Monday, April 5, 2010

Possible Call of Duty 7 News Coming Soon?


Here's the deal.  A few of us in the CoD community received a mysterious package in the mail today.  This package contained a single USB flash drive.

Upon loading this flash drive, we were met with a text file and an MP3 file which was very similar to the radio transmissions found in World at War's zombie mode.  The text file consisted of the following -Cryptography; Isotope; Philanthropy; Hydrogen; Ember; Rebirth.  Using our heads, we saw that those words created the single word CIPHER.  That meant we had some investigating to do.   The following is the MP3 file that was also included...


                          
  

    
After scratching our heads for a few minutes, we were given a link to Joystiq, who also received this mysterious package and had already finished the dirty work for us.  Here's what they had to say....


"Sneaky marketers take note: Joystiq is likely to become entangled in elaborate and possibly regrettable alternate reality games on slow news days.

Today, we received an unmarked USB storage device in a mysterious, unmarked envelope. The drive held a simple text file, with the following words: Cryptography; Isotope; Philanthropy; Hydrogen; Ember; Rebirth. Oh, this one's easy! Cryptography; Isotope; Philanthropy; Hydrogen; Ember; Rebirth. Cipher! But for what?

An audio file embedded on the same drive offered only some electronic voices, a sequence of letters and numbers read by a female voice -- M O D [sound of 3 chimes] Z Z Z J N Q R Y D 3 F R P -- and some words spoken by a man: "What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also," followed by, "Don't believe everything you see."

The identity of the man speaking may be impossible to determine, but you might recognize the person he's quoting initially: Julius Caesar. Using a Caesar cipher, and assuming that "mod" and the sound of 3 chimes signaled a shift of 3 letters, we ended up with "W W W G K N O V A 6 COM." That led to a mysterious website, featuring a small, adjustable television set.

More codes and quotes! As best as we and our partner Google can determine, the quote emanating from the television is from Francis Bacon and -- yes, that's right. Bacon Cipher. It's less delicious than it sounds.

The audio message on the website simply spells out "Nova Six" over and over, but some of the letters are spoken by a male, whereas other are spoken by a female. Bacon's method of steganography is used to hide messages within plain sight, usually with different type faces. We assumed that the male and female voices offered a similar method of obfuscation, and converted each male letter to "A" and each female letter to "B."

At the very end, a voice utters, "Hell is purple." Et voila: Purple Hell offers an automatic converter for the "Baconian Cipher." After plugging in our converted string of letters, we received this confirmation:

"APRIL WEEK TWO.""

Here is the video found on the GKNOVA6 site.  Feel free to let us know what you think in the comment section or on Twitter @WePlayCoD.




So there you have it, "APRIL WEEK TWO".  The team over at Joystiq seemed to think that this was in regards to Fallout, but we know better.  Considering a few of us in the CoD community were specifically targeted to receive this message, it's safe to assume that our friends at Treyarch have something up their sleeves next week....AND WE CAN'T WAIT!  

3 comments:

  1. Nice, but with an error (at least)

    Female voice: A (not B)
    Male voice: B (not A)

    Then,

    aaaaa=A
    abbbb=P
    baaab=R
    abaaa=I
    ababb=L
    babba=W
    aabaa=E
    aabaa=E
    ababa=K
    baabb=T
    babba=W
    abbba=O

    qdyduuhlwru
    (zzz.oyohufhqdulrv.frp)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Most likely its a clue as to when the first DLC is coming out. April 14, 2011 is on a Thursday which is when most all DLC is released. That's what my money is on.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm an idiot. Delete comment above. Didn't see the date...

    ReplyDelete