A former Dambuster Studios employee, Matt Phillips, recently tweeted that they put an easter egg inside one of this former titles, 2016’s Homefront: The Revolution. Unfortunately, Philips forgot to include the actual code to unlock the hidden content within the game and it’s been lying dormant for all these years. Thankfully, a hacker went to work and was able to reverse engineer the game, finding the code and unlocking the content, which was also tweeted out by Spencer Perreault, an Xbox Software Engineer. The content in question? A fully playable 4K port of TimeSplitters 2, one of the most acclaimed FPS games from the mid 2000s.
We already knew that you could access the game via an arcade cabinet in Homefront: The Revolution and play a couple of demo levels. However, according to Phillips, the entire game was thrown into Homefront: The Revolution, not just a couple of levels. The idea was giving the player a chance to play the game within a game, a very intuitive idea. Even more impressive is that it’s not just an emulated port of an older system, it’s a full-blown 4K remake. Phillips stated that the code to unlock the game was lost years ago, writing it down on paper and never seeing it again.
For those who need some context, Dambuster Studios was, at the time of its inception, made up of developers from the now-defunct Free Radical Design, the studio that made the TimeSplitters franchise. Free Radical Design, amid some financial difficulties, was purchased by Crytek in 2009. Unfortunately, they themselves would go through an arduous time with money issues, which eventually lead to the company being bought out by Deep Silver, with the latter eventually selling most of their IPs to THQ Nordic and their parent company Embracer Group.
As we already mentioned, TimeSplitters 2 is one of the most popular FPS titles from the 2000s. Sadly, the same could not be said for the game that housed its 4K port, as Homefront: The Revolution had mixed reception upon release. TimeSplitters was one of the properties that Embracer Group acquired in that transaction, so there’s always a glimmer of hope for a proper remake release as opposed to trotting through a different game just to play it.