
“Gradually the responses became more intense People started bringing out the slurs and calling for us to be doxxed and/or murdered. While the early comments were more finger-wagging than malicious, that soon changed. “Of course we knew people would be disappointed and that there would be a few harsh responses but it felt relatively light-hearted for the most part.” “Initially it seemed to go as expected,” James said. Then on April Fools’ James revealed the joke. By then the screenshots had already made their way to sites like r/NintendoSwitch on Reddit and 4chan. The team released the “leaks” online three days before April 1 with a plan to reveal themselves on April Fools’. “But in the following days the telephone-game effect kicked in and soon enough the source was somehow ‘an insider at Nintendo of Japan.’ Things got a little scary then.” “It was wild that any outlets picked it up at all to be honest, especially when the first few cited the source as being ‘some random people on a Discord server.’ Like, that wouldn’t normally strike you as being remotely trustworthy, right?” James said. James told IGN he has no idea how the screenshots leaked from their Discord server, but the images were soon being picked up by Nintendo fansites as legitimate leaks. You can check out some of the assets in the gallery below. Together, the team created several “leaked” screenshots of a new Flipnote App coming to the Switch, complete with a fake title screen. Other contributors included Calcium who created the artwork, Liss who contributed a fake Japanese translation, and Austin and Rob from Sudomemo, a website dedicated to sharing Flipnote creations long after the service was shuttered officially. James organized the effort and designed fake UI. Art Credit: Calcium UI: James Translation: Liss Mock-ups for the fake Flipnote app for Switch created for April Fools. That spurred the developers to try and flesh out the concept and present fake screenshots of a “leaked” Flipnote Switch app for the community’s annual April Fool’s joke. While the community member in question wasn’t very pleased with the glib response, another developer on the channel was briefly fooled. “Towards the end of March, somebody who apparently wasn’t aware of the joke started to get on our case about rather aggressively, thinking we were intentionally tricking the community.”Īs a response, James created a quick mock-up in Sketch, a design program, and presented it to the community. The community made the idea of a new Flipnote app for the Switch an in-joke, but the impetus to create fake screenshots for April Fools’ didn’t materialize until five days before April 1.
