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After five years, the mystery behind an arcade machine in Homefront: The Revolution has been solved. The arcade machine featured a demo of TimeSplitters 2, letting players access the first two levels--notably, this is the closest to a PC port of TimeSplitters 2 that's been officially released. Dataminers, however, were able to find files relating to the entire game in the code, but with no way to access them they were unsure if the entire game had been ported or not. Efforts continued over the years, but no major discoveries were made.

Then, last week, former Crytek developer Matt Phillips Tweeted the following in response to a thread asking game developers to post their favourite Easter eggs they've snuck into their games: "My proudest moment. Fully playable, native 4K port of TimeSplitters 2 hidden in this arcade machine in Homefront: The Revolution." He went on to explain that the unlock code has been lost, leaving even him with no way to access the game. He had given a friend of his a notebook with the code, who once tried to post it in a Discord server to let people know about this hidden port, but he was called a liar and promptly banned. He also let people know that there were no hints to the unlock code hidden in the game's code, so people shouldn't waste their time searching.

It seemed like that was the end of the story. Until, four days after this revelation, Spencer Perrault, a software engineer at Microsoft and presumably Philips' friend with the notebook, Tweeted out the code. It still took some time for the code to be found due to Twitter's algorithm burying the Tweet, but eventually it was discovered by a Discord community member named Sandwave. Meanwhile, another member named Fanoto was reverse engineering input checks on the PC version, and discovered codes for the arcade and challenge modes, as well as several that serve an unknown purpose. Spencer Perrault has also since Tweeted another code that apparently provides invincibility.

Here is a nice writeup. You can just enter the code on the level select screen for the easiest result. pic.twitter.com/ovUXyohqAr

— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) April 9, 2021

For those unaware of the connection between TimeSplitters 2 and Homefront: The Revolution, Dambuster Studios--the team behind Homefront--were formerly Crytek UK but were renamed after Crytek faced financial difficulties and sold the Homefront franchise to Deep Silver, who retained most of the original staff to continue work on the game. Before they were Crytek UK, however, the team was Free Radical Design, developers of the TimeSplitters franchise, meaning that they still held the rights after two name and publisher changes (and, for the record, Matt Philips notes that all the necessary paperwork was done to ensure everything was done above board).

 

[mrcroket]

I wonder if the "port" was made by porting the game source code to cryengine or just compiling the original source code for the new machines and pc.

 

[D34DL1N3R]

YES. WHOLE HEARTEDLY YES. the only thing console exclusives do is prevent people from being able to play the version of the game not gimped for the crap consoles. PC exclusives make sense because the platform has a lot more unique traits and features consoles will never have. Console exclusives dont and are just pure greed

Congrats. It's 8:51am here and you've won a spot in my top 10 dumbest posts of the day contest.