Nintendo Responds To N-Bomb Furor

Nintendo has issued a statement in response to the discovery of a racial slur in media copies of the DS game Animal Crossing: Wild World, and they are predictably both very regretful and not really responsible.

The uproar began with Stephen Totilo of MTV Multiplayer discovered that the pre-played copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World sent to him by Nintendo featured a sheep named Baabara who welcomed him with the phrase, "How are you, n---a?" and made other conversational use of the word as well. The existence of the n-bomb was quickly verified by Kotaku, and very soon the obvious question was being asked: How could Nintendo let that kind of thing get out in an official PR package?

Nintendo has since issued a statement apologizing for the oversight, as well as subtly shifting the blame onto technology run wild. "Previously played copies of the 2005 DS game Animal Crossing: Wild World were sent to 14 members of the media to demonstrate the ability of players to transfer items to the new Animal Crossing: City Folk for Wii," the statement said. "We regret that an offensive phrase was included without our knowledge via a wireless function that allows user-generated catchphrases to spread virally from one game to the next. This version is limited to 14 copies created for media review purposes only and is not available at retailers. We sincerely apologize for the incident and are working with media who received the game cards to return them to Nintendo immediately."

Many people, here and elsewhere, have questioned what the big deal is, since the phrased isn't actually coded into the game. Obviously I didn't anticipate a need to explain this, but the simple fact is that this isn't your 14-year-old brother training your game to say something stupid; this is Nintendo sending a product to game journalists as part of an official public relations campaign. It has to be held to a higher standard. And when it's not, it reflects extremely poorly on the company and its products.

Source: MTV Multiplayer

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I lol'd.

Message to everyone who received said Animal Crossing cards :

Don't send'em back, send one to me, or keep'em for they're collector.

Or sell'em on eBay, they're quite unique !

It's not as valuable as the copies of Half Life 2: Episode 2 wherein Gordon screams "Die assholes, die!" at the 12th pack of Hunters he comes across.

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree that this is a big issue. First of all, yes, the word is very taboo, but I can't seem to leave my apartment without hearing it three times from my neighbors before I even get to my car. I remember hearing it over 1,000 times in high school during my formative years, and finally I remember playing many video games which actually had it included...*gasp*...intentionally. The fact of the matter is this: it was an accident and an oversight and it went to all of 14 people. It isn't hard coded into the game, and Nintendo simply failed to play through each copy of the game before shipping it out. Mistakes happen. You say it isn't about the word per se, but more about the company holding a "high standard." Well I hope you give them this much flak when they misprint the coloring on Mario's shoes on 8 copies of galaxy, or forget to put in two layers of bubble wrap instead of one in 23 new DS packages.
Also, by creating a hornet's nest around this, all it will do is encourage Nintendo to continue censoring multiplayer communication in their products and limit online abilities even further. This sort of incidence is exactly what they try to avoid when they nerf online connectivity in the first place. Personally, I would like to see them move in the other direction.

KarmicToast:
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree that this is a big issue.

I'll second this. I could name any and all characters in any game like that and no one would care. It's just unfortunate that this happened in a PR thingy. But as long as Nintendo did not actually hardcoded it in, I don't see a problem here.

... via a wireless function that allows user-generated catchphrases to spread virally from one game to the next.

Score one for user-generated content!

Still, not really appropriate for a kiddies game?

Cyclomega:
I lol'd.

Message to everyone who received said Animal Crossing cards :

Don't send'em back, send one to me, or keep'em for they're collector.

Or sell'em on eBay, they're quite unique !

Unfortunately there could be no evidence. Characters on the game share quotes, so one day the sheep could say tht, and the next day she could be using say... The ducks catchphrase. On the flipside however, The whole town could end up using her catchphrase!

I'm sorry but that word ceased to seem offensive to me at all when 90% of "artists" in the Mainstream Rap world started to use it to refer to themselves.

Then again I do live in England, where African Blacks are no longer the main target for racists, so maybe it's still an issue to some....

The wireless thing tells an interesting story. Some intern at Nintendo plays Animal Crossing, Nintendo says they need a save file with a lot of stuff unlocked, the intern volunteers his copy, forgeting some of the colorful language of his townsfolk. When shit starts hitting the fan and his job is in trouble he starts making excuses. "I didn't put that there, it must be because it downloaded it from someone else's copy when I visited their town and I didn't notice because then I turned my system off and never played again." Voila, the intern has plausible deniability and Nintendo can't discipline the friend, who doesn't work for them, so the wireless gets the blame. "Our game is just too unpredictable to monitor the content of," says Nintendo, "It'll never happen again."

I wouldn't find this so interesting except for the need Nintendo has for apologizing for something that seems really trivial to me and the fact that they basically repeated the excuse for individual behavior as a way to absolve a whole company. "Well, that one guy screwed up, it happens to the best of us. Certainly no way we could've evaluated the user content we copied and sent out."

They've completely shot themselves in the foot though if people realize that if the word got in virally that this is decidedly not limited to 14 copies but any copies that it's spread to out in the wild from wherever Nintendo got it in the first place. This is all just so weird.

@cyclomega: Not really. It sounds like the copies in question are the same as any you could buy at a game retailer, except for the save data. It's fairly trivial to make the animals in Animal Crossing say different catch-phrases, so anyone could set up an "animals are racist" copy given a little time.

Ago Iterum:

Unfortunately there could be no evidence. Characters on the game share quotes, so one day the sheep could say tht, and the next day she could be using say... The ducks catchphrase. On the flipside however, The whole town could end up using her catchphrase!

And that would be funny.

Plus it's a clear case of "white boy hypocrisy".

Black people can spam nigga eleven hundred times a sentence, but should one white guy utter it, or a video game character due to leaked user-generated lulz, a shitstorm will unleash...