Nintendo Source Codes Secrets Leaked Online, Game Designers Warned

Nintendo is more inclined to focus on its June Direct preparations but it appears the company now has a serious situation to deal with. Though they have since transitioned to the Nintendo Switch as its main game console offering, a massive leak was reported recently tied up to its old consoles - the Wii and the Nintendo 64.

About 3 GB of files were released at the internet forum 4Chan with the one behind it still at large, Kotaku reported. Among the stuff that was shared appear to include the Wii source code and other detailed information about the console. Aside from that, there were also hardware test demos for the 1996 Nintendo 64 and some internal documents tied to the 2001 GameCube.

“The biggest and craziest thing in this leak is the datasheets, block diagram and Verilog files for every component,” Atheerios, a ResetEra forum user said. “Verilog is a hardware description language; it is used to describe circuits via code, so with this, we can learn how every single piece of the Wii was made.”

These are documents and information that were not supposed to come out - even if the two consoles are over and no longer in use. But the thing here is that designers and programmers now get a better picture of how the games for the said game consoles work. However, using those leaked designs comes with a risk. And if these developers or programmers are not careful, they may just end up facing legal cases from Nintendo's legal group.

Regardless of whether they directly use these files or not, the logic behind the flow and design should help emulators come close to the games played on Wii or the Nintendo 64. And while the leaks already appear to be massive, there is the belief that this is just one small part of bigger caches of proprietary company information. Nintendo has yet to comment on the said leak.

This breach comes not long after Nintendo was reportedly dealing with problems trying to develop upcoming games on time. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the company with work-at-home setups simply not helping. And tied up to that are questions on what to expect on their scheduled June direct event although there are insinuations that it may be delayed.