Images of “Super Donkey”, a never-before-seen prototype included in Nintendo’s recent “Gigaleak”.
A massive leak of Nintendo’s apparent source code is giving gamers a rare and unauthorized look at Nintendo’s development process dating back to the Super NES era.
The massive archive treasure, first released on 4chan on Friday and quickly dubbed “Gigaleak” by the community, includes compilable code and assets for the Super NES, Game Boy, and N64 games on the Mario Mario Kart, Zelda, F-zeroand Pokemon Serie. Hidden within that code are a plethora of pre-release sound and art files that have never seen the light of day, as well as fully playable prototype versions of some games.
Nintendo has not responded to a request for comment, but the sheer size and complexity of the leak point to its authenticity: falsifying this amount of data in a credible (and viable) way would be an incredible amount of work. Star fox Developer Dylan Cuthbert has also publicly confirmed the authenticity of an early Star fox 2 CAD tool included in the leak. And many of the assets in the leak also match images previously seen in magazine previews, suggesting authenticity or an incredible level of attention to detail between leaks.
Modders and homebrew developers have been researching the data hoard over the weekend and leading Twitter and YouTube with their discoveries. Among the most interesting findings:
This new leak comes months after a separate dump of internal Nintendo data that included source code for various Nintendo console operating systems, as well as internal Powerpoint presentations discussing various features of those consoles.
While many revel in a treasure trove of previously unknown historical information contained in the leaks, some are concerned about the privacy implications of some internal emails included in the leak, along with personally identifiable information in some cases. Others are concerned about how the disclosures will affect the industry.
“This Nintendo leak is bad on many levels,” Digital Eclipse developer Mike Mika tweeted. “It hurts, it hurts fans, and it turns the preservation issue into a security issue and tightens control over intellectual property, regardless of its historical or educational value to history.”
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