Mario and Link are pretty psyched about Nintendo’s promise to be more “inclusive” in future games. Last night’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver discussed Nintendo’s recent apology for not including gay marriage in the upcoming 3DS game Tomodachi Life.
“We pledge that if we create a next instalment in the Tomodachi series,” Nintendo wrote, “we will strive to design a game-play experience from the ground up that is more inclusive, and better represents all players.”
Oliver’s take is like all of your best/worst fanfiction brought to life. Skip ahead to 1:41 for the interesting parts.
Comments
14 responses to “Nintendo Characters Celebrate Gay Marriage”
Did we REALLY need that top pic! I’m SO outraged! Those blue tiles are TERRIBLE!
It could always be worse!
Rainbow road anyone?
John Oliver’s brilliant. For anyone in to them, his podcast with Andy Mitten called The Bugle is a good dose of weekly satire.
I think a lot of people will become incensed in their search for an Oliver/Mitten podcast. All hail Zaltor the Merciless and fuck you Chris.
do we really need more fuel for the fan fic fire.
Just don’t read it?
Did we really need this? Jeez. GROSS!!! I’m sure if the games looked like this they’d sell like hotcakes. NOT.
This is one of my new favourite shows. John Oliver is hilarious!
Look! Another click bait article!
Hardly clickbait when it’s a company actually changing it’s stance on something poignant.
No. The scren shot is fan made and they just said sorry. Is that new?
Of course the shot is fanmade, it was on John Olivers show. Did you watch the clip!?
I can’t really watch vids on my phone with a shattered screen, sorry. Im wasnt trying to be a jerk, i was just saying the pic was click bait.
I’m sorry weresmurf, but I have to disagree. If anything, it seems like Nintendo are apologising to fan out the flames it unintentionally caused from all this.
To elaborate, Nintendo didn’t anticipate such an uproar from the community when they patched out the gay marriage glitch. I would go as far as to say the thought of adding gay marriage never crossed their minds while the game was in development.
I say this because while the LGBT community is growing in Western countries, it is far less prominent in Japan, with same-sex marriage yet to be legalised, if ever.
These factors, along with the original plan that Tomodachi Life would release in Japan only, can lead one to assume that this would be why Nintendo never considered adding gay marriage.
Furthermore, this “gay marriage” glitch is not quite as simple as the name suggests. It actually used a combination of editing female Miis to resemble males, along with the importation of older Miis from a Wii or the DS prequel.
However, this importation caused an issue which led to save files being corrupted, so Nintendo, once again unaware of the storm they were about to conjure across the net, patched out this bug so as to prevent such an error from happening.
Because of this, along with the general misinterpretation as to why Nintendo did what they did, communities on sites such as Tumblr and other gaming news sites have gone on to assume Nintendo is “sexist” and “not with the times” when in fact, as I stated earlier, it was all a simple misunderstanding.
I would wager that had this entire thing not been blown ridiculously out of proportion, said communities would not buy, play, or even pay attention to Tomodachi (and I have found evidence to support this claim).
I would also like to point out that I am a staunch supporter of same-sex marriage and equal rights to all. But there’s a fine line when it comes to sensible debating, and all these innacurate accusations against Nintendo by these “social justice warriors” have crossed it.
TL;DR,
Nintendo did what they did it to stop the game from breaking. The internet assumed it was out of homophobia, and this led to Nintendo bending over backwards for the incorrectly enraged masses and promising to add gay marriage to the next game.
EDIT: Oops, forgot my source for the patch reasons: http://nintendoeverything.com/why-nintendo-patched-tomodachi-lifes-same-sex-relationships/
Until there is another, you sir are the champion of my internets.
You’ve plainly rationally said the entire events. Not some self righteous partial quote of events to invent an argument.
Well i for one hope they stick to their own Japanese values being LGBT is a privilege of modern society, one that creates less children that won’t be able to support the next generations retirement causing economic destruction.
Yeah but you are a mouth-breathing rube, and no one except Herald Sun phone pollsters gives two shits about your antiquated opinions.
That is actually a decent explanation for why they haven’t put in lgbt stuff, noone has really tried to formulate an explanation before, its all just “OMG NINTENDOH Y U NO SUPPORT US GAY PEOPLES IN YA VIDYA GAMEZ”…
Dude, we have over population, it is not compulsory for straight people to hook up or have kids, the vast majority of people are still straight anyway and gay people happen whether hicks like you want them too or not. I’d rather people like you didn’t have kids anyway.
So your 6 kids are currently studying medicine at Yale?