Waking Titan/Cassettes

No Man's Sky
Active since 2017-06-01
The No Man's Sky ARG - an ARG that began with 16 mysterious cassette tapes.
Type	[[List_of_Investigations#Official|Official]]
Creator	Hello Games
Discovered	2017-06-01

Main Page > List of Investigations > Waking Titan > Cassettes

Note: This page is under construction - more information is still being added!

The No Man's Sky ARG was created by Hello Games. It began with 16 cassette tapes being mailed to prominent individuals in the No Man's Sky online community. At this time, it is unclear what these cassette tapes are leading to. It is speculated that when the mystery of the tapes is solved, a new update for No Man's Sky will be announced.

This ARG is currently being solved by the No Man's Sky community: in particular, the No Man's Sky subreddit. Most of the information on this page has been compiled from stickied posts.

The first cassette tape, mailed to /u/StuartGT

Cassette Tapes

Beginning on June 1, 2017, moderators of No Man's Sky subreddits /r/NoMansSkyTheGame, /r/NMSPortals, and /r/NMSGalacticHub started to receive cassette tapes in the mail. Each cassette tape was labelled with a number out of 16.

Here is a summary table, showing each tape's number, current status, and owner:

Tape Number	Tape Owner	Tape Status
1	/u/StuartGT	Uploaded
2	Unknown	Unknown
3	/u/MrUnnoticed	Uploaded
4	/u/Tony-Towers	Uploaded
5	Unknown	Unknown
6	/u/BaRKy1911	Not yet played
7	/u/UnimatrixZeroOne	Uploaded
8	Unknown	Unknown
9	CobraTV	Uploaded
10	/u/swampthing3000	Uploaded
11	Unknown	Unknown
12	/u/Nevadander	Uploaded
13	Unknown	Unknown
14	Unknown	Unknown
15	Unknown	Unknown
16	Unknown	Unknown

A-Side Audio

The A-Side of the cassettes consists of portions of three songs by 65daysofstatic, the composers of the soundtrack for No Man's Sky. The tracks are, in order:

Red Parallax
Supermoon
End of the World Sun

Which are track numbers 8, 2, and 10 on the No Man's Sky soundtrack.

Tape 9/16 contained a different recording to the first 7 tapes.

B-Side Audio

The B-side audio of all of the currently available tapes consists of garbled noise. When running the noise through a spectrogram, a sequence of characters can be clearly seen:

• Spectrographs of the cassette B-sides
• 
• 
• 
• 

706s7274616p

Running this ciphertext through ROT13 and then decoding the resulting hex yields the following string:

portal

The B-side audio of Tape 9/16 was also different compared to the first 7 tapes.

Notes/Posters

Some tapes came with a signed NMS Poster with the text

Thank you for your support
It means the universe to us
we hope you enjoy what comes next
-Sean

One came with a note:

The giant gateway calls out to me, filling my mind with whispered secrets of a far-flung world.

This is an exact quote of a text that is in the game files right now, but apparently not used or discovered yet.

Transcript of A-Side from Tape 9/16

I am alone in this space between worlds.
I am alone, but for my thoughts, my words.
I am alone, but for you.
I see you, you must have known I could.
You must have known what this was.
Through these travels we come to know ourselves, just as the universe comes to know [us, in turn].
 
I cannot step through. I know now that if I do, all of this will be over. Lives come back to me. I’ve seen horrors and blunders wonders. I have been cruel, I have become good and evil. I have grown beyond all such things, [by a fractured life].
 
And now I am become you. One day, your voice will speak to you, telling you of something, some signal that needs answering. It will tell you of some secret of the heart of reality, some puzzle that needs to be solved, [plus lest all life falls into decay and oblivion.] Do not listen to it.
 
If all the world is a lie, then nothing is true, not even an explanation. Abandon it. Abandon me. It is inevitable.

Additional Resources

• No Man's Sky Subreddit
• Cassette ARG Megathread
• MediaFire folder of all audio recordings.

Theories

The following information is presented as speculation, and shouldn't be used to build theories from

From reddit user notno6lesix:

After looking through the comments and finding out the tracks featured on side A of the cassette I got the length of each in seconds and converted it to hex and I got the following coordinates

011F:0106:01D2

I hope this is of use

It's the length of the original versions of the songs on Side A in the order they're on side A so if the coordinates don't lead anywhere we could try the 8 but versions 

Soundtrack

Each cassette could correspond to a track on the 65DoS soundtrack. 16 cassettes, 16 tracks, and audio on the tapes are songs from that album.

This page is a work in progress, and will be updated as new developments emerge.