Nintendo struggles to contain massive Smash Bros. Ultimate leaks

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Photograph from the convention floor of PAX West.

Enlarge / A massive Smash Bros. mural from a trade show.

We’re still two weeks away from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate‘s official December 7 release, but Nintendo is already struggling to squash holiday weekend leaks of everything from the game’s animated cut scenes and hidden content to its massive, remix-filled soundtrack.

The earliest evidence of the game’s availability “in the wild” dates back to a Wednesday post on 4chan showing an image of the game’s purported retail packaging. In the following days, further online reports suggested that the game was being sold early and relatively widely at certain Mexican retailers.

From there, it was only a short matter of time before pirated versions of the game’s data were leaking on to the darker corners of the Internet (thanks in large part to the unpatchable Switch hacking method published earlier this year). That in turn led to streamers showing off spoiler-filled demonstrations of the still-unreleased game on Twitch and YouTube. Nintendo has been working to take down many of these streams with copyright claims, but archived versions are not very difficult to find online as of this writing (we won’t be providing direct links here, though).

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https://arstechnica.com/?p=1418199