Nintendo is announcing a new game console this year to replace its unpopular Wii U home system. The new console is codenamed "NX", and very little information about it is publicly available.
On Monday, a blurry image of a bizarre looking game console controller popped up on Reddit. Its poster claimed it to be a Nintendo NX controller.
To us, this looked pretty fake.
Our headline in writing about the supposed leak was, "This may be the controller for Nintendo's next game console (but probably isn't)". The image on the controller is a still from an old tech demo, and the controller itself looks ridiculous. Nintendo is known for carving its own path, but let's not get too crazy.
But when three much sharper photos showed up on Wednesday — again on Reddit, this time from a different user, all claiming to be photos of the Nintendo NX controller — we were, begrudgingly, far more convinced.
These guys look like the real deal:
And:
Our headline on Wednesday was far more direct: "This is almost certainly Nintendo's next game console".
As it turns out, however, that first image was just a very, very detailed hoax. Here's the 3D modeling software used to create the first image, in a screenshot taken from a video released on YouTube on March 24:
That first image, apparently, was a fake.
But what about the other three? It's totally unclear. They all look very legit, and they line up with a patent filed by Nintendo in June 2015 for a device that looks stunningly similar to what's depicted in the second batch of three photos:
The person claiming to have made the first image has some convincing proof. That person doesn't mention the other three images, though the controllers shown in both look near-identical.
Adding fuel to the "all of this is one elaborate hoax" argument is these renders from the DeviantArt page of the person responsible for the faked first photo — they really hammer home the point that this could all just be one very detailed hoax:
Nintendo for its part has said next to nothing when asked for comment. "We have nothing to announce on this topic," the company told gaming site Kotaku.
The full video breaking down the faked original image is right here:
And no, we seriously don't know if these are all fake images from the same person or what. The video's creator could not be reached by time of publishing.
