Ubisoft’s cryptic puzzle shared with fans as part of the marketing for Assassin’s Creed Shadows may have been solved less than a day after its big reveal.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the long-awaited entry in the series set in Feudal Japan that players have been calling for, and its big announcement is set to take place in a video tomorrow, May 15.
It seems that Ubisoft may have underestimated the power of the community, however, as players have seemingly cracked the code ahead of time, as reported by IGN, revealing what could be key details in the game.
A teaser released on Monday showed a giant hourglass in Oaska, Japan, with a mysterious code at the bottom showing S89N-29S. This code was quickly cracked by fans as they paired the numbers to letters in the English alphabet, deciphering the word “Shinobis.”
The biggest teases lay deeper, however, with a fan on Reddit spotting a background image on the Assassin’s Creed Shadows page on Ubisoft’s website containing a hidden code with 24 two-digit numbers.
Alongside this, a code found in an email advertisement had the numbers 11, 21, and 33 repeated across several lines, and players much smarter than I can ever hope to seem to have unveiled the mystery.
A response to that post paired the numbers together, resulting in four lines of eight pairs of numbers, with the only pairs being 33 and 11, 11 and 21. As explained, this works a lot like binary, and the odds of this being pure chance were given odds of 16 in six million.
The numbers translate to 1579, the year the historical figure of Yasuke arrived in Japan, so it serves as a major hint that this is the time period where Assassin’s Creed Shadows will take place and that Yasuke will play an important role.
According to Wikipedia, Yasuke was the first African to appear in historical Japan. This may pair well with the timeline in the Assassin’s Creed series as Origins showed the Hidden Ones originated from Egypt and the African continent.
