The As-Yet Unsolved Secret in Inside
Inside contains many secrets, and to the public’s knowledge almost all of them have been solved since its release on Xbox One in 2016.
To the solving party the secret is known as the “printer secret” and it has been part of the game ever since its initial release. It is easy to miss it on an ordinary play-through – to find it go to a glass cage near the end of the human part of the game and stand around at the correct spot for a few seconds to change the printer output, from generic printouts, to a long string of dots, dashes and slashes. Solve the string by correctly sorting and deciphering the gibberish and get a secret piece of text. Next thing to do is to input the text into a seemingly ordinary email subscription box on the developer’s website which returns a teasing, noisy and corrupted image file in a PDF document.
To make it more complicated nearly every release have had their own set of codes for the printer secret, however while the secret has definitely grown over time it has always been solvable from the beginning.
Over the course of a couple of years detectives have been stabbing at the printer secret ever since they first discovered its existence. Vital to the developer is the ability to follow the process of the solving party – however Playdead don’t know much about the inner workings and discussions of the solving party, but they have systems in place where the solving party communicates indirectly to them, and gives them hints at how far they’ve reached.
Early on the printer was just a static asset to be used as background noise. Routinely as production drew to a conclusion the content creators on the team got more and more time on their hands. So along with general polish they also had the time and capability to put in small homages, secrets and Easter Eggs here and there until content lock down was imposed. Even after the lock down, the printer was still allowed to be fiddled with. Now that there was a secret there, it also had to work and have something nice for the audience to discover at the end of it. The secret is as of today not solved, but the detectives seem to work on it regularly.