Apex Legends Finally Lets Us See Crypto, and Now the Memes Are Flowing

After a long stretch of datamining, an apparent leak, and the appearance of some strange progress bars and glitches around the arena, it finally seems that the next addition to Apex Legends has shown his face in Kings Canyon. You can't play as the Legend quite yet, and Respawn Entertainment developers are being coy about confirming his name, but Crypto is finally (sort of) here. The game's community is having a ton of fun with this Legend's first in-game appearance.

To spot Crypto in Apex Legends, you have to go to the underground labs added in the battle royale's recent Voidwalker update. During that themed event, a set of breakable doors in a shadowy corner of the labs once led to an abandoned room with an audio log that dispensed a little backstory for Wraith. But go to that same room now, and you can see Crypto and his little drone companion hacking something at a terminal in an adjacent locked room.

You can't watch him for long, as he quickly spots you and turns tail mid-hack. It's a great set-up for some decent memes, from variations on the SpongeBob "ight imma head out" and Eric Andre "let me in" formats to Mirage doing his best Jim Halpert impression.

Crypto's elusive hacker act follows from the first official glimpse we saw of the character back in the launch trailer for Apex's second season, where he hacked into the Kings Canyon Repulsor tower and brought it crashing down with an explosion. Things stayed pretty quiet on the Crypto front until a few weeks ago, when character art claimed to have been leaked from an event for GameStop managers was matched to an unfinished Legend model datamined back in March.

That original datamined information is where the name Crypto first surfaced for the character. Since Respawn hasn't confirmed any details about the character, a few of the developers are having fun on the Apex Legends subreddit by acting oblivious to the name.

It's possible Respawn could introduce the character with a different name, but at this point Crypto has been canonized by the Apex community with months of speculation and a good collection of memes. No matter what, he'll always really be Crypto.