It was too good to be true, the NX news which we reported on last week has been exposed as fake. The images which were first revealed in this reddit post have been revealed to be fake. Their creator took to youtube to discuss how he managed to create the 3D printed “prototype” In the video which is right after the jump you can see his whole design process and how he took the current bevy of rumors and synthesized them in to the “leaked prototype”
Props to the maker, I was completely fooled. Neogaff, reddit, and even major news outlets like Game Spot and Kotaku were taken in as well. Personally I am surprised to find that this is a hoax, so well did it seem to integrate with the design and patent documentation that we have seen in the past, but the evidence is irrefutable.
In the post Frank Sandqvist, who founded laser-engraving company CNC Design, says “I’m sorry if I got people’s hopes up, but it seems most people were against this kind of design, so maybe it’s a relief to hear that it’s fake,” Sandqvist explains. I thought it would be funny to see how easy it would be to recreate that Photoshopped leak in real life–it turns out, it’s pretty easy.”
So if you dont want to watch the whole video that’s basically the gist of it. The prototype is 3d printed, and painted to appear as real as possible. The video goes in to quite a bit of technical detail on how and what materials, and its actually pretty interesting to watch if you have the spare time. In case you want to know what it might look like to play say a Zelda game on a controller like this one with no physical buttons beyond the two “nibs” vine user Tim Aza has made a mock up of what you might end up seeing. Looks pretty good if you ask me.
https://vine.co/v/ipgFFbXMQAU
This is the second fake Nintendo related report just this week, with a story also making the rounds that Nintendo would be reducing or even canceling the production of their current system the Wii U well before what most people predicted would be its end of life. Between these two things the internet seems to have it out for Nintendo.