Game Secrets

An Easter Egg Fit for Geeks

You may (or may not) remember our joint exclusive sneak preview with Sonic Stadium and Sonic Wrecks of Sonic Colors’ new voice actors a while back. In that clip, Tails mentioned only he can read what his translator says because it’s in Binary.

Those sneaky writers took advantage of that and snuck in a nice little message to those intrepid enough to catch a glimpse of Tails’ PDA.

Slight and minor ending scene spoiler, so view at your own discretion.


In one of the closing scenes after Sonic saves the day and the little Wisps, we get a nice view of the screen of Tails’ computer. First off, we can see that it’s not Binary he’s reading, but hexadecimal code. If you run the strings through a converter, you get the following messages.


“49 66 20 79 6f 75 20 63 61 6e 20 72 65 61 64 20 74 68 69 73 20 79 6f 75 5c 5c 5c 27 66 72 65 20 61 20 67 65 65 6b 21 20 ” or “If you can read this you’fre a geek!”

That typo is in the game, yes.

It’s always nice to see script writers hiding little bits like this within the game.

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14 Comments

  • Reply

    Hahah, brilliant! I love this kind of stuff.

  • Reply

    Hah!

  • Reply

    A few minor errors:

    1. The hexadecimal for the third line is transcribed incorrectly. It should be: “49 66 20 79 6F 75 20 63 61 6E 20 72 65 61 64 20 74 68 69 73 20 79 6F 75 81 66 72 65 20 61 20 67 65 65 6B 21”

    2. The extra ‘f’ isn’t a typo. The actual character is two bytes: 81 66. The text is encoded in Shift-JIS, not ASCII. The double-byte character maps to U+2019, ‘RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK’.

    • Reply

      If you know that, you’fre a geek!

      • Reply

        Way to completely miss the point. I assume you’re from Tristan’s Stupid Shit Zone, which is why you couldn’t understand a single word I said in the above comment.

        • Reply

          I will downright admit it, I did not understand one single thing from what you said above, simply because I don’t understand hexademical code. However, I am not from Tristan’s awful site.

          …But calm down, I was only joking.

  • Reply

    “If you can read this, you’fre a geek”

    Game hackers aren’t the only ones who write messages like that…

  • Reply

    so wait…
    Sega doesn’t know the difference between Binary and Hexadecimal? Or did they just say that Tails can read Binary but neglected to inform us that he can read hexadecimal as well?

    • Reply

      Probably because the word ‘binary’ makes the average non-techy gamer go ‘”ooh computer code”.  Same reason that his PDA has a technical-looking green screen and unnecessary waveform diagrams on it

      • Reply

        Hexadec is easily converted to binary. One character in hex is relatively easy to convert in 4 characters binary. So why worry about that? xD
        Tails is smart. All we need to know lol

  • Reply

    I knew something had to be hiding in there, so I decoded it myself and saw that. 🙂

  • Reply

    I think that “typo’d” thing will become the next meme

    if you have some geeky moment, you should expect you’re friends to say You’fre a Geek.

    • Reply

      Once again, a clueless Windows user who doesn’t understand that there are these things called “character encodings”, some of which support double-byte characters. The ‘f’ isn’t a typo, it’s a result of incorrectly decoding the text as ASCII instead of Shift-JIS.

  • Reply

    I’ve learned to read binary myself to some extent, but I’m not super-fluent.

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