About the Mario Kart 8 DLC Leaks

As you might know, I'm a hobby editor myself, working for ZeldaEurope. And what I learned in all those years is never trust the big media sites. They are all like sparrows. If one starts to fly, they all do. Even if there's nothing there.

Now, you might have seen the Mario Kart 8 DLC leaks recently, which now got falsely debunked as a fake, because someone on GameFAQs (Nin3DSFan) used the data to make some jokes. But the original data wasn't from this guy, it was from Brawl Custom Music back in November. See this discussion about the original leak, which revealed the following five tracks for the upcoming DLC pack:

• GCN Baby Park
• 3DS Neo Bowser City
• Animal Crossing
• Woods
• Metro

What happened here is the controversy about the choice of Retro tracks. I personally like them, Neo Bowser City is my favorite track from Mario Kart 7 and I would be happy to see it back, while Baby Park is certainly one of the most unique tracks from the series, which should be in there for the fun alone. It could also make a great battle arena.

But not everyone agrees with my opinion, some might find Neo Bowser City to be boring and others might find Baby Park to be a cheap addition, which caused some heavy dispute over whether this leak is real or not. Nin3DSFan (the guy on GameFAQs) now used this to have some fun, you might even call it "trolling". His posts are entertaining, I give him that, and at one point he even "admitted" in an apology that he only made the leaks up. In the very next sentence he makes clear that he's just joking, however, someone NeoGAF completely missed the joke and thought this was proof that the leak is fake. Ironically he even says that people should look more into things, before believing everything, while he didn't even manage finish reading the fake apology. Some moderator on NeoGAF then closed the thread based on this false "proof" and the news sites picked this up, ignoring all the posts about original source (including one of mine).

And this is how modern Nintendo news sites work, ladies and gentleman. Their world view is based on NeoGAF and even there they only dig on the surface. None of these infos were new, these leaks were around since November, some even picked them up a while ago, but sites like NintendoEverything tend to miss these infos, because there are no passionate editors around, who really dig for this stuff. Remember all the pictures of the 8-Bit weapons for Hyrule Warriors from crediar, which he posted before they were officially revealed? This also never made the news, but not because it wasn't "interesting" enough, but because they simply missed it. Probably should have posted it on NeoGAF, I guess.

I'm not saying that the Mario Kart 8 leak will turn out to be real, so don't laugh it me if it's not going to be Neo Bowser City and Baby Park. I'm just saying that they are not yet proven to be fake and after all the accurate Hyrule Warriors DLC leaks I wouldn't wonder if this turned out to be real as well. But I guess we will know for sure in a couple of days.

The moral of this story is: don't trust the big media sites or big media in general. Those are all just sparrows. Don't get me wrong, sites like NintendoEverything are really good when it comes to sharing and collecting official info about Nintendo. I use them on a daily basis. But when you have to do more than just copying info, mistakes like this happen a lot, sadly.

Update: And the leak was real, all tracks are in! Guess that guy on GameFAQs was just lucky... Oh, and there's Cheese Land, that was also on my wish list, because it was quite a thematically unique track from Super Circuit. There's also Ribbon Road, which looks amazing as well. I'm very happy with these! But the biggest surprise was probably getting another F-Zero track, but I guess these games are a good source for some anti-gravity action.