A developer for Homefront: The Revolution has revealed he hid a 4K port of Timesplitters 2; and that the way to unlock it has been lost.
Jan Willem Nijman- a developer who worked on Disc Room, Nuclear Throne, acted as half of Vlambeer and more- asked fellow developers on Twitter about the Easter Eggs they had hidden in games.
Responses included Lenna’s Inception managing to troll streamers live by having them discuss the streamer themselves, The Division featuring the weapons of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a soap bar in Dusk being able to one-shot enemies, and the animal toy in Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 looking like a Katamari.
One of the developers that responded was Matt Phillips, who tweeted “My proudest moment. Fully playable, native 4K port of TimeSplitters 2 hidden in this arcade machine in Homefront: The Revolution.” He then included an image of an arcade machine where the game is presumably playable.
This should not be confused with the other TimeSplitters 2 Easter Egg, as Eurogamer and others previously reported on being able to play two levels from it. However, this was not the full game (as implied by the word port), and certainly not in 4K.
Phillips elaborates in later tweets. He explains that if users were somehow able to add a second arcade machine into the co-op maps, it would take them to the game’s multiplayer menu thanks to the network stack combining with Homefront‘s co-op code.
The news caught many by surprise, including those hoping for a 4K port of Timesplitters 2 to be sold separate from the game. However, even those wanting to play it within Homefront: The Revolution were to be disappointing.
“The unlock code has been lost to time,” Phillips explained to another Twitter user. “I don’t have the notebook with it in any more. I once gave it to a friend to leak in some Discord channel and they called him a liar and banned his account ahahah.”
Hope may not entirely be lost however. YouTuber RyanUKAus had discovered multiple map files for TimeSplitters 2 within Homefront over a year ago. While this goes some way in proving the full game may be within Homefront, Phillips theorizes this modding have been done via hex editing, rather than the game’s code.
The final published game would be harder to edit than the developer build (by design to prevent hacking), and hex editing is even more complicated than that; modifying the game’s code at the binary level. Phillips notes that this makes it “even more impressive.”
Homefront: The Revolution is available on Windows PC (via Steam), PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Timesplitters 2 was available on Nintendo Gamecube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox.
