Video game development is a secretive business, and few video game makers are as secretive as Nintendo. But what happens when information about an upcoming game leaks online, and a Nintendo employee is suspected of being responsible? Well, that’s when the ‘Nintendo ninjas’ get involved, a pair of former staff have said.
Speaking on their Kit and Krysta podcast in advance of tomorrow’s major Nintendo Direct, ex-Nintendo of America employees Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang have discussed how information might find its way online — and what the Mario maker does behind the scenes to limit leaks as much as possible.
“They really do run a pretty tight ship on the first-party,” said Yang. “Like, you literally [were given] the fear of God and being fired from your job. That fear was really real at Nintendo. We joke around about the ‘Nintendo ninjas’, like this is actual employees at the company. That is their job to investigate leaks. They’re a team at Nintendo that gets paid to do this and they are very elite. They’re very good at their jobs…. They’re very precise about the information they need to solve the case.”
Nintendo’s infamous secrecy extends to those working inside its halls, with teams kept small to keep information among a tight-knit group of people — meaning fewer potential leak sources, and an easier job for the ninjas to find the culprit should something leak that only a couple of people know about.
“People [at Nintendo] are scared straight around the leaks,” Ellis said. “They are true believers, they work on these things in small enough numbers, small enough teams. That was something that we could aways see, when it got more and more confidential, there’s fewer and fewer people working on it, to the point where you almost wonder ‘how are we going to get anything done?’ But they have to, and that’s their burden to carry.”
“It is a very difficult process to get ‘disclosed’ on information that you think you may need to do your job,” Yang agreed. “But the higher-ups in Nintendo were always very careful about who is actually getting that information, to the detriment, a lot of the time, of the people working on something, because they’d have to work four times as hard.”
Still, leaks from within Nintendo have occured in the past from some employees who have gone “rogue” Yang said, as they believed that seeding information online ahead of time would actually be helpful to the company.
“There are a small percentage of people inside Nintendo who may have the mentality… of well, ‘if I leak something, or share something with somebody outside of the company, I’m actually doing the company a favor,'” Yang recalled. “‘I’m actually helping. I’m creating hype. I’m marketing the game.'”
“Over the years, we did see some cases of that,” Ellis confirmed. “Those people were dealt with, swiftly,” he added, making a slicing motion across his neck.
When it comes to hardware leaks which involve physical manufacturing, Nintendo is in the same boat as other technology companies where keeping upcoming products confidential becomes extremely difficult. Indeed, this is something Nintendo itself experienced at the start of 2025 when it announced Switch 2 to a world which already had a pretty good idea of what the console would look like, thanks to leaked manufacturing samples being photographed — and even used by peripheral makers in their marketing (only to be successfully sued by Nintendo later).
Advance knowledge of Nintendo Direct broadcasts, meanwhile, can leak from third-party companies which have their own games included.
“I’ll say nobody’s incentive [to keep secrets] is ever going to be as strong as a Nintendo employee,” Ellis said. “Nobody’s ever going to have that much pressure put upon them. That fear — literal fear — of God put upon them.”
That said, some Nintendo departments were believed to seemingly be more leaky than others.
“We would joke, like, ‘oh well, you know, once this thing gets to Europe, that thing’s going to leak,” he added. “We were very aware of the leak danger zones. And like, ‘on this date, this information is going to be shared here, so the risk is going to escalate.'”
As for tomorrow’s Nintendo Direct, rumors are of course already flying — though nothing significant from Nintendo’s own line-up appears to have made its way online… yet.
“We all know what happened to Pyoro,” Ellis said, referencing a previous prolific Nintendo leaker who ended up vanishing from the internet. “Yes, this can be an exciting thing, like oh my gosh, everybody’s on pins and needles for my next update… until you get that phone call or somebody shows up at your door and you disappear.”
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
