My Uncle Works at Nintendo

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About

My Uncle Works at Nintendo is a facetious statement which is often jokingly used to spread false insider information about Nintendo and its upcoming projects.
People try to get others to believe that they have received insider information from their uncle who supposedly works at the video game company. For example:

"My uncle works at Nintendo and he said Raiden will be a playable character in the next Super Smash Brothers.

The lie is so well known that in internet culture, it has become a joke way for people to signal that any information they're about to say will be false.

Origins

The exact origins of the phrase are unknown, but it is commonly understood to have its roots in the 80s, during the early days of Nintendo. Cabel Sasser, who worked on the indie video game Firewatch, claims to have known about the lie since the 1980s, when information about future video games was not as readily available as it became with the advent of the internet.^[1]

Spread

The "Uncle Who Works at Nintendo" is credited as one of the sources of early video game urban legends, like being able to find Mew under a truck in the first generation Pokémon games, finding the Triforce in Legend of Zelda": Ocarina of Time, unlocking Sonic the Hedgehog and Tails in Super Smash Brothers Melee, seeing Lara Croft nude in Tomb Raider, etc.^[3]^[1]

Online Use

As the internet developed communities devoted to video games, the "Uncle Who Works at Nintendo" was widely recognized as a signal the person citing him was lying. A few Advice Animals were made mocking the idea (shown below).

On June 2nd, 2009, Something Awful posted a satirical article in which they posted a mock interview with a "Guy Whose Uncle Works For Nintendo."^[4] TV Tropes includes "My Uncle Works at Nintendo" in a list of Nintendo memes,^[5] defining it as "The go-to explanation/response for how someone would get insider info on a game, especially if it's obviously fake." On January 7th, 2014, a Tumblr dedicated to joking about fake Nintendo rumors launched called "My Dad Works At Nintendo."^[6]

On October 15th 2014, a text-based horror game called "The Uncle Who Works at Nintendo"^[7] was released.

On March 31st, 2016, Campo Santo^[1] published an article about the phenomenon, along with the story of Cabel Sasser, a real life "Uncle Who Works at Nintendo" (though Sasser works at Panic, not Nintendo). Sasser asked his nephew what would be a fair price for Firewatch, and he said $20. The nephew then posted in the Firewatch forums on Steam that his uncle told him the game would be $20, thus marking one of the first known times when the "Uncle Who Works at Nintendo" story turned out to be true.

In a 2016 post on the LostMediaWiki,^[2] a commenter criticized the sourcing on an article about Pokémon Crystal with:

"Some guy in Japan" isn't a great source. You might as well say "My cousin's uncle's brother who works for Nintendo" like back in the Pokémon days on the playground.