 This video is sponsored by Surfshark. My uncle works at Nintendo. How many times have you heard someone make this claim? If it's not an uncle, it's another relative. If it's not Nintendo, it's Microsoft or Sony or any other gaming company. Somehow, on every playground and every school in the world, there's at least one kid who loves pretending their family has special insight into the gaming industry. Maybe they'll claim to have new games that haven't been released yet, or maybe they'll pretend to know details about upcoming consoles that haven't yet been announced. But is it always a lie? What about the times when young gamers have actually leaked precious secrets because their parents or relatives have been working to develop new games or hardware? Believe it or not, it does happen. There has been at least one definite instance of a game leak from an uncle working at Nintendo, or rather, a company that publishes games on the Nintendo Switch. In 2016, when Campo Santo's Firewatch was still in development, eager fans were debating on the game's forum about what the game might cost upon release. Enter Pingu the No Scoper, who left a simple message. $20. My uncle works with the game. He asked if $20 was good, and I said yeah. You can imagine how well this was received by other forumites. The idea of an uncle leaking information was particularly funny, and even Batman himself waded into the thread, replying with a simple but effective no. Little did anyone know that behind the scenes that publish a panic ink, someone was, well, panicking. At first, both the team at Panic and at Campo Santo had thought the same as the rest of the forum. Here was a classic example of the uncle who works at Nintendo. Then someone said, wait a minute, do any of us have a weird nephew who might actually be posting those? In his own words, Cable Sasa, co-founder of Panic, instantly froze in place. Yes. Yes, he did have a nephew, and he had spoken to him about the game. He said, I very frantically launched Steam and pulled up the Steam profile of Pingu the No Scoper and clicked the little past usernames dropdown. I recognised another handle of my nephews in the list, somewhere above Papa John and Guy Fiery, and lost my mind. Nobody could believe I was the uncle, least of all me. So what to do now? Well, there was no real harm in the post. Pingu, real name Max, hadn't done anything wrong. Cable, though, wasn't quite ready to let this go. He got his revenge a few weeks later, after Firewatch had released, at a family gathering. He started telling the story very innocuously, before beginning to put pressure on Max. He said, When I got to the part about his post, I could see he was getting really nervous. His glasses actually steamed up a little bit as his face flushed, which is exactly how I would have felt. Max later recounted, Right as I heard him say, someone at Campo Santo found something on the Firewatch forums, my face practically turned red instantly and I started laughing. I knew exactly what this was about. My entire family couldn't tell why I was laughing so hard until he said, and Pingu the no-scoper was our Max. Cable has since really leaned into his identity as the uncle who leaks game rumours to his nephew. He even went so far as to get a t-shirt printed which reads, The Uncle is Real, above a picture of the Firewatch logo. Other stories don't necessarily involve Nintendo games, and don't always have such a happy ending. For one particularly notorious example, we turn to the Xbox 360. In July of 2005, four months before the release of the 360, a teenager made posts on GameSpots forum claiming to have played on the new console. According to the 16-year-old, his father worked for Microsoft and was in charge of developing the new console's power cable. None of the other commenters in the forum believed him. At first. Then the team posted photos showing him playing on the new console. It turns out he'd been telling the truth all along. He even gave the world its first glimpse at the 360's start-up animation. And, unsurprisingly, he managed to get his dad in a lot of trouble once the photo started spreading across the internet. Moving slightly away from the sphere of gaming, one woman whose father worked at Apple shared the iPhone X with the world in advance of its official release. In a YouTube video which has since been deleted, the woman not only showed herself visiting her dad's office and using the iPhone X, but also managed to inadvertently show off some employee-only QR codes used internally within Apple. Things did not end well. The YouTuber was forced to delete the video, and her dad was immediately fired. She later said, At the end of the day when you work for Apple, it doesn't matter how good of a person you are. If you break a rule, they just have no tolerance. Apple really did like my dad, and they let him go, because he broke a rule. It was an innocent mistake, and he fully apologizes. The moral of that story, don't mess with Apple. But what about those kids who claim that their uncles at Nintendo get them loads of free games, including titles that have not yet been released? Well, there might be some truth to this, after all. All the way back in 1991, during the heyday of the NES, anyone who really did have an uncle who worked at Nintendo could very well have had games that hadn't been released in stores yet. At least, not technically. Video game journalist and historian Chris Bienic has shared online a copy of the Nintendo Employee Purchase Order form. Like many companies, Nintendo offered an employee discount at the time, and allowed its staff to pay just $14 for classics like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, games which cost around $50 at the time in shops. The form specifically mentions that only the employees themselves were allowed to pick up their orders once they'd arrived. But without a doubt, these employees were using their discounts to buy games for their younger relatives. Somewhere out there, a kid really did have an uncle who worked at Nintendo, who kept them well stocked with all the latest titles. Even newer releases, such as Nintendo World Cup and Super Mario Bros. 3, were available for a discounted purchase price. Bear in mind that release windows for games were very different at the time. It wasn't until the release of Sonic 2 in November of 1992 that the industry saw its first international simultaneous release. Before then, shops would simply get new stock whenever it happened to turn up. So it's very possible that an uncle at Nintendo really did give his niece or nephew games that wouldn't be available in nearby stores until a few months later. The moral of the story, apart from that you should never mess with Apple, is that you never know when someone might be telling the truth. The next time someone claims that their uncle or grandmother or second cousin works in the game industry and has told you a valuable secret, who knows? They might be telling the truth. This video is sponsored by Surfshark. The internet is not as free as it once was. Governments love to censor things they don't like, and companies often restrict what media is available in different parts of the world. A virtual private network routes all of your internet through a server of your choice in a different part of the world, letting you bypass region-specific barriers to internet freedom. For example, if you spend any of your time in the UK, you might notice that British Netflix is somewhat lacking compared with American Netflix. If you quick taps of the Surfshark app and you'll be able to access a far wider variety of entertainment. 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