Nintendo Switch News: More Details on Hidden 'Golf' Game Reveals It's a Tribute to Satoru Iwata
It can now be confirmed that the hidden "Golf" game on Nintendo Switch was tucked into the console as Nintendo's way of continuously honoring their late global president Satoru Iwata.
Iwata was Nintendo's fourth global president and CEO from 2002 until the time of his death in 2015. His contributions to the gaming industry date back to the 1980s and was one of the developers who worked on the "Golf" game for Nintendo Entertainment System.
Since the news emerged that data miners found a secret NES emulator for the "Golf" game within the Nintendo Switch, there were some doubts because there was initially no provided demo or set of instructions for how an average gamer could access it.
However, that changed recently when a five-minute instructional video was uploaded on YouTube by user fire3element. It revealed how the NES emulator for "Golf" was activated on the Switch.
The video provided several proofs that everything was put in place to pay tribute to Iwata. It showed that the console's system date and time must be set to July 11 – Iwata's date of passing. After doing so, players should copy Iwata's hand gestures when he did a presentation on Nintendo Direct back in 2014 using the Switch's motion controls.
Iwata's hand gestures when he mentioned the phrase "to you" (as seen on the Nintendo Direct 2014 video) should be performed several times until a voice prompt says "success." The screen will immediately turn into the main menu of the 1984 "Golf" game.
This information has all been confirmed by Yellows8 through a page in the Nintendo Switch wiki site called SwitchBrew.
The speculations of a hidden NES emulator and "Golf" game on the Nintendo Switch dates back to July when a user shared on GBATemp a "really odd experience." At the time, the user suddenly found the "Golf" emulator working on his Switch console and was able to play the game.
The NES emulator is named "Flog" and is embedded in the main binary. It features three game modes: the single-player and two types of two-player modes, as shown on SwitchBrew.