Former Nintendo Minute hosts and Nintendo of America employees Kit Ellis & Krysta Yang revealed in a recent episode of their Kit & Krysta podcast the story surrounding an image shared by Nintendo in the days before the reveal of the Nintendo Switch.
The image, pictured above, showed someone in a Mario costume peeking from behind a curtain and was used to tease the upcoming reveal.
According to the two hosts, the image didn't receive the best reception- both internally and from fans- due to it being improvised and leading people to heighten their expectations of what it could be teasing.
Here's the full exchange:
Krysta: This was very controversial. The person that had this idea was the former head of social, not [Kit]. This person commissioned a photoshoot for the Mario costume character in the office… It caused some concern actually because of course, Nintendo doesn't want to like not manage people's expectations and this was too much in the zone of like speculation, what could it be, too much of a tease for something as big as a console reveal so it didn't go over too well. Then of course it got memed into oblivion, and people were kind of upset about it honestly.
Kit: Here's the thing. With these big beats and moments like this, you always need more assets than you think you do. And in this case, there was clearly no asset to pair with this news, and nobody wants to put out a tweet that has no image with it, so it's like "Well what can we do?" There's always some spreadsheet – here's every single asset we need, every single sizing, every single use – and I think in that case they must have just missed out because why else otherwise would they be taking a last second picture of Mario in the shower, you know? "Please, give me the asset to use. Do you have it? Please give it to me, otherwise I'm going to do this." They'll be ready next time.
Krysta: People were upset because they didn't use an official thing. I'm not saying that they did anything wrong.
Kit: Again, they will be on top of this, this time. It won't happen again.
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