Hidden Switch game is actually a tribute to former Nintendo president [Updated]

This weekend, Switch owners learned their consoles are apparently holding a hidden copy of the NES game Golf, along with a built-in NES emulator designed to run it. But Switch hacker yellows8 and others who have been able to run that emulator say they've only been able to do so via "unofficial" methods that let them run jailbroken Switch binaries independently.

Now that the emulator is widely known to exist, a few diehards and hackers are engaged in an obsessive quest to discover if there's an "official" way to launch that emulator on stock hardware. While that quest hasn't borne fruit yet (Update: now it has; see more details at the bottom of this piece), the search itself is a fascinating look into the subculture of console hacking and the fast-moving world of rumor and conspiracy theory that often surrounds it.

The Setery mystery

Surprisingly enough, yellows8 probably wasn't the first person to launch NES Golf on the Switch. That title likely goes to Setery, a user on the GBATemp console hacking forums who posted about the game mysteriously appearing on his system back on July 22. As Setery tells it:

I had this really odd experience with my switch that when I had left and returned to it, NES Golf was on my screen. I played it and it played normally, but it was night time for me so I wasn't thinking about the importance of this.

Plenty of people in the forums were skeptical of Setery's story initially, especially since he says he forgot to record any photo or video evidence back in July ("I totally blame myself for not recording any of it" he wrote). With yellows8 corroborating Golf's existence on the Switch this weekend, though, Setery's old post seems to have the retroactive proof it needs.

Then again, Setery could have just made a lucky guess. The existence of the "flog" emulator buried in the Switch's code was known in hacking circles well before Setery's post. 3DS and Switch hacker SciresM noted back on July 7 that the flog emulator's file system includes an empty file called "AtLeastOneFile," for instance. Yellows8 also posted about the flog app on July 22, noting that it was associated with "titleID(nes-emu)." Maybe Setery just noticed that "flog" was "Golf" backwards and threw up the hoax post in case it ended up paying off.

Off to a confused start

In any case, Setery's post convinced many that there was a built-in way to launch Golf without having to resort to more unofficial methods of memory access. Setery's thread about his early "Golf" experience has become a ground zero for people hunting for that Easter egg. Fellow GBATemp forum-goers started pestering Setery for all the details he could remember from the spontaneous Golf appearance—Breath of the Wild was in the console slot, the console was docked to the TV, and the Joy-Cons were in the included Controller grip, etc. Setery even posted all of his system settings in case they provided a clue to how to unlock the game.

As the GBATemp thread expanded, the shaky speculation on possible unlock methods ranged far and wide. One person wondered if "battery percentages could have anything to do with it." Another theorized that an "overheated" system could access areas of RAM at otherwise disallowed addresses, using examples of strange behavior in Splatoon 2 as "evidence."

Some suggested the system's date or time had to be set specifically with a reference to the NES' launch date, for some reason. Others surmised you had to be on the Switch's "News" screen to get the game to launch, though it's unclear why or how this theory developed.

Some forum-goers even started seeing what they thought were hidden button patterns in split-second system animations. Could these possibly be a hint at a button combination needed to unlock the emulator? Forum-goers took to analyzing video frame by frame to decipher this "clue," which seems to have gone nowhere.

Other GBATemp posters were dismissive of all this guesswork: "Perhaps you were using it on a very sunny day, curtains open, and a disturbance in the Van Allen belt together with an unexpected solar flare allowed an excess of cosmic rays to corrupt some RAM location in your Switch," user salkwalvein wrote sarcastically. "That would be difficult to replicate, but you could ask NASA to take it in a trip to outer space and test if that triggers the game."

The secret motion

Following that mostly baseless speculation, a few hackers claim to be narrowing in on the unlock method by disassembling the actual "flog" binary found on the Switch. Console hacker Plutoo was the first to comment on what he found: "To trigger golf you need to set system date to 11th July (date when Iwata passed) then do a joycon-motion (probably a golf swing?)," he wrote on Twitter. "The required joycon motion is approx 1.5 seconds long. Not sure which screen you have to be on. Haven't been able to trigger anything myself."

Bringing the death day of Nintendo's well-respected former president into the unlock method might seem morbid, but it could be plausible for an Easter egg that was intended only to be used respectfully by Nintendo staff. The July 11 date requirement also conflicts with Setery's story of the mysterious Golf appearance, which he recalls happening on July 19.

Others in the hacking community have confirmed the basic thrust of Plutoo's supposed method but differ on the details. Vulnerability researcher Mike Heskin says the unlock requires the July 11 date setting but adds that players need to have a specific region/language setting and "hold down the X button" while doing the unknown Joy-Con motion. Yellows8, though, says holding buttons shouldn't matter and adds that there are "other" requirements that he hasn't disclosed. "It's basically rotating joy-cons certain way," he writes.

Despite these outlines, none of the hackers have been able to trigger the emulator's launch as of yet (though yellows8 says he's "so close"). That hasn't stopped users on GBATemp and Twitter from writing about all the time they've wasted basically trying random Joy-Con motions to unlock the game.

"Can't believe I just spent 10 minutes trying golf motions... like a madman on different screens," one user wrote. "I've been swinging my arms at the job and my partners laughed at me," another wrote. "And later they helped me."

Others have tried holding the Joy-Con in a respectful semi-bow, as Iwata made famous during his Nintendo Direct appearances, to no avail. Plutoo joked on Twitter about having "given 100 people their daily exercise" by making them test random Joy-Con motions.

This might seem like an extreme amount of effort to put into figuring out how to play a decades-old golf game. But it's the search for hidden knowledge, more than the prize at the end of the tunnel, that drives this quest. And Nintendo has seemingly encouraged these kinds of searches in the recent past, hiding messages in the Switch Pro controller and the source code of the NES Classic.

The momentum behind the "flog" search is the same one that drove players to find Easter eggs in Punch-Out!! and Mortal Kombat decades after their release. It's the same compulsion that drives gamers to distraction looking for a way to revive Aeris in Final Fantasy VII or searching for Luigi in Super Mario 64. While those quests have been confirmed to be urban legends, though, the path to unlocking the Switch's NES emulator seems much more likely to bear fruit soon.

[Update, 7:06 p.m.: On Tuesday, yellows8 updated the Switchbrew wiki with purported details of the "official" emulator unlocking method. According to yellows8, the method is designed to only work one day a year—July 11, the day Satoru Iwata died—in a way that seems hard for most Switch owners to get around.

As yellows8 writes: "The loaded date originates from network-time-sync'd time, regardless of whether the user has it enabled or not. When the system was never connected to the Internet, it comes from the user-specified date instead. This is loaded from the time service-cmds, with the actual time-sync being handled by NIM."

In other words, if your system has ever been connected to the Internet, the "flog" emulator will know the real date and ignore any manual clock change to July 11. You can only cheat and reset the system date manually if you have a fresh system that has never done an Internet time check (or, possibly, if the Switch's internal clock battery is disabled or dies). For those with a clean, never-Internet-connected system, though, some fresh video evidence has emerged.

This means the quest to unlock Switch Golf might be effectively over for the vast majority of Switch systems until July 11 rolls around again. That said, it's heartening that yellows8 says the "hidden motion" to unlock the game seems to match Iwata's signature "Direct" hand motion, as some had previously guessed. The launcher also plays a Japanese voice clip of Iwata taken from a Nintendo Direct presentation. What a sweet, hidden tribute to a key figure in Nintendo's history.]