It is well known that Nintendo is one of the companies that cares most about keeping its secrets. Therefore, when a company leak not only appears, but ends up being real, we know that we are facing a special moment.
That’s what happened in 2017. in the run-up to E3 that year, when a user on Reddit uploaded an image, assuring that Nintendo was going to announce a new Yoshi game that year, attaching an image that corroborated his speech.
The photo in the era of Photoshop could mean nothing, but sure enough, that year Yoshi appeared as one of the releases that the company was preparing for the Switch. How did this happen?
Thanks to the site 404 Media, we were finally able to find out what happened, since they obtained a file with reports of cases of potential violations of security policies committed within Google between 2012 and 2018, and the Nintendo leak was one of the topics mentioned.
The document indicates that a Google employee reported the situation for investigation, since the URL “admin.youtube.com” appeared in the image shared by Reddit. reserved for site employees onlyand after an investigation the case was concluded.
A contractor, who worked for the company on a temporary basis, He entered the Nintendo profile using the administrator credentials to be able to see the videos that the company had already uploaded but private, after which he was able to find the Yoshi trailer that the company was planning to release later. The employee found this video, downloaded it, and then shared the information with a friend, who was the one who uploaded the photo to Reddit. Curiously, after the investigation it was determined to have been an unintentional failure.
Beyond the anecdote, it is curious to now learn about the power that some users within the Google company could have, at least until 2018, and although this example affected Nintendo, andThere are other cases revealed by the report where more serious leaks appearsuch as the existence of a file with geolocated car license plates thanks to Street View, an error that allowed thousands of hours of children’s voices to be recorded and YouTube making video recommendations based on the history that the user had already deleted.
