Back in 2016 players of Dambusters Studio’s Homefront: The Revolution easily found an Easter egg featuring two levels from 2002’s Timesplitters 2. Now a code until recently thought lost has been recovered that unlocks a complete playable port of the time-travelling first-person shooter.
Responding to an April 4 Twitter thread asking developers the best Easter eggs they’d ever hidden in a game, Rust lead programmer Matt Phillips revealed that instead of just the two levels players knew about, he included an entire playable port of Timesplitters 2 within Homefront: The Revolution.
My proudest moment. Fully playable, native 4K port of TimeSplitters 2 hidden in this arcade machine in Homefront: The Revolution. https://t.co/U0ulGEW1A1 pic.twitter.com/a4UsyOw7eh
— Matt Phillips (@bigevilboss) April 4, 2021
The only problem, as Phillips went on to explain, was that he didn’t know the unlock code.
The unlock code has been lost to time, 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
— Matt Phillips (@bigevilboss) April 4, 2021
For a while, it seemed like no one knew the code. Code-savvy gamers mobilized, hoping to uncover the secret. Then, four days later, Twitter user and self-proclaimed “emulation ninja” Spencer Perreault replied to Phillips with exactly what everyone was looking for.
You mean this code?
LT+Up, LT+Up, Down, LT+Right, RT+Left, RT+B, LT+Y, LT+Y, RT+X, LT+A— Spencer Perreault (@SpencerTheDean) April 8, 2021
And boom, we’ve got access to all of Timesplitters 2. In order to unlock the game, players need to access the arcade machine within Homefront: The Revolution, inputting the code within the limited version of Timesplitters 2 playable within. The original two-level Easter egg can also be accessed through the Homefront “extras” menu once discovered.
The port isn’t perfect. Though it will run natively at 4K, the graphics are very 2002. Don’t expect any enhancements. On PC, where I tested out the code, some of the levels caused the entire game to crash to desktop when I tried to load them, notably NeoTokyo, and I encountered several crashes while playing through other levels. Still, not bad for an Easter egg port of a game that didn’t come to PC in the first place.
Steam user Dutchoper72 put together a great guide for getting the code to work, including additional codes to unlock arcade mode and more. The guide even includes a save file for the PC version, so Steam players won’t have to go through hours of Homefront: The Revolution to fiddle about.
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