No Man's Sky community deciphers cryptic Hello Games cassette message

The No Man's Sky community has deciphered an unexplained message coded onto a number of cassette tapes, apparently sent out by developer Hello Games.

The message is just one word long: "portal".

Audio cassettes were delivered over the past week to moderators of the official No Man's Sky reddit.

Each tape is numbered out of 16. Seven have been reported found so far.

On each cassette's side A is a piece of synth music. On each tape's side B is a pattern of distorted noise.

The game's reddit community has pulled together to analyse each tape side. Hear each below:

The community discovered that each tape's side B, when run through a spectrograph, hides a coded message: "706s7274616p". Apply the ROT13 substitution cipher and you get 706f7274616c, a hexadecimal value. Convert this to ASCII and you get: "portal".

Out of the seven tapes found, only three have been fully spectrographed. There may be other words in others, although the repeated word suggests they may all be the same.

So then, "portal". Could it refer to a new gameplay feature headed to No Man's Sky via a future update? Being able to zip back and forth on a planet's surface would be handy. Being able to instantly jump to a useful position in space might be even handier.

As yet, Hello Games is keeping quiet.

We'll keep an eye on the reddit for when more tapes are found.