Nintendo's internal NX logo leaks for first time
Switch out.
Remember the codename Nintendo "NX"? Before the Switch's official unveiling, these two letters were how Nintendo referred to its NeXt-generation console.
The NX name was used by Nintendo to refer to the Switch both internally and publicly, as the company began to drum up excitement for the Switch's unveiling. (And because in the Wii U era, there wasn't much else to get excited about.)
But here's one thing we never saw publicly: Nintendo's own internal NX logo used in early versions of games destined for the Switch.
An animated NX logo has been leaked online, pulled from the files of an early in-development copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
Being a pretty straightforward port of a Wii U game, there's little else in the files of interest - it is very much just the Wii U game ported over to the NX, sorry, Switch hardware.
If you fancy watching 10 minutes of this early build, that's on YouTube (for now):
So, this is the first time we have seen this NX logo. Was this always intended as a placeholder? Did Nintendo ever consider keeping the NX name? For now, all we can do is gaze into its rather eye-like animation and wonder.
Nintendo fans will know that NX is the latest in a long line of development codenames used within Nintendo to refer to upcoming hardware launches. The GameCube was codenamed Dolphin, Wii U was Project Cafe, while the DS was nicknamed Nitro. Perhaps most famous of all was the Wii, which was discussed publicly for several years using the codename Revolution.