It has been a little over eight years since we got our first official look at the Switch. Eight years since we first saw Karen on the rooftop. Eight years since we embraced the thought of playing Skyrim on a plane. Eight years since we wondered why the heck you would take a console on a dog walk.
To mark this anniversary, former Nintendo employees Kit and Krysta have opened up about what went into the making of the now-iconic trailer in the latest episode of their podcast (timestamped above). And yes, it will come as no surprise that there was a certain amount of juicy drama behind the scenes.
Until 2016, Nintendo had followed the same hardware reveal formula as everyone else: a spec-focused E3 presentation all about the facts. However, with Switch, the team wanted to take a different approach, one that showcased the system for its "occasions" above all else.
According to Krysta, "people were not on board" with this new style. Some Nintendo of America employees apparently believed that it was too risky to move away from the spec-first presentation and worried that people would be confused by this initial marketing. "There was a lot of drama," she explains, "there was a lot of headbutting".
This was paired with internal fears about an increased chance of leaks from shooting a live-action trailer. All the Switches used in the commercial lacked the "guts" inside to make them playable, but some still worried that easily overlooked areas (like, let's say, an urban rooftop) posed a risk should anybody nearby have a pair of binoculars to hand.
Obviously, in the end, the fresh style came out on top (as Kit puts it in the latest podcast, "These are the moments where you realise, 'we are a subsidiary of this big company, we're actually not in charge at all'"), but that didn't stop Nintendo from prepping several 'Plan B' options should it be poorly received. One involved Reggie joining Kit and Krysta for a 12-minute video covering some potential console FAQs — a project that was shot and edited together, but never saw the light of day.
While the trailer would, of course, go on to become an iconic (and much memed) part of Nintendo history, the pair still have some gripes with the chirpiness of it all. "I never liked Karen," Krysta confesses, "I would never play on a rooftop". Yeah, fair play, Krysta.
The original trailer has since been removed from the official Nintendo of America YouTube channel, but you can still hang out with the cool hipsters via our archived version. Come on, let's bring on the nostalgia together.