Goldeneye successor unofficially unlocked as free bonus inside another game ~ USA Latest Games

What's so special about a fully fledged TimeSplitters 2 menu? In this case, it's the fact that this fully unlocked game has been hiding inside of another game for five years. [credit: THQ Nordic ]

2021 has been a bountiful year for a select group of retro console gamers—specifically, fans of Goldeneye 007. Earlier this year, we found and confirmed a leak of the N64 classic as secretly remade for Xbox 360 consoles (it's even playable on both real hardware and emulators). Today, the same thing applies to a different game from some of Goldeneye 007's original creators: TimeSplitters 2.

The story began with an offhand comment on Twitter this weekend from British programmer Matt Phillips, who had worked on the 2016 video game Homefront: The Revolution. As a nod to the Easter holiday, Phillips piled onto a Twitter thread about long-lost Easter eggs inside of video games, and his was a doozy: He had put a "fully playable, native 4K port of TimeSplitters 2" into a five-year-old game without anybody realizing it.

If you've played H:TR, you may have seen a TS2-branded arcade cabinet toward the end of the game. Walk up to it and activate it, and that 2002 game will boot up, albeit in bite-sized form. Only its first two levels are playable, and only in single-player mode. But as it turns out, Phillips put most of the older game's native content into that cabinet, all locked away with some debug codes.

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