A Twitter account called WaddleDeeKnows started gaining traction last week, shortly after Nintendo’s latest Direct presentation (named after the ever-present and adorable Kirby enemy). A self-described “industry insider working deep within Nintendo” posted a series of tweets on February 7 with an authentic February 7 time stamp that appeared to reveal details that Nintendo would not officially reveal until the evening of February 9, two days later.
Nintendo “insider” Fooled Thousands
A new Wii Sports and a Super Mario Strikers sequel, Xenoblade 3 specifics, and even “Valve games coming to Switch” were all revealed by WaddleDeeKnows days before their official public announcements.WaddleDeeKnows started tweeting about “a few more leaks for the rest of the year” on the morning of Thursday, February 10 and gained over 2,000 new followers (and countless other watchers) as a result. These tweets included exciting rumours about new Switch ports of Goldeneye and Half-Life 2 as well as “an Encanto game developed by Bandai Namco” that no one had expected to see.
To summarise, many people’s hopes were dashed on Thursday evening when the WaddleDeeKnows account revealed that it was a phoney insider account. According to the newly exposed charlatan, “this account was an experiment to see how easy it is to fake it and make it”. Unfortunately, “I wanted to see how simple this was, and unfortunately, it is.”
A wide net is being cast
Jon Cartwright, the man behind WaddleDeeKnows and the Good Vibes Gaming collective, walked us through the scam in a video posted last Friday. As a cautionary tale, WaddleDeeKnows serves as the latest example of a common Internet scam that can make random users appear clairvoyant in retrospect.
It was WaddleDeeKnows’ liberal use of Twitter’s delete button that proved to be the key to his “insider” knowledge. He started tweeting his predictions for Nintendo Direct announcements as soon as he set up the account on February 7 (and made it private so no one else could see what was going on). These predictions ranged from the logical like a sequel to Super Mario Odyssey with Mario and Peach working together to the outlandish like Luigi’s Mansion 2, Punch-Out!, ARMS, and even Labo.
Cartwright simply deleted dozens of incorrect predictions from his account after the Nintendo Direct presentation ended. After this, there were no more accurate predictions for later followers to find. Because no one sees these tweets, Cartwright said, “I could delete as much as I want and no one would notice.”