In recent weeks there has been a series of alleged leaks regarding Nintendo-related data. The earliest of this series of leaks was centered around Pokémon, including betas for Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver and data for the English versions of Pokémon Blue and Pokémon Yellow, including source code, object files, and internal communications between Game Freak, Nintendo, and their testing and localization teams. This particular leak appears to be tied to the release of the “SpaceWorld 97” demo of the Japanese version of the Gen II games and the original hacker simply withheld this data until now.
Just over a week ago, the second wave of the leak came out again focusing on the Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver games. The leak allegedly contained multiple early builds for the games including unfinished and unused designs. The leak also allegedly includes source code for the games as well as a Game Boy emulator specifically designed by Nintendo for the purpose of testing the games.
The most recent phase of the leak seems to have been brought up on the GBATemp forums on Friday, May 1 by user Ryccardo. The leak, however, gained more mainstream exposure late on May 2 with a ResetEra thread by user Atheerios that brought it to the attention of other outlets like Nintendo Everything. This leak again contains more Pokémon data, but more interestingly contains an archive of data that is quite possibly the most comprehensive data leak of confidential, proprietary information in the history of gaming. The amount of the alleged data and the nature of said data makes summarizing it in its entirety impossible here, but some highlights include:
- Excel databases with the assigned product code for most hardware models from the NES to the DSi, even including the arcade SNES.
- A full Nintendo 64 SDK.
- 3DS internal-use Pokémon software, including a tournament legality checker, a tournament recording software, and a Mew distribution ROM for the 3DS versions of Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue.
- Massive amounts of data surrounding the GameCube and Wii, including planning documents, APIs, internal software documentation, and a full Wii SDK and source code for its operating system.
This leak does not appear to be new according to those familiar with the leaks and the source. It is believed that this data was actually obtained back in 2018 and withheld over time for slow distribution. It allegedly comes from a server hack related to the company BroadOn which has since become Acer Cloud Technology (or at least a portion of it).
Many posters on both GBATemp and ResetEra are asking what this means for both Nintendo and consumers. The leap that many people make is that this will immediately be incorporated into existing emulation efforts. This seems unlikely for most projects as emulation is already a legally gray area, so most want to distance themselves as much as possible for any official documentation or code in order to avoid accusations of actual theft of code.
As for Nintendo, most of the information that has been made available is for older systems, so the immediate implications for Nintendo may not be too drastic. It is possible that this could somehow impact their long-term plans for revisiting these systems via in-house emulating or remakes. It also opens the possibility that it accelerates the market for third-party hardware manufacturers in the vein of units like the RetroN but for the N64, GameCube, and Wii.
Due to the obvious legal implications of such confidential information, we will not be linking to any site hosting or linking to hosts of said data.
