Overwatch’s Ana videos are hiding secret messages (update)

Blizzard Entertainment touched on the origins of Ana, the first post-launch character coming to Overwatch, in an illustrated trailer earlier today. Not only does the video give us some clues about the story behind Pharah’s formerly missing-in-action mother, it also included a secret message.

At about 1:16 into the new video, a still frame showing a sequence of hex values appears. If you weren’t watching the video frame-by-frame, like some of us were this morning, it’s pretty easy to miss. Here's an enhanced version of the image:

The message appears twice in the video, and repeats the following sequence: 2E 2E 2E 7B 76 20 66 62 72 20 63 7E 72 79 72 20 7B 76 20 7E 79 71 78 65 7A 76 74 7E D4 A4 79 2C 20 63 7E 72 79 72 20 72 7B 20 67 78 73 72 65.

Fortunately for the inexperienced code crackers out there, the Overwatch subreddit took a stab at it. Their solution? "La que tiene la información; tiene el poder" or, "Whoever has the power; has the information."

It’s not entirely clear what Blizzard is trying to tell us, if that's accurate. Is that supposed to be a hint about the relationship between Sombra and Ana? Is Sombra simply an alias for Ana? Is it a hint about an upcoming gameplay mode coming to Overwatch? We’re checking in with Blizzard to see if they’ll give us some more hints.

You can watch Ana’s origin trailer below to see if you can uncover any other clues.

Update: Blizzard sneaked another secret message, again in Spanish, into a developer update video published today in tandem with a new patch that adds new character Ana and a host of balance changes. That video ends with a still frame of a sequence of bar codes, which the residents of the Overwatch subreddit quickly decoded. The short version of that code-busting effort — which went from bar codes to hex to binary to a QR code — resulted in two sentences of text.

"¿Estuvo eso facilito? Ahora que tengo su atención, déjenme se las pongo más difícil," the message reads.

That roughly translates to "Was that easy? Now that I have your attention, let's make things more difficult."

That's not a lot of information, but it could be another hint about the existence of Sombra, the character hinted at in Overwatch's Dorado map and a couple voice lines.

Blizzard Entertainment will be in attendance at this week's San Diego Comic-Con, where the company says it will discuss the creation of Ana. Perhaps we'll learn more about Sombra there too.