The hunt for the CoD 2020 teasers
Since the beginning of August, there has also been movement in the game alongside the leaks. Two days after the tweet at the beginning of this article (August 6), selected content creators received strange boxes.
Included was a note saying, “Do not open this box before August 10, 2020 – 12 PM EDT.” Speculation was high, and when the boxes were finally opened the following Monday, even more questions arose than before.
In these boxes, the chosen ones did not find their preview version of CoD: 2020, but rather items with which a great “Easter egg” hunt began, which continues to this day. Even in the Warzone, soldiers suddenly discovered mysterious messages.
We want to summarize the individual steps of the great treasure hunt for you once more.
CoD: 2020 Easter egg hunt – From the box to the website
The recipients of the boxes had to contact an Activision phone number on August 10 to receive the code for the combination lock. Upon opening, they were greeted with technological relics – a slide projector with corresponding photos. A slide projector projects small framed pictures (slides) onto a wall, thus displaying them larger, similar to an overhead projector in school. A few strange documents were also found in the large storage box.
With the photos, the puzzling really began. It quickly became clear that some of the slides depicted the outline of the multiplayer map “Summit”, a “Black Ops” classic that is also available in “Black Ops 4”. However, what the strange pictures with circles and letters meant, and what the maps were doing there, was initially completely unclear.
To make matters worse, all the sent boxes contained different photos. Therefore, collaboration was necessary to arrive at the solution. Some of the photos with the letter salad ultimately matched computers on the map, which highlighted letters in the photos with circles at specific positions. The first code was cracked: “Turn Eleven White” or in German “Zug Elf Weiß”.
But there were still more strange photos, and the first code had not yet proven helpful. So, they continued to search and eventually found the appropriate decryption for the other code images. This time, puzzlers had to overlay the photos with clocks found on the map. The 5 clocks hang next to each other and are marked with cities that match the maps visible on the slides.
Each of the circle photos also has a color marking, and the maps have a digit. They found the appropriate digit on the walls of some houses on “Summit”. The houses, in turn, indicated the color marking of the circles, which connected the map, circles, and clocks. Here, they could then decode the letters by reading the 3 hands of the clock clockwise starting from 12 o’clock. The second solution phrase: “Bish, You Were Here”.
With the new code, the code crackers found a connection to the first code – a chess game from 1972. At that time, Boris Spassky, the reigning world champion from the Soviet Union, and Bobby Fischer, an up-and-coming chess player from the USA, played against each other in the so-called “Match of the Century”. With “Bish, You Were Here,” one could identify a very specific match, and together with the first code “Turn Eleven White,” it was clear that it had something to do with the 11th move of the white side.
At this point, it became extremely tricky. Developer “Treyarch” decided to share a minimal hint on their Instagram story, which was sufficient to send the player base on the right solution path. Like in a hangman riddle, they posted: _ _ _ _ _ _ K _ _ _ _ _ _. The 11th move for White in Spassky vs. Fischer was “Pawn takes Pawn,” which fits perfectly into the letters that “Treyarch” showed on Instagram.
Now, a clever puzzler just had to figure out that this hint led to a website, and the first and thus far biggest step in the hunt for CoD 2020 was solved: pawntakespawn.tv. Here there’s an old television to marvel at. More on that in the next step.
The summary of the first step can be found in a video by the German YouTuber “TheReaper”:
On page 3, we continue with the mysterious videos that have been gradually added since the discovery of the website. Here you’ll find strong duo loadouts if you want to tackle the hunt together.
