The Nintendo Switch Features A Hidden Tribute To Satoru Iwata

A mystery has surrounded the Nintendo Switch forums in the GBATemp console hacking community for the last few months, as someone stumbled upon a lovely tribute to the late Nintendo President Satoru Iwata embedded into each and every Nintendo Switch. Naturally, if you’d rather this not be spoiled, you should stop reading here.

Back on 22nd July, GBATemp user Setery posted that he had accidentally and quite mysteriously found his Switch loading into a fully playable version of NES Golf, which has even been updated to feature motion controls.. It had already been known that there was an emulator named “flog” built into the system software, but how to access and use it was unknown. Sadly, Setery hadn’t recognised his find when he stumbled upon it late at night, and so a months long hunt for this easter egg started.

After a lot of speculation, another hacker Plutoo discovered that to access the game you needed to set the console date to 11th July, the date of Satoru Iwata’s passing, and performing some kind of motion control input. Plutoo speculated this could be a golf swing, but after further investigation, it seems to match up to Iwata’s trademark “Direct” hand gesture. As the game loads, it plays an audio clip of Iwata from one of his Direct presentations.

You will, however, have to wait until 11th July 2018 to try this out. The console determines the date and time from network time sync, but takes it a user-specified time if that has not occurred. This means you’ll almost certainly be out of luck.

It’s a truly lovely hidden tribute to the respected and very well liked figure, and I look forward to next year where I can raise play NES Golf in his honour.

Source: GBATemp, Switchbrew via Ars Technica

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I'm probably wearing toe shoes, and there's nothing you can do to stop me!

4 Comments

  1. Ha! Mental!

  2. Please remind us of this in early July 2018 TSA :)

  3. Wonderful! I’ve set myself a reminder. Lovely to see this sort of thing, it’s very old school and like you say a lovely tribute.

  4. That’s a cool easter egg and a nice tribute.

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