Nintendo Sharing Splatoon & Zelda Concerts Online On YouTube

Nintendo has revealed they are releasing two of their big concerts for fans to watch for free, on YouTube.

On the official Nintendo Twitter account, they shared this message:

“Mark your calendars for this special The Legend of #Zelda Orchestra Concert!

Visit our official YouTube channel on 2/9 to watch the full, pre-recorded performance: ninten.do/6005iQryH”

Meanwhile, the North American Splatoon Twitter account had this message:

“SRL Stage Management here! The show must go on! The Splatoon 3 Deep Cut concert previously scheduled for Nintendo Live 2024 TOKYO will be held on February 10.

It’ll be posted on Nintendo’s official YouTube channel so you can watch at home!”

Nintendo has of course released celebratory concerts of their video games before, and this will only be the latest for both The Legend of Zelda and Splatoon, two of the company’s current pillars. But there’s a big reason these upcoming releases are interesting.

Nintendo cancelled a Nintendo Live event planned for this week, and a Splatoon esports event in December, as we had reported back in November.  Unfortunately, these events were cancelled because Nintendo received threats targeting their employees at that time. They had chosen to prioritize the safety of their people at that time.

As explained by GoNintendo, both of these concerts were supposed to be part of the January Nintendo Live event. When one considers the cost it made to produce these concerts, especially the AR stuff used for Splatoon’s events, that’s a lot of money that could have been going nowhere.

Now, a few months later, Nintendo is looking at these concerts that should have been released at this point, and what they were going to do with them. Unfortunately, we don’t know the status of those threats targeting Nintendo’s employees, including if the threats had been addressed or if this is something the company is still being careful about.

Nintendo’s decision to just share the concerts for free is, of course, a general good for everyone. The fans can get to enjoy this high quality content that celebrates their favorite games. But we can’t help but wonder about the dark undercurrent behind this news; that Nintendo didn’t schedule new live events to show them, and doesn’t seem to have planned any Nintendo Live events in the near future.

At least, this much is speculation on our end so we will leave it at that. Nintendo definitely wants to get this stuff out if they are on the road to launching a new console in the near future.