Deathloop’s earliest Easter egg has a 27-year history (2024)
Deathloop mines a vast array of aesthetic sources, from the medieval architecture of Germany’s Northeim district, to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, to the vibrant fashion of Pierre Cardin. As with all of developer Arkane’s games, it combines divergent inspirations to create a singular universe of its own. And as with all of Arkane’s releases, Deathloop wouldn’t exist were it not for a defunct, and criminally overlooked, game studio from the ’90s. And an Easter egg in its opening moments pays homage to that lineage.
Like the protagonist of (so) many video games, Deathloop’s Colt begins with a case of amnesia. Filling the shoes of this tabula rasa, I wake up on a beach, with an empty bottle of booze by my side, before venturing into the concrete tunnels of the island of Blackreef. I soon arrive at a locked door. There’s a keypad next to it, with space for four numbers.
“You know the code,” an ethereal set of floating letters tells me. “Yeah,” I tell myself, “I’m pretty sure I do.” I enter the digits 0-4-5-1 with a smug grin. The door doesn’t open. “Old habits die hard,” Colt utters aloud to himself. A trophy pops up with the same idiom printed next to its colorful little icon.
Image: Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon
Whether knowingly or not, there’s a good chance you’ve entered this same code before. It opens the first door in BioShock, unlocks a supply crate in Firewatch, and even grants access to a VIP’s office in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, among many other examples. (This is the most up-to-date list I could find.)
More than just a knowing wink, this number (or some variation of it) is a direct reference to Looking Glass Studios, a developer that existed from 1990 to 2000 and paved the way for immersive first-person games. Although often thought to allude to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 — and, by extension, the temperature at which book paper autoignites — 0451 is also a reference to the real-life code that opened the door to Looking Glass Studios’ headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Warren Spector, former general manager at Looking Glass and founder of Junction Point Studios, cites the Cambridge code as the original source. Pixar does something similar by hiding A113, the classroom listing of the animation studio at the California Institute of the Arts, in almost all of its movies.
“The 0451 code has become kind of a signature that developers use to align themselves with Looking Glass,” Tim Stellmach, another former Looking Glass employee who went on to work at Vicarious Visions and OtherSide Entertainment, told Polygon in a 2015 cover story. It dates back to the original System Shock in 1994,which, along with the RPGs of Origin Systems, pioneered first-person games that allowed players to complete objectives through a variety of means. They’re often called “immersive sims.” Deathloop, along with the rest of Arkane’s catalog, is very much a part of that legacy.
“I think much of what we take for granted design-wise in games comes directly from the philosophy underpinning all of Looking Glass’ games,” Spector told Polygon in the same cover story. “The influence of that studio can’t be overstated, even if many don’t realize they’re building on the foundation it laid years ago.”
I haven’t finished Deathloop, so I can’t say whether the code actually works later on (I’m still pissed about that first door). But it’s fun to see Arkane signaling to longtime players that it’s both acknowledging and potentially toying with its legacy. It also fits thematically in a game about breaking a recurring, eternal loop. Regardless, I’m going to keep trying the code on every door I find — whether out of curiosity or sheer stubbornness, I don’t know. Old habits die hard, I guess.
Julianna claims she always remembers and if Colt forgets she has to get really violent with him and the stress snaps him out of forgetting every loop. And apparently in the first loops everyone remembered, but started forgetting as more loops passed.
Harriet gives her speech from inside the co*ckpit, behind locked doors and bulletproof windows. It can be accessed by climbing onto the co*ckpit and shooting a button inside her office from outside the window, to unlock the door. After the door is unlocked, you can reach Harriet to kill her.
One of the most recognizable Easter eggs in Deathloop are the arcade cabinets dotted around various buildings, each of these is a reference to other Arkane or Bethesda-publised titles past, and there are a lot of them! Arcade cabinets and their references include: Honorless (Dishonored) Super Honorless 2 (Dishonored 2)
As it turned out, Colt was trapped in the Loop for 17 years but eventually reappeared, crashing an old sea plane into the fishing docks of Huishi Village and was institutionalized at the Dargyey Institute until Egor Serling freed him five years later.
Julianna claims that things started to go wrong when Colt, having had second thoughts about the AEON Program, started murdering her in every loop in an effort to free her from it. Julianna eventually grew to hate Colt and began to retaliate, culminating in her starting to hunt him in every loop.
Julianna presents Colt with duelling pistols. You can either pull the trigger or not. If you let Julianna live, you'll get an ending in which Colt wakes up by the beach as normal, but Julianna pops up and they banter about establishing a loving daddy-daughter relationship.
Be patient, and she'll head for the microphone setup. Sneak up behind her and snap her neck. Claim all of her Trinkets and gun, absorb her Residuum, and then pick up the Nexus Slab.
Taking down Harriet will get you the Nexus slab, +11500 Residuum, The Fourpounder weapon, three Exemplar Weapon Trinkets, and three Exemplar Personal Trinkets. If you come back and kill Harriet with poisonous gas, you'll get the Judgement Day achievement.
You can infiltrate this hangar in a number of ways, in traditional Arkane style. Harriet waits in hangar 2, always. You can scale to the top of the hangar using double-jump and Shift. You can use the Aether Slab to sneak past the many guards in hangar 1, then move through the connecting hallway between both hangars.
They're tied to a simple choice at the end of the game that's not difficult to mess up. To obtain them, all you need to do is finish the game and then press or don't press a button and maybe do a little bit of movement; it's that simple.
Compared to Arkane's previous immersive sim series, Dishonored, Deathloop encourages players to spill as much blood as they want; no penalty or morality system is punishing you for using all the cool weapons and powers at your disposal.
The Goldenloop adds one new group of enemies and one boss-type enemy to Deathloop. The boss enemy is the Garbage Collector, who is the keeper of the Fugue Slab, who can be found in Karl's Bay in the Afternoon. The new enemy type is the paint bomber eternalist.
Update 2 has made many tweaks to the AI which, combined, should mean that NPCs will spot you more easily when you're trying to be sneaky, and try harder to murder you once they do know you're around. These include: NPCs now react to bullets passing close by, such as headshots that miss.
There are 4 Legendary Weapons that can be found in Deathloop through special means, which are tracked in your sidequests (also known as Arsenal Leads).
Parent company Colt Defense, LLC, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on June 15, 2015, citing both assets and debts in the $100 million to $500 million range. According to analysts, Colt's problems were due to the loss of the contract and low demand for its civilian handguns.
But unlike the other Visionaries, Colt's mind is tortured by the repetition and the very thought of an eternal loop. A world without Lila can never be Paradise -- and so Colt starts to try and break out of the cycle.
The company's origins date to an 1836 patent granted to Samuel Colt for his firearm design. Colt has long been a key supplier to the U.S. military, but in 2013 lost its contract with the government to supply the successor to the M16, the M4 carbine, because of reliability issues.
Introduction: My name is Francesca Jacobs Ret, I am a innocent, super, beautiful, charming, lucky, gentle, clever person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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