It seems that Hello Games has been keeping the No Man’s Sky community a little busy lately by sending cryptic cassette tapes to the game’s official reddit page moderators. These fans just cracked the code even if no one knows exactly what it means.

Hello Games recently sent out cassette tapes to select fans in the No Man’s Sky community, each numbered out of sixteen. Although only seven of them have been found so far, inquiring minds may have just found a one word message hidden within them. The word is “portal.”

Each of the tapes has a side A with a piece of music and a side B, which features some sort of sound distortion that almost resembles wind through a microphone. If you’re interested in hearing what these actually sound like, you can listen to some examples below.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/F6K0S6devsw

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HK3hu8cj9f0

By sending the sounds on each tape’s B side through a spectrograph, the community found that the tape was hiding a message and by further investigating their findings they found the aforementioned word. For more information on exactly what was done in order to achieve this result, I encourage you to check out the reddit thread.

So far, five of the seven known tapes have been put through this process and the same word has been found in each. It’s unclear at this time what the remaining tapes will say, if anything different.

As for what “portal” means, it remains open to interpretation. If it is in fact the only message that the cassette tapes offer, perhaps it’s an elaborate tease for future support to the game. If there’s more to these cassettes, maybe they’ll reveal a new angle to the game’s lore. So far, Hello Games has not commented on this development, nor do we know where the remaining nine tapes might be or what they might add to this mystery.