Nintendo has been around for a very long time—over 100 years, in fact. But more relevantly, they’ve been in the video game business for nearly four decades now, and in that time, they have built a reputation for making quality games as well as some of the best-loved and highest-selling consoles of all time. There is a certain amount of confidence that consumers have when they buy something with the Nintendo name on it, having earned a level of trust that most game companies—and companies in general—can only dream of having. Especially if that company is named EA.
That isn’t to say that Nintendo has never made any mistakes, or done things to shake its fans’ trust. As a matter of fact, if we really sit back and think about it, we should probably be a little more weary of Nintendo than we are. It’s not that Nintendo has a worse history of broken promises and deliberate marketing misdirection than other companies, because they don’t. What makes these examples of Nintendo doing things to rattle our trust so much worse is that so many of us grew up playing Nintendo games, and therefore the company deceiving us at such a young age might have led to us growing up to be the jaded cynics that we’ve all become.
Of course, if you’re one of those people who thinks Nintendo hasn’t earned all the acclaim and accolades they’ve been showered with over the years, then all this list is going to do is reaffirm why Nintendo isn’t to be trusted in the first place.
25 Final Fantasy 6.5
For its first decade, Final Fantasy was linked to Nintendo as just about all of the games were released exclusively to Nintendo platforms.
There was little reason to doubt that Final Fantasy would continue its love affair with Nintendo going into the N64 era.
Screenshots of what was assumed to be “Final Fantasy 64” made the rounds in the press, using the assets of Final Fantasy VI and putting them into a 3D world. Needless to say, Final Fantasy never came to the N64, and anyone who bought that system in anticipation for the franchise’s next-gen debut were extremely disappointed.
24 Where’s The Duck?
Something that made a lot of games of NES era especially challenging was that games didn’t always do the best job at explaining themselves, instead choosing to let players find their way using trial-and-error and blind exploration.
Still, there is a difference between a game being vague and outright lying to you. And the latter is exactly what happened with Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, which contained NPCs that would literally give you false information. One infamous example is a reference to a “Graveyard duck” of which one doesn’t exist, nor does crouching in the graveyard yield any results.
23 Hats Off To Toad
There are a lot of weird mysteries within the world of the Super Mario games. Is Mario and Luigi’s last name “Mario?” And if Yoshi is male, how can he lay eggs?
The question of whether Toad has a mushroom HEAD or a mushroom HAT, however, is a whole different story.
It completely changes the nature of the character(s), and whether they are truly “mushroom people” or not. The late-80s Super Mario Bros. cartoon clearly decided that Toad is just wearing a mushroom hat, but Nintendo later debunked this and confirmed that Toad actually has a mushroom for a head.
22 The Wind Faker
Shortly after Gamecube was announced, we got a first look at what was to be the true “next-gen” follow up to Ocarina of Time, showing an amazing-looking battle between a gritty-looking Ganon and a mature, adult Link.
Fast forward a few years, and Nintendo reveals what Zelda for Gamecube actually ended up being—and it wasn’t that.
While Wind Waker has since gone on to be considered one of the best entries in the franchise’s history, there is no denying how disappointed the world was to see that it was nothing like the darker, more realistic Link we were promised.
21 Super Ultra Turbo Hyper Edition
In arcades, the many Street Fighter II revisions were no big deal—one day you’re pumping quarters into Street Fighter II, and the next, Street Fighter II’: Champion Edition. No harm, no foul.
But when they are spaced out across multiple, full-priced home games, it’s not so amusing anymore. Capcom was likely planning to later bring the superior SFII revisions to the SNES when they put out a port of vanilla SFII, but they did that first anyway—and millions of people soon found their $70+ game basically obsolete only a year after buying it.
20 Virtual Insanity
In the mid-90s, the world experienced its first VR obsession—which quickly faded when everyone realized that the technology was still far too primitive and expensive.
This didn’t stop Nintendo from trying to cash in on VR mania, releasing what remains their biggest blunder: the Virtual Boy. Promising an immersive, cutting-edge 3D experience, what they actually delivered was a headset that wasn’t worn but instead had to be mounted on a table for gamers to stick their face into and gave almost everyone headaches. To this day, Nintendo still barely acknowledges the thing even existed.
19 Seal Of Inequality
It was a noble promise: a “Nintendo Seal of Quality,” marking games that supposedly passed the company’s strict guidelines and extremely high standards. The mission statement behind the seal read, in part, that it marked games that met their “standards of excellence in workmanship, reliability, and most of all, entertainment value.”
That last bit is important when you consider how much unmitigated garbage (see above) was released for the NES that carried this “quality” seal. It quickly became apparent that all the seal really ensured was that, at minimum, the game would turn on and basically just “work.”
18 There Will Be…Sweat?
When Mortal Kombat took arcades by storm in 1992, it was primarily for two reasons: the game’s “digitized” graphics, and the buckets of red stuff that was unlike anything of its era.
We probably shouldn’t have expected Mortal Kombat for SNES to be uncensored, but we also didn’t think they’d bother unless it was.
Imagine the disappointment of millions of SNES-owning Mortal Kombat fans when they brought the game home and discovered that, not only were the fatalities made G-rated, but attacks resulted in fountains of clear liquid that we could only assume was meant to be sweat.
17 Conker’s Good Fur Day
Conker first headlined his own adventure in a Game Boy title called Conker’s Pocket Tales. It was very much in line with Rare’s tradition of family-friendly platformers starring cuddly mascots: Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie, and so on.
Conker’s Twelve Tales for N64 was to follow in that line, but Rare suddenly took a creative left turn and instead made the game M-rated. It was a disappointment to Rare’s young fans who suddenly couldn’t play their latest game—and a shock to parents who bought the game not knowing that it starred a drinking, smoking, womanizing squirrel with a violent temper.
16 A Tale Of Two Mario 2s
Few game sequels have ever been as anticipated as Super Mario Bros. 2, which hit North America in 1988. We didn’t really question why it was so different than the original, since there was already precedence for that back then (see: Zelda II).
Then Super Mario All-Stars hit—along with “The Lost Levels”—that shook up everything we thought we knew about Mario sequels.
As it turned out, our “Super Mario Bros. 2” was actually an altered version of a game called Doki Doki Panic, with Japan getting a completely different Mario sequel that hadn’t come to the West.
15 What’s Under That Suit?
One of gaming’s longest-running franchises is led by one of gaming’s best-loved characters who just happens to be a woman: Samus Aran. Samus’ gender is almost never the focal point of her character, and she’s spent most of her adventures in gender-nonspecific space armor.
In one of the most surprising twists in gaming history, Samus was shockingly revealed to be a woman at the end of the first game. But rather than trying to just be vague about her gender beforehand, Nintendo outright lied about it—referring to Samus as “him” multiple times in Metroid’s North American manual.
14 The Fourth Wall Is Closing In
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem for the GameCube has a “sanity meter” which slowly fills as various things happen to you in the game. Maxing it out causes your character’s grasp on reality to slip—which literally affects your sanity as well.
Some of the “sanity effects” are fairly easy to suss out and reside entirely within the game world, such as eerie sound cues and the like. But others completely smash the fourth wall and trick you into believing all kinds of things—the worst of which is that the game is glitching and is erasing your entire memory card!
13 Assault From A Battery
Almost very video game that has been made in the last couple of decades has some sort of save component, but most early video games needed to be beaten in a single sitting—or by leaving your NES on all night.
However, some games were created with a built-in battery that would let you save your progress even when you turned off the game. The problem is that the batteries were extremely unreliable, and there was always a moment when you fired up Zelda and had to brace yourself for the possibility of seeing that dreaded empty file select menu.
12 Crush’n Expectations
In 1994, Killer Instinct and Cruis’n USA entered arcades and were advertised as a preview for what the upcoming Nintendo 64 was going to be capable of.
There was just one problem: Neither game actually ran on N64 hardware, but instead, custom boards by Midway and Rare.
It turned out that it was basically false advertising to claim that either game ran on the same hardware that would power the N64, and that became all-too-apparent when those games—especially Cruis’n—came to N64 and were greatly inferior to the arcade originals.
11 Final Fantasy 2… Or So
The original Final Fantasy for NES was a modest hit in the U.S., enough to ensure that its follow-up would also be localized. Several years later, its direct sequel—Final Fantasy II would come to the SNES, later followed by Final Fantasy III, and then… Final Fantasy VII? Uh, what?
It turns out we were lied to about what we thought was Final Fantasy II. In reality, it was actually Final Fantasy IV, with the two installments in between skipping a Western release. Our Final Fantasy III was also incorrectly named, actually being the sixth entry.
10 Never Judge An NES Game By Its Cover
In the 80s, vague collections of pixels had to be mentally transformed into the grand adventures they were advertised to be. It wasn’t necessarily deceitful on the developers’ part—they were just doing the best that they could with the limited tech of the time.
The marketing departments of that era, on the other hand, actively tried to trick us at every turn.
A frequently-pointed-to example of this is the NES adaptation of Rambo, which is not only a pretty unremarkable game but also one that is not at all like the incredibly impressive cover photo led us to believe.
9 The Bird
If the idea of a pixelated bat or bird doesn’t immediately make you curl up into a fetal position, then you haven’t played many NES games.
In particular, you’ve never played Ninja Gaiden, which had birds that literally waited until you were right in the middle of a jump to swoop down and take you out. And don’t think you could just make the bird run its course and then proceed safely, because that bird would respawn infinitely, waiting to get you each time you were airborne. Why did game developers hate us back then?
8 Earthbound For Disappointment
While Earthbound—or Mother 2 in Japan—feels like a universally-beloved classic, it actually wasn’t a super huge seller in North America when it was originally released.
Still, for a time, it seemed as though the next Mother game was going to be localized for the U.S. under the assumed title of Earthbound 64. Not only did that never see the light of day, but it eventually morphed into Mother 3 for Game Boy Advance years later—released in Japan only. So that is two versions of the third Mother game that we were teased with and never got.
7 Something Is Wrong
It’s easy to miss given the speed by which the animation plays out, but if you look closely enough, you will see that Mario is punching Yoshi in the back of the head to get him to stick his tongue out in Super Mario World.
Shockingly, that’s not even the worst thing Mario does to Yoshi.
Riding Yoshi offers the ability to jump off of him in order to extend the height of Mario’s leap. That’s all well and good, except that Mario thinks nothing of doing that even if he’s over a chasm at the time. RIP Yoshi(s).
6 Fool Me Once (A Year)
In the days of gaming magazines, it was a lot easier to prank gamers because they received the “April issue” of a magazine sometime in March and wouldn’t be thinking to be on the lookout for April Fool’s tricks.
Electronic Gaming Monthly’s most legendary prank was revealing the supposed secret SFII character named “Sheng Long.” Next to a very convincing screenshot that allegedly showed the hidden character were detailed instructions on how to unlock him—and gamers across the country probably spent literally hundreds of cumulative hours as they tried in futility to get the trick to work.
