Nintendo fans on Reddit were in an uproar last week when a user going by the name “Idriss2Dev” posted the blurry photo below, which allegedly showed a dev kit version of the controller for Nintendo’s upcoming “NX” game console.
Redditors decried the design as “ugly,” “uncomfortable,” and “pretty terrible.” However, other users were quick to point out that the image looked “very fake,” mainly due to the lighting of the screen.
However, less than a week later on Wednesday, a different user posted a new series of photos of the same design, including the second image below. This time the photos were high resolution and the device looked much more real. Many Redditors seemed to be convinced that not only was the device real, but based on clues in the photos, they believed it had been posted by someone at the Ubisoft-owned developer Massive Entertainment‘s headquarters in Sweden.
Still, even those who believed that the image was real were still dismayed by the design (a near-exact match to a Nintendo patent revealed in December), which lacks any physical buttons on the face of the controller.
Much to the relief of most, the poster of the original image left a comment in his thread on Thursday night, linking to a video that showed how he made the digital fake using 3D Studio Max and Adobe Photoshop.
Then this morning the maker of the second set of photos also came clean: his were fake as well. But rather than a fully digital fake, the second fake Nintendo NX controller was a real, physical object that Finnish maker Frank Sandqvist created with a FormLabs Form 2 3D printer and a Trotec laser cutter.
“My brother and I, we run this company where we have a laser cutter and 3D printer, and I thought it would be funny to see how easy it would be to recreate that photoshopped ‘leak’ in real life,” Sandqvist explained in the video. “It turns out, it’s pretty easy.”
Indeed. With the advancement of maker technology, it’s more important than ever to be skeptical about any alleged leak of upcoming hardware, no matter how shiny and real it may appear.
