Is Cory Barlog teasing his next project? The Santa Monica Studio creative director has made some pretty seismic changes to his Twitter handle doing away with the God of War theme that has defined his Twitter presence for the past few years.
The alterations to his avatar, banner, and bio that appeared late yesterday take on a distinctly cosmic theme. The avatar now features a satellite while the banner depicts a wide shot of a cluster of galaxies.
The satellite image is concept art for NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft , while the banner picture is from the Hubble telescope and is known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field , a snapshot of various galaxies (thanks Resetera ).
Interestingly, Cory Barlog used the very same Hubble image in a GDC presentation back in March titled ‘Reinventing God of War.’ He uses the analogy of the Hubble telescope image to describes mythologies and how the geographical switch in God of War was cannon.
He says;
Some people had the conception that ‘hey, Kratos at the end of God of War III destroyed the world!’ Well, he destroyed what they believed the world was in Greece, which was their world. Everybody believed their world was the only world; in fact, we still believe that today.
The following tweet accompanied the changes and reads ‘End Transmission’ alongside a string of what appears to be Morse code. The new bio also features the following code ‘….. ….. …. … .. .’
Run through a Morse decoder, the tweet translates to ‘SIE’, while the bio converts to ’55HSIE.’ The ‘SIE’ portion appears to refer to Sony Interactive Entertainment, which owns Santa Monica Studio. The cryptic meaning behind ’55H’ remains unclear. Possibly, a countdown?
Sci-fi and Santa Monica Studios aren’t exactly synonymous with each other, especially if we peruse the developer’s God of War-dominated back catalog. This all suggests Barlog and the crack team responsible for last year’s phenomenal God of War are working on a new IP.
The space theme immediately harks to a trademark filed by Sony in Jan. 2018 for an unannounced game by the name of RaySpace.
Of course, this is purely speculative, and Cory Barlog could be trolling us. We can’t discount that this is an elaborate ploy used to announce a Twitter hiatus either. Or, in some convoluted fashion, confirming that the next God of War will take another geographical and mythological leap as we saw with the latest entry.