Remember when Nintendo posted a photo of someone in a Mario dress looking creepily behind a curtain?
The now-iconic symbol, posted by Nintendo of the US on Twitter in October 2016 to promote the upcoming Nintendo Switch expo, immediately became a meme and was reposted everywhere, even a few times. , the pages of this same website online.
But what was the story behind that image? Where did it come from and why was it so unusual? Well, former Nintendo employee Package Ellis and Krysta Yang have now mentioned the incident on their podcast (thanks, Nintendo Moment), and it all sounds as last-minute as it sounds.
“This was very controversial,” Yang explained. “The person who had this concept used to be the previous head of social media. This person commissioned a photo shoot for the character dressed as Mario inside the workplace to walk around… they mainly staged the character dressed as Mario walking behind the curtain and making the object.
“It actually caused some concern because of course Nintendo doesn’t want No managing people’s expectations and this was too much in the zone of speculation: what could it be? [Is] Is it too provocative for something as big as a console reveal? So it didn’t go very well. Then, of course, it fell into oblivion and people were a little upset about it, honestly.”
Ellis said the image alone was important, as there were hidden replacement images provided by Nintendo for that particular marketing issue, something that had left his group’s social media head in a bind.
“Here’s the thing with these big “Beats and moments like this,” Ellis said. “You always need more assets than you think. And in this case, obviously there was a deny resource that matched this information and no one wanted to post a tweet that had the deny symbol. So it’s like, clearly, what can we do ?
“There’s always a spreadsheet that says, here’s every asset we need, every size, every profit. And I think if that’s the case, they should have ignored it, because why, If not, would they be another way? Taking a last-second photo of Mario in the shower, you know?
“Spying on Tom Mario in the shower,” Yang interjected.
“This time they will be in charge,” Ellis concluded. “It won’t happen again.”
Arms crossed for Birdo behind a shower curtain for the Transfer 2 exhibition?
