Gamers Are Going Full Sherlock on Alleged Photos of Nintendo’s New Console

Photos purportedly showing the controller of Nintendo’s next console, codenamed “NX,” have “leaked” onto the internet, and internet supersleuths have been working overtime to determine if they’re legit.

Images surfaced earlier this week, posted by Redditor Perkele37, that were supposedly of the controller for a developer kit of the NX. The controller itself looks like a patent that Nintendo grabbed last year, showing a device with a big screen and no physical buttons.

The folks on Reddit have been hard at work ever since the images were posted, trying both to determine whether they’re the real thing, and where they might have come from. That’s led to dissections of the images showing the controllers. Redditors looked at the keyboard that’s partially in the shot and determined it’s showing the configuration of keys used in Sweden. And then someone compared the tree reflected on the right side of the image to a photo of the building that houses Sweden-based studio Massive, the folks behind Tom Clancy’s The Division.

Redditors say: it’s a match.

So holy crap, could this be the real thing and did some poor fool at Massive leak Nintendo’s developer kit ahead of the company’s official NX announcement, expected later this year? And is said poor fool not long for the game development world, thanks to the Sherlock Holmsian superpowers of a bunch of video game fans with time to kill? Well, as with anything on the internet, the veracity of the claims are in question.

See, just a few days ago, this other image of the purported NX got leaked and picked up by various websites. That image looks kind of, well, fake, though. Lighting in the photo is a little wonky and the picture shown on the screen is from an Unreal Engine 4 demo, which makes it an easy Photoshop. The whole thing is blurry, the connections look bulky and poorly streamlined, there’s no Nintendo branding—it’s all definitely suspect. But as Destructoid pointed out, it’s not easy to say definitively it’s been tampered with; the evidence for or against this leak seems inconclusive.

The new leaks look more trustworthy: The images are very crisp and clear, and therefore seem less likely to have been the result of tampering. But then Nintendo-covering outlet Nintendo Life cited an unnamed source the site deems trustworthy, who said the leaks “aren’t legit.”

Furthermore, you know that tree that supposedly is out front of Massive in Sweden? As the Reddit thread notes, Google Maps says it’s not there anymore.

The plot is thickening pretty goddamn quickly at this point. One thing’s for sure, though: Nobody seems to actually like that leaked controller design. Ball’s in your court, Nintendo