Developer Bungie has a long history of sneaking secrets into their games, and their latest project they’d included, presumably to check they hadn’t slipped anything too naughty in there.

I’ve been scouring the planets in search of hidden details, and listed my findings over the following slides. Hopefully you’ll find some new information in here, to enhance your enjoyment of Destiny’s world(s)!

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Amazingly, the first Destiny Easter egg actually appeared in Halo 3: ODST, way back in 2009. An advertising board with the seemingly innocuous title “Destiny Awaits” could be found in that game, complete with a shot of the Earth... but wait, is that the Traveler hovering over it?

Bungie had suggested for some time that there was still a final secret to be discovered in Halo 3: ODST, and when eagle-eyed players noted this display after the first Destiny details were announced, series digital artist Vic Deleon confirmed it by tweeting “IT’S FINALLY BEEN FOUND!”

IT#39;S FINALLY BEEN FOUND!

In the game itself, the first Easter egg appears during the opening cinematic sequence, as a group of astronauts land on Mars and begin exploring the planet. Look closely at the spaceman’s boot as they descend from their craft, and you’ll notice what looks like the Destiny logo embedded in the tread. This can also be seen in the dusty footprint they leave behind as they set off across the planet’s surface towards the Traveler.

On your visits to the Tower you'll no doubt have noticed various ships buzzing around the place, and probably dismissed them as little more than background furniture. However, rather than just being randomly generated to make things look busy, these are the actual transport belonging to the guardians currently visiting this location.

To confirm this, as soon as you warp into the Tower Plaza, turn right and sprint into the Tower Hangar. Get inside quickly enough and you’ll spot your ship being flown in and docked, before it gets lowered into the subterranean parking lot.

A giant football first appeared in Halo 2, and made several appearances in subsequent games in the series. As a possible homage to this a football can be found in the Tower Plaza, which normally spawns on the left hand side under the stairs. By running or sliding into it you can kick it around, and perhaps get a little game going with your fellow guardians.

Also in the Tower Plaza is a large purple ball, which is much more lightweight and floaty than the football. This normally appears on top of the crates next to Bounty Tracker Xander 99-40, although it can also be found on the table by the Cryptarch’s tent. Knock it into the air, then see how long you can keep it up for... or, like me, spend an age trying to balance on top of it before some sod immediately kicks it away. Cheers, mate.

The trees in the Tower Plaza may help to brighten the place up, but the one near Gunsmith Banshee-44 can also be scaled to take in the view over the whole area. A few carefully placed jumps will get you most of the way up the trunk, then a final sprint jump will launch you into the branches. Have a little boogie up here and lord it over the guardians collecting their bounties below.

Here’s a secret feature of the Tower Plaza that requires at least two people to experience. On top of the Postmaster’s building is a large fan, and this rooftop can be accessed by sprint jumping from the nearby steps.

Once you’re on top of the fan, you need a second player to head up the steps at the side of the Plaza and onto the balcony overlooking the area. At the far end there are some panels on the floor, which provide an ‘Activate Fan’ prompt when stood on--hold down the button here and anyone stood on the fan will be launched high into the air. Get the timing right, and combined with a jump you can reach the top of the flagpoles or even the pillars above the Vault terminals.

While exploring the final planet Mars, fans of the Halo series may spot a building which bears more than a passing resemblance to a familiar character. This can be found in the Trenchworks area of the map used in several missions, though it can also be accessed during the Mars Patrol--head straight forwards from the start and follow the valley to the Scablands, go straight across it and through the next valley to Giants’ Pass and the Valley of the Kings, then down the tunnel at the far end until you reach the Trenchworks.

Here you’ll find this building, which thanks to its glowing golden window and central green banner looks an awful lot like the Master Chief himself. Purely coincidental, I’m sure...

Destiny’s developers have obviously been using their lunchtimes to play other games, and you can find a number of references to what’s been on the office machines hidden away in some of the armour descriptions. The first is a piece of Exotic chest armour called Heart of the Praxic Fire, which comes with the description, “In that last moment she seemed as wholly luminescent as the Sun, and I wished to be so brave.” Dark Souls players should pick up on the nod to the cheerful and powerful Knight ‘Solaire of Astora’ – who can be summoned to help players with many of the bosses in the game – but if they didn’t the ‘Praise the Sun’ perk carried by the armour should hammer home the reference.

And if you’re really looking to complete the Dark Souls look, try equipping the Ghost Angel Cloak for your Hunter. The tagline is, “We are an army of the chosen dead.” So get out there and round up some more recruits. By shooting ’em in the head.

As we’ve already seen, Bungie loves to leave subtle nods to other games in their creations. But the studio doesn’t stop there: books and TV shows have every chance of appearing in Bungie’s works. Head to the Cosmodrome on Earth, pick up some Patrol missions and you’ll eventually come across one called ‘Four Arms Good, Two Arms Better’. Aside from the Vandals you fight in Old Russia having four arms, this is a knowing reference to Animal Farm (ask your parents) where the pigs eventually used the maxim, “Four legs good, two legs better!” as they became more human.

Showing that they can also riff off modern pop-culture, Bungie also included a Bounty called ‘All in the Game’. Which is eerily similar to the words Omar Little says in the final scene of the first season of HBO’s The Wire, “It’s all in the game, yo. All in the game.” That on its own might not convince everyone, so consider this: the Bounty also has you killing Fallen enemies and pick up Wire Wraps. Not just a coincidence after all, then.

Cortana may now be known to most people as Microsoft’s answer to Siri, but she started out life as the AI in the Halo series. Bungie was obviously keen to hang on to their iconic blue guide in some way, and although she doesn’t appear in physical form in Destiny you can hear Jen Taylor, the voice of Cortana, talking over the PA system in the Tower.

Listen long enough and you can ever hear her quit during an announcement – tired of being everyone’s personal assistant, we presume.

This next Easter egg comes direct from the internet detectives on Reddit. Take a look at the Director map screen and, around the edges, you’ll see a series of numbers on the top right, bottom left and left hand side. These are HEX codes. Reddit user Arukemos took these digits and changed them into ASCII code, then soon discovered the bottom numbers translate to “Alright OK”. alrightok.com takes you to a page for a User Interface artist who worked on the game. The left hand side numbers mean ‘Be Dave’, which Dave Candland, Lead UI designer for Destiny, confirmed was correct by tweeting ‘Reddit finds my egg’ and adding there are currently 32 Daves working at Bungie. The top sequence? That says ‘mackay’ – another UI artist, MacKay Clark.

When the House of Wolves expansion was added to Destiny in May 2015, players got access to a host of new areas and challenges. One of these was a new social space called the Vestian Outpost. Head here and look right as soon as you arrive and you’ll see the Postmaster. Next to him is a lamp you can turn on and off to your heart’s content. Light goes on, light goes off, light goes on, light goes off, light goes on, light goes off… Did somebody order a disco?

You can find this little treat every time you go to the Tower. As soon as you spawn in, look down at your feet and you’ll see the phrase ATRIVM PROPVGNATORVM. Translated from Latin this becomes Hall of Champions. So the Tower isn’t just a nice place to hang out, it’s a memorial to every Guardian fighting against the Darkness.

So we all remember the song called Breaking Benjamins that was written for Halo 2, right? Good. In that case you’ll remember the first line of the chorus was ,“Only the strongest will survive,” which is something you’ll hear a lot as you start matches in the Crucible. Coincidence? Maybe, but probably not knowing Bungie.

While tackling the Will of Crota Strike on Earth – released as part of The Dark Below DLC – you’ll hear Eris Morn giving you instructions as you make your way towards Omnigul. However, if you’re the first player to reach the sealed door in the Jovian Complex and use your Ghost before Eris has finished telling you about Omnigul’s purpose, she’ll inform you that, “In its dying breath the Traveler released the Ghosts… to open doors.” Poor Dinklebot. Will he never catch a break?

Look closely around in certain areas of the Tower – on the Speaker’s desk or at the top of the tree near the Gunsmith, for instance – and you should see some coins. There are seven of these (of course there are) located around the Tower, and the first person to find them all and send photographic evidence to Bungie received a special player emblem only available from the developer for their troubles.

But don’t give up. Players have since discovered that the House of Wolves DLC also had some hidden coins in the new areas. Only two have been found to date, so there’s still time, Guardian. Who’s guessing there’ll be five more?

The Beatles’ Sir Paul McCartney wrote the song ‘Hope For the Future’ specifically for Destiny, and it doesn’t contain the phrase, “Hey Jude,” even once! Want to listen to it? You’ll need to select the credits from the Director map screen once you’ve finished the main story missions. The song was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in the UK by a 120 piece orchestra.

During any mission you’ll notice enemies coming out of doors which close again once everyone is safely though and walking into your bullets. They won’t open again if you walk up to them, but summon your Ghost and they’ll slide apart. Apart from the isolated Strike strategy cheese it’s a useless trick, but worth seeing at least once all the same.

As you’ve probably gathered by now Destiny is full of references to TV shows, games, and popular culture. For example, there’s a Patrol mission on the Moon called ‘Power Underwhelming’, which also happens to be the code for activating God mode in Starcraft. Then there’s the Legendary sniper rifle ‘Final Boss’, named after a MLG Halo 3 team. And finally, a Legendary shotgun called the Comedian is a nod towards the gun-toting Watchmen character of the same name. He loves shotguns, too.

Win nine matches without a single loss in the Trials of Osiris and you’re granted access to the Lighthouse where you’ll find a chest full of goodies. But head to the left when you arrive and you’ll discover a secret room underground. It’s been suggested that this is Osiris’ room, and it looks like a bloody battle took place at some point – look around and you’ll find bullets and weapons on the ground, along with the bodies of those who didn’t make it through the fight.

So, those are the Destiny secrets we know about so far. But, as Bungie are the masters of Easter eggs, there’s undoubtedly still more to be discovered. Had you spotted any of them before, and are there any others you know of? Tell us in the comments below.

Hungry for more of the hidden stuff? Then why not check out .

In games, nothing can be said to be certain except death and… well, mostly that. Death as a consequence of failure has been a part of games since the days of , and what came after has stayed pretty much the same: a Game Over screen, a Continue? prompt (maybe with an exchange of quarters in there somewhere), and you begin again as if nothing happened. That's been the gaming standard for decades and it's practical enough, but it can make death insignificant.

But not all games play to that standard - some choose not to ignore that you were a corpse just a moment ago, choosing instead to weave the reason for your resurrection into the gameplay. Death isn't merely an inconvenience that loudly reminds you you're in a video game!, but a real part of the game with a place in its world. It’s not the right fit for every situation, of course, but a creative workaround for death can genuinely enhance your playing experience.

As seen in: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Assassin's Creed, Tales from the Borderlands

We all know how it goes when you tell your friends some incredible personal story: you fudge the details and forget things, so you sometimes have to back up and correct yourself. Most of us stop short of claiming we died during our travels, but video game protagonists have a habit of trading in extremes. When they describe their adventures after the fact, they'll detail their own demise before remembering that they're very much alive, and none of that actually happened.

Being able to explain away death as overenthusiastic storytelling is a happy accident - the frame exists for bigger reasons, to keep you wondering how (rather than if) the hero escapes deadly harm to recount the story later. That makes this non-death a close cousin of the standard revert-to-checkpoint approach, but one thing saves it: its sense of humor. You get to feel like you're in on the joke, and hearing how the protagonist explains away their mistake can be worth the failure. It can even seem logical, if it's .

As seen in: BioShock, Borderlands, Crackdown

In the very near future (sometimes so near that it's actually the past), mankind hammers out all the ethical and biological ramifications of cloning and starts mass production on personal body copies. Now you can get clones like snacks out of a vending machine, which is convenient when your job involves being repeatedly destroyed by enemies who want to nail you into the ground like a tent spike.

This kind of death-dodging works best in games that are meant to be challenging, but also aim to create a certain feeling around each fight. For instance, the most satisfying conclusion to a Big Daddy battle in BioShock is watching a giant monster go down after throwing everything you have at it, which doesn't work as well if you have to completely restart the fight every time it kills you. Fighting your way through Rapture has to feel difficult if the struggle is going to be meaningful, but you don't want to lose out on the rhythm each fight is meant to have. Having another you waiting in the wings, ready to be spawned on a moment's notice, keeps you on beat.

As seen in: Dark Souls, Shadow of Mordor, Bloodborne

If used incorrectly, this can quickly become the narrative equivalent of the creators throwing up their hands and storming out of the room. Given that you do technically come back to life time and time again, immortality is the laziest possible explanation if nothing more is done with it. Thankfully, the games that use this concept best avoid that by making immortality an even bigger part of the game.

The immortality method takes some serious commitment from the game to avoid looking like a cop-out. By planting the concept deep in their world lore (the way, for example, Dark Souls does by making you an Undead out to destroy the source of your reanimation), unending life becomes as much a part of the plot as it is a gameplay device. It never feels like there's an unnatural break when the protagonist dies, because it falls perfectly in line with the storyline.

As seen in: Grand Theft Auto, City of Heroes

There's little way to play this one straight, but that's half the fun. Regardless of what sort of damage your character is subjected to - falling from a ten-story building, getting run over by a Jeep, slamming a jet into a suspension bridge and succumbing to the resulting inferno - nothing actually kills them. Instead, after the loading screen comes and goes, they trot out of the nearest hospital, with nothing to indicate their misadventure except a slightly lighter wallet.

This undeath is sure to get a few laughs on principle, which is part of its appeal: it's the game giving you a wink and a nod over your unfortunate and likely stupid demise while showing it doesn't really care to punish you. In fact, it purposefully moves you from the place where you died so you can start fresh somewhere else and not have to immediately deal with what just killed you. That's why you mostly see this in sandbox games - where it would be incredibly annoying to restart far away from your goal in a linear title, in an open-world it feels like a respite, so you're free to go cause mayhem elsewhere.

As seen in: Destiny, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Too Human

It's good to have friends in high places - or low ones, depending on your perspective. While the hero may not have a supply of body copies on hand, they do have a patron deity who's interested in keeping them alive. That means whenever they bite it, their connection to those divine beings is what raises them from the dead, just in time for to charge back into the fight and send their enemies into cardiac arrest.

This one can both be taken seriously or played for laughs, based on how the game frames the situation. The ethereal Traveler in Destiny is taken very seriously, so it's a matter of grave importance when its power is used to raise a fallen guardian. Same goes for Too Human, where you're resurrected by Valkyries. Meanwhile, in Conker's Bad Fur Day, a drunken squirrel makes a deal with the Grim Reaper to pay for new lives with severed squirrel tails, which everyone involved knows is weird. In either case, it gives the main character an even greater sense of importance: not only are they untouchable, but they have a patron god keeping them that way, because they're just that important to the survival of the world (or whatever's going on in Conker).

As seen in: Psychonauts, The Talos Principle, Ether One

We're getting downright here, when death adversion is based on the idea that you have no physical form to kill. Whether that's because you're a robot, or are projecting into a digital world, the result is the same: you get an infinite amount of 'lives' because dying kills the image of you, not your essence. Deep.

While that seems like a simple way to handwave in-game death, since your synthetic form can be mentioned once and never again, it takes serious legwork to implement it in any game with a hint of story. Portal's co-op mode gets away with it because the robot bodies are just there to facilitate you shooting holes in the wall, but something like The Talos Principle has to explain why you, robot, need so many bodies to accomplish your objective. Robot-projection death only works if it's built into the bedrock of the game, but when it is, your mechanical immortality can itself open up interesting questions. Reaching your goal is the only way for this all to end, but what could be so important that the game keeps endlessly rebuilding you to do it?

As seen in: Super Meat Boy

You're not a creature of this world. For whatever reason the laws of physics and biology don't apply to you, and after being mercilessly splattered against a stray sawblade, you're able to gather up your own remains and reconstitute yourself. There's no pretenses of logic here, no attempt to explain how you flagrantly defy the blueprint of the universe. Just you, reforming yourself at the end of every death, the game daring you to question it.

This approach only really works if a game is willing to commit to the levels of absurdity it demands. But once that's accomplished, this may well be the most indisputable death dodge out there, because it isn't really a dodge at all. You die, and have enough will left to rebuild yourself through a means that only the unforgiving cosmos understands. That, in a weird way, becomes the epitome of persistence. If the protagonist is willing to scrape what remains of their flesh off yet another death contraption and do it all over again, what excuse do you have?

The creative twists on death I've described here range from stiff-lipped serious to unapologetically silly, but all have the same aim: give in-game death as much consideration and coherence as every other part of the story.

When death is tweaked to fit the game, rather than the other way around, that attention to detail makes the world of the game feel so much fuller, and death itself more genuine. Many of these death-aversions are just as strange as time-reserved regeneration, if not more so. Most players will buy the idea of a restart without a second thought, while walking out of a hospital unscathed after falling out of a helicopter might be hard to buy. But it's the effort that makes it believable, to carve death into the proper shape that makes it fit into the overall puzzle. And so you have a better game, even when it involves a helium-inhaling Grim Reaper.

In games, nothing can be said to be certain except death and… well, mostly that. Death as a consequence of failure has been a part of games since the days of , and what came after has stayed pretty much the same: a Game Over screen, a Continue? prompt (maybe with an exchange of quarters in there somewhere), and you begin again as if nothing happened. That's been the gaming standard for decades and it's practical enough, but it can make death insignificant.

But not all games play to that standard - some choose not to ignore that you were a corpse just a moment ago, opting instead to weave the reason for your resurrection into the gameplay. Death isn't merely an inconvenience that loudly reminds you you're in a video game!, but a real part of the game with a place in its world. It’s not the right fit for every situation, of course, but a creative workaround for death can genuinely enhance your playing experience.

As seen in: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Assassin's Creed, Tales from the Borderlands

We all know how it goes when you tell your friends some incredible personal story: you fudge the details and forget things, so you sometimes have to back up and correct yourself. Most of us stop short of claiming we died during our travels, but video game protagonists have a habit of trading in extremes. When they describe their adventures after the fact, they'll detail their own demise before remembering that they're very much alive, and none of that actually happened.

Being able to explain away death as overenthusiastic storytelling is a happy accident - the frame exists for bigger reasons, to keep you wondering how (rather than if) the hero escapes deadly harm to recount the story later. That makes this non-death a close cousin of the standard revert-to-checkpoint approach, but one thing saves it: its sense of humor. You get to feel like you're in on the joke, and hearing how the protagonist explains away their mistake can be worth the failure. It can even seem logical, if it's .

As seen in: BioShock, Borderlands, Crackdown

In the very near future (sometimes so near that it's actually the past), mankind hammers out all the ethical and biological ramifications of cloning and starts mass production on personal body copies. Now you can get clones like snacks out of a vending machine, which is convenient when your job involves being repeatedly destroyed by enemies who want to nail you into the ground like a tent spike.

This kind of death-dodging works best in games that are meant to be challenging, but also aim to create a certain feeling around each fight. For instance, the most satisfying conclusion to a Big Daddy battle in BioShock is watching a giant monster go down after throwing everything you have at it, which doesn't work as well if you have to completely restart the fight every time it kills you. Fighting your way through Rapture has to feel difficult if the struggle is going to be meaningful, but you don't want to lose out on the rhythm each fight is meant to have. Having another you waiting in the wings, ready to be spawned on a moment's notice, keeps you on beat.

As seen in: Dark Souls, Shadow of Mordor, Bloodborne

If used incorrectly, this can quickly become the narrative equivalent of the creators throwing up their hands and storming out of the room. Given that you do technically come back to life time and time again, immortality is the laziest possible explanation if nothing more is done with it. Thankfully, the games that use this concept best avoid that by making immortality an even bigger part of the game.

The immortality method takes some serious commitment from the game to avoid looking like a cop-out. By planting the concept deep in their world lore (the way, for example, Dark Souls does by making you an Undead out to destroy the source of your reanimation), unending life becomes as much a part of the plot as it is a gameplay device. It never feels like there's an unnatural break when the protagonist dies, because it falls perfectly in line with the storyline.

As seen in: Grand Theft Auto, City of Heroes

There's little way to play this one straight, but that's half the fun. Regardless of what sort of damage your character is subjected to - falling from a ten-story building, getting run over by a Jeep, slamming a jet into a suspension bridge and succumbing to the resulting inferno - nothing actually kills them. Instead, after the loading screen comes and goes, they trot out of the nearest hospital, with nothing to indicate their misadventure except a slightly lighter wallet.

This undeath is sure to get a few laughs on principle, which is part of its appeal: it's the game giving you a wink and a nod over your unfortunate and likely stupid demise while showing it doesn't really care to punish you. In fact, it purposefully moves you from the place where you died so you can start fresh somewhere else and not have to immediately deal with what just killed you. That's why you mostly see this in sandbox games - where it would be incredibly annoying to restart far away from your goal in a linear title, in an open-world it feels like a respite, so you're free to go cause mayhem elsewhere.

As seen in: Destiny, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Too Human

It's good to have friends in high places - or low ones, depending on your perspective. While the hero may not have a supply of body copies on hand, they do have a patron deity who's interested in keeping them alive. That means whenever they bite it, their connection to those divine beings is what raises them from the dead, just in time for to charge back into the fight and send their enemies into cardiac arrest.

This one can both be taken seriously or played for laughs, based on how the game frames the situation. The ethereal Traveler in Destiny is taken very seriously, so it's a matter of grave importance when its power is used to raise a fallen guardian. Same goes for Too Human, where you're resurrected by Valkyries. Meanwhile, in Conker's Bad Fur Day, a drunken squirrel makes a deal with the Grim Reaper to pay for new lives with severed squirrel tails, which everyone involved knows is weird. In either case, it gives the main character an even greater sense of importance: not only are they untouchable, but they have a patron god keeping them that way, because they're just that important to the survival of the world (or whatever's going on in Conker).

As seen in: Psychonauts, The Talos Principle, Ether One

We're getting downright here, when death adversion is based on the idea that you have no physical form to kill. Whether that's because you're a robot, or are projecting into a digital world, the result is the same: you get an infinite amount of 'lives' because dying kills the image of you, not your essence. Deep.

While that seems like a simple way to handwave in-game death, since your synthetic form can be mentioned once and never again, it takes serious legwork to implement it in any game with a hint of story. Portal's co-op mode gets away with it because the robot bodies are just there to facilitate you shooting holes in the wall, but something like The Talos Principle has to explain why you, robot, need so many bodies to accomplish your objective. Robot-projection death only works if it's built into the bedrock of the game, but when it is, your mechanical immortality can itself open up interesting questions. Reaching your goal is the only way for this all to end, but what could be so important that the game keeps endlessly rebuilding you to do it?

As seen in: Super Meat Boy

You're not a creature of this world. For whatever reason the laws of physics and biology don't apply to you, and after being mercilessly splattered against a stray sawblade, you're able to gather up your own remains and reconstitute yourself. There's no pretenses of logic here, no attempt to explain how you flagrantly defy the blueprint of the universe. Just you, reforming yourself at the end of every death, the game daring you to question it.

This approach only really works if a game is willing to commit to the levels of absurdity it demands. But once that's accomplished, this may well be the most indisputable death dodge out there, because it isn't really a dodge at all. You die, and have enough will left to rebuild yourself through a means that only the unforgiving cosmos understands. That, in a weird way, becomes the epitome of persistence. If the protagonist is willing to scrape what remains of their flesh off yet another death contraption and do it all over again, what excuse do you have?

The creative twists on death I've described here range from stiff-lipped serious to unapologetically silly, but all have the same aim: give in-game death as much consideration and coherence as every other part of the story.

When death is tweaked to fit the game, rather than the other way around, that attention to detail makes the world of the game feel so much fuller, and death itself more genuine. Many of these death-aversions are just as strange as time-reserved regeneration, if not more so. Most players will buy the idea of a restart without a second thought, while walking out of a hospital unscathed after falling out of a helicopter might be hard to buy. But it's the effort that makes it believable, to carve death into the proper shape that makes it fit into the overall puzzle. And so you have a better game, even when it involves a helium-inhaling Grim Reaper.