Credit, Getty Images
A revelation awaits the curious on a summer Saturday in Paris, 90 years from now
It was a whole new challenge. And fans of the Trials video game franchise knew that its creators would make the obstacle race as difficult as possible.
They also knew to be on the lookout for “easter eggs” – hidden clues or external references to other games, movies, people, etc.
In the previous game, Trials HD, they had found clues to a magnificent riddle that took years to solve. What they didn’t expect is that the enigma of Trials Evolution would lead them to explore mystical and scientific themes, to the point of leaving home in search of material clues to solve the great mystery.
And they also never imagined that, thanks to all their efforts, they would end up finding all the necessary pieces for the puzzle to be solved… after none of them is alive anymore.
This episode is legendary among gamers. And, among cultural scholars, it is an invitation to reflection. What might seem like irrelevant entertainment brought to mind some of the deepest questions of the human condition, they said.
But let’s start by telling what happened to the epic riddle of the game Trials Evolution.
Credit, Ubisoft/Disclosure
Available for Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows, the game ‘Trials Evolution’ was developed by the company RedLynx and published by Microsoft Studios
the tour
To guide us, we turned to super fan Brad Hill, who, under the pseudonym Professor FatShady, posted a summary of the treasure hunt on the Kotaku website when the gaming community reached the conclusion that it was possible for the time being.
The details are complex, but in general the story was as follows:
Shortly after the release of Trials Evolution on the Xbox Live Arcade game download service in April 2012, players began discovering a series of wooden signs that, when joined together, formed a coded message.
With a lot of effort and a little luck, they deciphered the message: it was instructions to perform a secret trick in the game that unlocked a song. The song began by saying:
“Wake up and listen / Secrets are hidden / In the brightest tones / Your ears may not catch them / Maybe you need to turn them into visible form…”
And so they did. A spectral analysis visualization program revealed a message in Morse code. And that message led to a website that contained encrypted images, updated daily from 2013.
Gamers noted that the images made reference to scientists. And with their names, they formed the 26 letters of the alphabet. It was another riddle.
Your answer? “Great freeze with no complete ending”, a theory about the end of the Universe.
This solution led to another website that provided coordinates and clues to find four scattered objects in the real world! One of them was in San Francisco, in the United States; the second, in Sydney, Australia; and the third in Bath, UK.
They were small hidden safes, where keys and metal plates were found with the beginning of a sentence: “It seemed like forever.”
The players discovered that the phrase was from the book Blame it on the stars, by the American writer John Green. The full quote was:
“It felt like an eternity, as if we had lived a brief but infinite eternity. Some infinities are longer than others.”
The fourth safe was found in the capital of Finland, Helsinki, which is the hometown of the company RedLynx, creator of Trials.
One of the fans who ventured to look for him went to the address indicated on the website. There he was handed some 300-year-old apparently real documents relating to the sale of land from a French estate in the 18th century.
There was also a map to reach a cemetery where the fifth and final vault was. And it contained another key and various objects, including an antique pocket watch from 1916.
Credit, reproduction
The images form the alphabet with names of scientists: Ampère, Bohr, Curie (the “D” is still a mystery), Einstein, Fermat, Galileo, Huygens, Ioffe, Joliot-Curie, Kendall, Lagrange…
On the back of the metal plate was an engraved message:
“Noon in the year 2113. First Saturday in August. One of the five keys will open the box under the Eiffel Tower.”
And so the riddle was solved. After so long, fans had reached the last stop on their global treasure hunt.
The long-sought resolution was in the future. But most of the enigma creator’s wishes had already been answered.
the mastermind
Everything was meticulously planned by Antti Ilvessuo – who, along with his brother Atte, was one of the founders of RedLynx in the year 2000.
As the community of gamers explored scientific theories, spectral analysis, ideas about the end of the Universe, cryptography, Neolithic tablets and shared their knowledge to solve the puzzle collaboratively, Ilvessuo watched with satisfaction that everything was developing as expected.
“The riddle really matters to me because it brought people together who wanted to solve it,” he explained in an interview with British writer Matthew Syed for BBC Radio 4’s Sideways programme.
“I believe that the effort to make something lasting only works if people work together for the common good, without fearing the worst, nor creating conflicts…”, says Ilvessuo. “You just have to be curious and take advantage of the knowledge.”
He smiles frequently, not clarifying the unknown details about the riddle. But he hints that, even 10 years later, he is still moved by what happened.
“For me, it was very meaningful. I’ve always said that you need to be able to trust people, that people are intelligent and curious”, continues Ilvessuo. “And the right way to solve the problems of the world we live in is with people working together.”
Credit, Getty Images
“In this conundrum, I had faith that people would trust and it happened. And it keeps happening,” he says.
This vote of confidence paid off. Even though it took so many decades to open the last vault, for superfan Professor FatShady and many of the participants, the conclusion is far from disappointing.
“You chase something like this because you want to see closure, you want to get to the end, you want to reach the goal,” the superfan told Sideways. “What’s interesting is that the conclusion wasn’t a conclusion, but the beginning of another 100-year journey to arrive at something else. This is the best way to end it: by giving us something in the future.”
An offer to what is to come… a legacy, which obliges us to project ourselves towards a tomorrow when we will not be here.
Or, as social psychologist Philip Cozzolino, from the University of Essex, in the United Kingdom, points out, thinking about something we normally avoid: death.
what’s in the middle
The act of reflecting on death is now considered a powerful psychological tool, quite different from simply planning for the future.
Cozzolino analyzed the psychological effects on people who have near-death experiences or receive a terminal diagnosis, but he indicates that we don’t need to go through trauma to gain the clarity that comes from thinking about death. What is needed is to confront some inviolable truths.
“There is a song by the band Pearl Jam (I’m Mineor “I’m mine”, in free translation), which says: ‘I know I was born and I know I’m going to die, what’s in the middle is mine'”, says the psychologist. “Only when you really assume both extremes – the birth and death – what’s in between is yours.”
Cozzolino points out that his research confirms what he is saying. Many of those who incorporate the inevitability of death into their outlook on life experience powerful positive changes.
“In many cases, they say to researchers, ‘I feel like I’ve finally taken control. Why am I doing this particular job? It doesn’t make me happy. Why are we in this relationship?'” he says.
Credit, Getty Images
The naked truth is that we have only a short period of existence interspersed between two eternities of oblivion. And it’s not just psychologists who argue that appreciating this reality can help us live more meaningful lives.
Great existentialist philosophers of the 20th century, such as Heidegger and Kirkegaard, already defended this point. And Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book Being and Nothingnessargues that appreciating mortality can add excitement to life.
Every hour becomes precious
Credit, Getty Images
Antti Ilvessuo at the 2016 E3 Games Conference while serving as Creative Director for Ubisoft RedLynx
Antti Ilvessuo chose not to be present when his enigma is solved.
“I’m not trying to leave a legacy,” he says. “The legacy is of the people who worked together to solve the riddle and those who will hand the keys to future generations. In other words, it’s a common legacy, a legacy of the work of many people.”
What he guarantees is that he left concrete agreements so that, on that summer Saturday in Paris, France, whoever attends the meeting below the Eiffel Tower at noon will find the final piece of the puzzle.
And if you want to know what the fifth key mentioned on the plaque is, it is an unlocked digital key from the game sequence, Trials Fusion.
Credit, Getty Images