Former Nintendo Minute hosts and Nintendo of America employees Kit Ellis & Krysta Yang revealed on a recent episode of their podcast Kit & Krysta the story surrounding an image Nintendo shared days before the Nintendo Switch reveal.
The image, shown above, shows someone in a Mario costume peeking out from behind a curtain and was used to tease the upcoming reveal.
According to the two hosts, the image hasn’t received the best reception – both internally and from fans – because it’s improvised and leads people to raise their expectations of what could be a tease.
Here’s the entire exchange:
Krysta: This was very controversial. The person who had the idea was the former head of social services, not [Kit]. This person commissioned a photo shoot for a character in a Mario costume in the office… This actually caused concern because of course Nintendo doesn’t want to like not manage people’s expectations and this was too much in the zone of similar speculation, what could be , too much teasing for something like that as big as the console reveal so it didn’t go down too well. Then, of course, it fell into oblivion, and people were a bit upset about it.
Set: Here’s the thing. With these big beats and moments like this, you always need more assets than you think. And in this case, there were obviously no assets to pair with this news, and nobody wants to post a tweet that doesn’t have an image, so it’s like, “Well, what can we do?” There’s always some spreadsheet – every single tool we need is here, every single size, every single use – and I think in that case they just missed it because why else would they take a photo of Mario in the shower at the last second, you know? “Please give me the property to use. if you have it please give it to me or I will do it.” Next time they will be ready.
Krysta: People were upset because they didn’t use the official thing. I’m not saying they did anything wrong.
Set: Again, they will be on top of this, this time. It won’t happen again.