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Huge apparent leak unearths Nintendo's prototype history:
A massive leak of apparent Nintendo source code is giving gamers a rare, unauthorized look at Nintendo's development process dating back to the Super NES era.
The massive trove of files, first posted to 4chan Friday and quickly dubbed the "Gigaleak" by the community, includes compilable code and assets for Super NES, Game Boy, and N64 games in the Mario,Mario Kart, Zelda, F-Zero, and Pokemon series. Hidden among that code is a bevy of pre-release art and sound files that have never seen the light of day, as well as fully playable prototype versions of some games.
Nintendo has not responded to a request for comment, but the sheer size and complexity of the leak points to its authenticity—faking this much data in a believable (and workable) way would just be an incredible amount of work.
[...] Modders and homebrew developers have been digging through the trove of data over the weekend and taking to Twitter and YouTube with their discoveries. Among the most interesting findings:
[...] While many are reveling in a treasure trove of previously unknown historical information contained in the leaks, some are worried over the privacy implications of some internal emails included in the leak, complete with personally identifiable information in some cases. Others are worried about how the revelations will ripple through the industry.
"This Nintendo leak is bad on so many levels," Digital Eclipse developer Mike Mika tweeted. "It hurts them, it hurts fans, and it turns the topic of preservation into a topic of security and tightening the grip on intellectual property regardless of its historical or educational value to history."
(Score: 3, Disagree) by looorg on Tuesday July 28 2020, @11:06AM (6 children)
Mostly made up of really old things that have already been figured out and recreated/emulated/etc. so it won't really do much for the emulation-community, not to mention that if you are developing an emulator this kind of data is toxic as hell since if you look at it or include any part of it you'll get fucked in every possible way by the Nintendo lawyers.
That a lot of development contain a lot of resources that in the end product isn't used, be it graphics or music or levels or some feature shouldn't be that strange. It's more of a curiosity then anything else.
A lot of the source code seems to be made up of and/or available only as object files and not as clean code, you could or might be able to cobble things together with it but it would probably have been preferred if it has not been compiled already.
So something to see here at the same time as nothing to see here, that wasn't already known or could have been figured out or recreated already. But it's interesting to know what Nintendo keeps everything, even unused resources FOREVER. Guess they need it around to preserve their precious Mario-IP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @11:49AM (2 children)
Well, that's certainly better than oops we lost HoMM3 code for its addons.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:49PM (1 child)
I seem to remember something like that happening with either Ultima VII or Ultima Online.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @06:13PM
It used to happen a lot back in the old days. The games themselves weren't expected to have enough shelf life to justify porting or updating them much past release. On top of which, the solutions available for backing up weren't as sophisticated as they are now. The end result is a ton of lost files.
Fortunately, emulation has come a long way and generally does a decent job of running old games, but having the source would be very helpful at times.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday July 28 2020, @12:05PM (2 children)
Object files are NOT source code. In any way, shape or form.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday July 28 2020, @01:18PM (1 child)
> Object files are NOT source code. In any way, shape or form.
I don't think I said that it was. The article claimed source code but I stated that it, or most of it, was, or appear to be, object files. You could always disassemble and decompile them but as noted it won't magically turn it back into the original source code again just as once bread has become toast it can't become bread again. But it could still be tasty.
A question then might be if Nintendo doesn't bother with keeping source code around or if the "leaker" removed the code and just kept the objects as some kind of proof or that Nintendo has just split the repositories and the leak doesn't have full access to everything. Who knows, I don't think I really care all that much about it.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday July 28 2020, @09:46PM
If you could decompile object back to source that easily, we wouldn't have ever cared about the leak, or need worry about source code ever again.
Fundamentally, it's a one-way process - like encryption the effort involved in de-compiling an object file of any significance back to source isn't worth it, and it's often cheaper/quicker/easier to just write the whole thing again from scratch.