No Man’s Sky has curiously been linked to an ARG called Waking Titan, so fans of the game have busted out their tinfoil hats for some serious theorizing. Has Hello Games found a cool way to tease new features ahead of E3, or is this just a publicity stunt? We’re not sure, but it’s pretty interesting.
To get the full story, let’s recap some recent events happening with the game. Around June 7, 16 key members of the No Man’s Sky community received numbered cassette tapes. Once the audio from the recording was made into a spectrograph, a sequence of numbers was found and converted through an ASCII cipher to reveal the word “portals.” This discovery led fans to believe that portals would be coming in a future update, but that may be just the beginning.
Over the last few hours, the No Man’s Sky community has noticed several links between this 16-centric ARG and an ARG called Waking Titan that launched June 2. The game encourages players to find 16 radio stations in the real world, and when looking for a station in New York, a man says he was approached by a courier and handed a 64-base data string.
Running it through ASCII ciphers revealed coordinates that, when approached in No Man’s Sky, brings players to a communication machine with a “loop-16 unexpected error code. 97C303N5884P.” Curiously enough, entering that code in the Waking Titan website grants access to a glyph. So, whether officially sanctioned or not, it’s clear these two experiments are somehow related.
With that fact firmly established, the No Man’s Sky community has dug deeper into Waking Titan to find some other secrets. For one, several of its puzzles focus on a red hexagonal shape similar to the game’s Atlas. In fact, the ARG’s first phase was actually called Atlas. Participants were also given an email message that says “we are the mystery hiding in plain sight. You will find us,” which is very similar to how the Atlas describes itself to the player during the journey.
In one particular puzzle, users were brought to the website and asked to click a red hexagonal shape. When answering with the equation 250/15=16 it granted access to a woman speaking. That woman, and the woman speaking in Waking Titan’s various radio broadcasts, sounds vaguely similar to the one featured on the No Man’s Sky tapes.
Still not convinced? The site atlas-65.com is tied to Waking Titan. Atlas is basically the center of No Man’s Sky and 65 could very easily be a reference to the game’s procedural music composers, 65daysofstatic.
At this point, all fans agree that the ties are simply too deep to not be meaningful. While the makers of the Waking Titan ARG could simply be capitalizing on the popularity of the No Man’s Sky tapes to craft their own narrative, we find it hard to believe it could’ve been taken this far. Titan advertised that it was focused around 16 radio stations as far back as May 27. How coincidental can it be that Hello Games just so happened to send 16 tapes to its fans about a week later?
Our best guess is that this may be some kind of collaboration between Hello Games and the creators of Waking Titan. Maybe once the Titans decided to include that No Man’s Sky coordinate link, they reached out to the developers. Knowing they were going to be hyping up a portals update soon, maybe a partnership was struck. Without official confirmation from either side, both fan bases are in a tizzy.
No Man’s Sky is available now on PS4 and PC.
What do you think of this Waking Titan ARG’s link to No Man’s Sky? Is it a collaboration or publicity stunt? Tell us in the comments section!
