Media

Nintendo Sends Game to Journos With Racial Epithet Surprise

A copy of DS title Animal Crossing Wild World sent out to media yesterday by Nintendo came loaded with most of the game’s secrets unlocked, it also included a nasty surprise.


When you come upon Baabara, the town’s resident sheep, you’re greeted with a racial epithet. The word is used repeatedly in your conversation with the sheep.

“I almost forgot about you, N—-a” “So got any juicy gossip for me, N—-a?” “Just thinking about it gets me all excited, N—-a.”

The word, written with a tilda over the N and an accent over the A, apparently popped up in the game because the person who was playing it, most likely a Nintendo employee, customised the greeting of the critter to include the word. One of the draws of the original DS title was that the text speech of the game’s inhabitants can be customised.

The sheep was first discovered by MTV’s Stephen Totilo, who reported on it over on Multiplayer. I was able to track the sheep down on the version sent me by Nintendo and verified that she’s just as mouthy in my version.

It appears that Nintendo copied the save for the game to multiple copies of Wild Word and then sent it out to game writers. The copy came with a letter explaining that content had been unlocked so writers could check out how moving stuff from the DS Animal Crossing title to the recently released Wii version worked.

We’ve contacted Nintendo for comment and will update when they reply.

Nintendo Plays a Game for Me, Includes Slur [Multiplayer]

Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)

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  • panfriedcharlie

    @Morgan: My guess it was a copy used for internal testing by the localization team. Even more interesting -- maybe it was from focus group testing or even a second-hand copy from a used game store.

    panfriedcharlie

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    Sorry, why is this word offensive again? I thought the "-er" version was the offensive one.

    I hear the "-a" version all the time in movies, music, and television.

    TRT-X

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    Honestly, I think the spelling is going to save them a ton of grief, though certainly not all of it. If it had ended in -er, there would be some serious hell to pay.

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