RAYUURNQWKNUFRCOJRWRMDGSEHUWTOAKRA

The question mark is included because the fourth letter of the sequence is not visible (see below).

As far as I know, the meaning of these marked letters is not publicly known. This means that although millions of people have watched the movie Fair Game, the Fair Game code has never been solved. In April I covered the Fair Game code in my series about the 50 most important unsolved cryptograms.

Earlier this week blog reader Rossignol, a skilled codebreaker and crypto history expert from France, provided me a complete set of screenshots of the Fair Game end credits. Here they are:

Thank you very much to Rossignol for providing these screenshots. They are very helpful for studying this unsolved crypto mystery.

So far, not much has been published about the Fair Game code. After I had published my first blog article about it, I received the following comment from a reader calling himself Martin Halpin:

The comment says (in German): “Don’t focus on the yellow letters, better take them as markers for the following letters.” It is the only comment that has ever been published on Klausis Krypto Kolumne under this name. The author is probably not a native speaker of German, as the words “kaprizieren”, “Letter”, and “Marker” are quite uncommon in this context. Martin Halpin is a character in James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake.

It seems possible that the production company of Fair Game is behind this comment. After all, the producers have an interest in increasing the popularity of their code. In any case it would be interesting to look at the sequence of letters that occurs if one takes the characters that stand directly behind the marked ones.

If a reader has some new clues about the Fair Game code, please let me know.

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Further reading: Who can find the hidden messages in these 16th century texts?

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