Nintendo made a specific choice regarding Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, that may have angered some fans, but also may have been the right choice for the company.
Wario64 first revealed on Twitter last week that Walmart stopped selling physical copies of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door online, and told customers they would have to go to the store to get a copy. And a few weeks before that, when pre-orders went live, Amazon’s listing for the game was also taken down. So, all Amazon pre-orders were cancelled.
At this point, many fans were rightfully upset. Why did Nintendo pull Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door from sale from these stores? Curiously, the same game is available in other retailers, such as GameStop, Best Buy, Target, and even QVC.
It seems some fans had some theories about it, and one of those fans believe that the theory has just been proven right. YouTuber Austin John Plays made this tweet a few hours ago:
“Nintendo cancelled preorders at major retailers like Amazon and thus Paper Mario TTYD didn’t leak 10-14 days early like most recent Nintendo games.”
True enough, Nintendo games seemed to have been leaking early, not only in the past few months, but in the past few years. Those leaks affected their biggest titles, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Splatoon 3, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The fact that we hadn’t seen any leaks yet seems to corroborate this theory very well.
It also suggests that Nintendo is working on tracking down the people responsible for the leaks, and they believe the leakers are using physical copies, and these specific retailers. We don’t know that much more about this situation, but one can imagine the leakers were using methods that would make it difficult to trace them, such as using payment methods that don’t identify them.
So it’s possible that they found this system that only worked at Amazon, and possibly Walmart. And if one is wondering why leakers would care about a remake of an old game, this isn’t the same thing as the gigaleak. The leakers were likely trying to get a ROM and spread it around before its official release.
If all of this speculation is true, it isn’t likely that Nintendo will ever admit to any of it. We will likely only know when it finally reaches the courts, at which point US laws will require public disclosure at some point in the proceedings. It’s certainly fascinating that even at the cusp of launching a new console, that Nintendo is going this far to try to deter people stealing and leaking their games, even the old games.
