 One thing Nintendo fans criticize about the Nintendo Switch, especially if you're someone who played during the Wii U and 3DS era, is that the Switch seems to lack a bit of personality. Now you can argue its minimalist UI and design is its personality, but even so, in the past we had gotten things such as menu music and eShop music and stuff like that to sort of fill in the background lack of noise while navigating the systems. Oh, and themes. You know, being able to change colors, maybe feature certain characters. And honestly, one of the most popular things online are all of the fan made fake UI tweaks that seem to always include some sort of theme. Sure, it changes the UI and maybe updates it or improves it in some ways, but there's always a theme attached to it that is different than what you can do with the current Switch. And that includes things like dark and white mode, right? That's what the Switch has. Well, what if I were to tell you that we now have direct evidence that at one point Switch was going to have not only music, but actual different colored themes. And, well, it just got scratched. Let's dive into this after I remind you that we are on our road to 100,000 subscribers. And if we can get there by the time Tears of the Kingdom comes out, we'll just go ahead and give away a collector's edition of the game. Because why the heck? Nah, that thing is so hard to get. The dang scalpers really are doing work out here. So anyways, let's just dive right into this video. So there was an article posted over at NintendoWire.com and it featured a couple of tweets and some old information that is resurfacing because of this. And the one tweet it features is from where gaming dump. And here's what's interesting because we don't look at old versions of the Switch operating system anymore, right? We're always data mining the new ones. Some of this stuff just gets overlooked. And according to Rare Gaming Dump, leftovers found in a pre-release version of the Switch's operating system, which was version 0.8.5, show that Nintendo was planning to include multiple theme colors but removed this feature before launch for unknown reasons. They give credit to the screenshot to GR animated. And you see here that it had a black theme, a blue theme, deep green, fresh green, light green, pink, purple, red, white, and yellow. Now these aren't exactly the sort of themes people always envision when they're thinking of themes. Sometimes they want to have characters feature like Kirby or Link or Mario or Samus, right? But these still would be considered themes because you'd be able to change the color. This is very similar to what we can do on mobile devices and or desktops, Mac, PC, et cetera, where you can just mess with the color scheme and that is a type of theme. So, and let that Nintendo at one point was going to support a bunch of different colors besides just the white and dark theme but that's all that really survived out of this initial stuff that existed in the Switch before launch. Now, another thing that was discovered a couple of years ago is that apparently there is an old unused clip of eShop music that was supposed to be on Switch. I don't know the story of the eShop music necessarily, but here, it's about 40-something seconds long. Why don't you give it a listen? And as you can see, it definitely fit right in line with what Nintendo had done in the past. Now, Nintendo Wire does speculate that the music might have been removed to improve the console boot-up process and make the home screen with the eShop faster. Right now, the home screen with the eShop is fine but every now and then you'll catch a hitch or get some lag and maybe with the music playing that would have just added more to it so it's possible that for performance reasons they did remove that music. It also makes you wonder if at one point there was music for the menu or the home screen that doesn't seem to have that problem but again, that's just speculation and this gets into the wider question of why Nintendo not only scrapped this stuff before launch but hasn't figured it out since because Nintendo has added features to Switch since it launched. Now, obviously the much maligned feature of the Nintendo Switch Online and having to play online is one thing but you did get that retro game services and some people love and or hate those services because they're not really a replacement for virtual console but it is an option to play retro games. Sure, that's a feature but the biggest actual feature they've added is the ability to use Bluetooth headsets. The operating system always supported it. They released an update that enabled it and frankly it was really weird because there was no modification done to the technology. They didn't wait for a specific version of Switch to come out to support it. No, all versions going back to launch support Bluetooth headsets now. So if they're able to add in a basic feature like that it makes you wonder why they never bothered to go in and maybe slowly enable different color themes. If they're not going to give us the ability to buy themes they could have at least given us these color options. So we can just add a little bit of our personality. Maybe you're someone who really likes to color pink or really likes to color blue. It would have been nice to be able to modify our system to feature our preferred accent colors but as it is we're not able to do that. I also wonder sometimes about why Nintendo didn't dive into themes overall. See I'm not someone that cares a whole lot about the themes or the music, right? For me a UI's entire point of existence is to go from point A to point B. So it's to take me from boot up to where am I going? Am I going to a game? Am I going to the shop to buy something and then go to the game? But the idea is I'm trying to get to a game. In the end that's the goal and the quickest way to get there is what I want. So I never cared as much about the music or the themes but I'm not going to pretend that I never messed around with them. On my 3DS I had some Zelda themes going and you also wonder if they didn't explore themes did they leave some money on the table? You remember they used to charge for some of their themes and you could earn some of the themes through my Nintendo as well. I just think that Nintendo had a missed opportunity to maybe make a lot of money. They had 130 million of these things sold, right? Of the Switches sold. Imagine, even if only 10% of that audience bought themes how much money that could have been? You charge between $1 to $5 per theme you could be making some serious bank especially for users that buy multiple themes. But again, Nintendo didn't go that route and while I personally am only a little bit disappointed because bare minimum I like the color options. I wish they would have enabled those. Those are what I've been all for. But it is kind of weird that we never got the ability to buy themes. It is kind of weird that they never bought them to retroactively add music and then just give us a toggle to turn it on and off. So hey, if you would like the music now we added a setting in your settings where you can go toggle that on and now you have menu music. It's just a nice quality of life improvement that some people enjoy because believe it or not some people sometimes in the past would turn on their Wii and just leave the music playing in the background while they're doing other tasks. I know it's a really weird use case for the music but that's how much they enjoyed it. It automatically would loop and you know what? Maybe they would eventually pick it up and go play a game. So that's just, I don't know. You guys let me know if you are someone who really misses themes. Do you miss the menu music? Do you feel like the switch is just a little bit less because of it? So what I want to know is how much do you miss having these features? Personally, I don't miss it that much although I would have liked to have the color options that they initially seem to have had. It just adds that little bit of extra personality and I do admittedly take advantage of color options when available. Like I'm on that new Mac Studio, right? And I sort of have the color set to a cool orange. It's just a color that works really well for me while I am working basically. Like my favorite color is blue but it just, it doesn't sit as well with my eyes. So it's just a personal preference. Anyways guys, you let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. I am Nathaniel Rumpeljantz and I'll catch you in the next video.