 Well folks, it happened. Tears of the Kingdom leaked. If that's all you need to know, well, it was nice seeing you guys and I'll catch you in the next video. But we're going to talk about what has leaked. We're not going to go into like exact specifics or anything like that, like story spoilers or any of that. This will be the last time, by the way, we actually talk about Tears of the Kingdom leaks because we have a policy on our channel. And that is that the moment the game leaks, we're done covering leaks. So we will cover the fact the game has leaked it, how we know it has leaked, and why you should be careful if you're trying to avoid spoilers. If you're someone like me who doesn't care about spoilers and you're going to consume all the leaks anyways, that's cool. I'm not going to tell you where to find them, but I can confirm they're out there. Some blurred images and stuff like that we might put in the video as we edit. But look guys, the game is out there. It has leaked. It is going to be playable in ROM form publicly later today. And I just wanted to throw out there that yeah, Tears of the Kingdom has absolutely 100% leaked as of this morning. Now, before we go into how we know it has leaked, I want to remind you guys that we are giving away a Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Nintendo Switch OLED. We're also giving away a Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Collector's Edition and a Tears of the Kingdom pin from PAX East. To enter all you to do is go down in the pinned comment in the description and winner will be drawn on May 12th. Oh, and we're on our road to 133,000 subscribers. So let's hopefully get there by the time Tears of the Kingdom comes out at this point, right? We're almost to 120. You guys are absolutely insane. All right guys, we are less than 12 days to go to Tears of the Kingdom, right? Not this Friday, but next Friday. Next week, it's insane. And of course, we knew that this week and I told you guys all along that this week, we likely were going to see Tears of the Kingdom leak out there now. Over the weekend, we had had a number of things pop up suggesting the game might leak soon. There were a number of games that sold on Macquarie out of Illinois, one of them for 100 and I think four other copies for 300 each. And again, can't really confirm much about those. There's the potential like look at the inside of the box and look at the game cartridge. We're not going to show that here, but that is something that yeah, it was a thing anyways on Macquarie. I could at least show the picture of all the sales of it. So that's interesting, but that didn't really confirm anything leaking. Maybe it confirmed somebody had some retail copies they were selling, but nothing really leaked from the game, right? To me, a leak isn't when a retail copy has been sold or something. A leak is when it gets dumped and put online, right? Or if a person with a retail copy starts to spam things online. So to me, that's when the leak happens. I've been avoiding making this video because I wanted to make sure that we had a confirmed leak. I didn't just want, oh, someone got a retail copy. Okay, that's, I mean, cool that we knew that was going to happen. So, all right. So that is something that maybe happened that people were freaking out about over the weekend. And then there were a couple like gameplay clips and a couple screenshots, but all of this stuff could have came from the first 20 minute demo of the game. So, because remember, if you guys remember the tears the king demos, we didn't get any footage from the first 20 minute demo. So a lot of it could have just been from there because it was mostly the beginning area, but also pay could be from a leaked game, right? Because the beginning area is the beginning area. Well, we finally now have complete confirmation the game has leaked. Now, why do we know the game is leaked and is going to be available later today in ROM form? Well, some images appeared over on 4chan and a few other places that could show clear cut scene or clear early game screenshot gameplay of tears of the kingdom and I have scoured and scoured and scoured to figure out if these images were true until I talked to somebody who has a review copy of the game. And I asked them directly, Hey, you have a review copy of the game? Have you played it yet? Yes. Okay, these are from the beginning of the game. Are these real? The response was absolutely. And these screenshots were all being played in an emulator. So somebody does have a ROM file that is playable right now. It has not been distributed publicly yet, but it will be later today. They mentioned it'll be open like four or five hours. So once that ROM gets distributed at a specific website, we're not going to link to any of that. It's going to be downloaded from there and uploaded at a billion other ROM sites. And you know what? It's going to be pretty easy to find it to be frank. Now, this is, you know, really interesting for a few reasons. One, obviously it leaking today versus say Wednesday or the end of the week. I mean, that that's almost a full two weeks early. That's a bit rough. Clearly, the leaks came from retail copies or something like that getting out into the wild. I'm just going to sit here and say that it's kind of sad that we all knew this was going to happen. And we've known for a while because every major switch game gets leaked. I don't think there's anything Nintendo could really do about it. Unless they do the unthinkable and go, hey, we're not going to allow tears of the kingdom to have a physical copy because physical copies are how the leaks are happening, or they would have to do something we really don't want to see. And that is require an online connection to even boot the game, which we don't want to see that. I mean, you could argue maybe they just include that and then a day one patch gets rid of that online connection requirement. But you don't really, really want to see that. So I'm not so sure that I really want them to go that route either plus hackers would eventually figure out a way to just work around that online connection aspect in the first place. So I do think that in the end, this is just an inevitability of the switch ever since it was super easy to hack the system from day one. The real the only real reason to prevent, you know, all of this from happening would be to have a system that isn't hacked yet. Like I don't know if the PlayStation five and the Xbox series has been hacked yet, I don't keep up that hacking scene over there. But if those haven't been hacked yet, that would be a nice example of why those games tend to not leak out early. So yeah, hopefully Nintendo's next device can maybe help a little bit with that and be much more secure out the gate. Of course, all systems eventually end up getting hacked. So in the end, it's going to happen eventually someday. But at least for a while, maybe we won't get these early releases like that. Some of you guys might be rejoicing because you're going to be playing it on me later later today or later this week when you find time and playing it in 4k 60 FPS and blah, blah, blah, and having a good time with it. I have a few things I want to note here about how we're handling this. And I already said it at the beginning, but we are not going to be covering any more leaks for Tears of the Kingdom. And it's unfortunate that when this does happen, it kind of hurts the channel a little bit. But I stick to my guns on this. There's a few reasons I stick to my guns on not covering leaks of Tears of the Kingdom once the full game has leaked. One of those is that Nintendo doesn't like it. But let's just be frank. If I start sharing screenshots, or even blurred gameplay, or go into exact details, look, Nintendo is going to be mad. And with Nintendo being mad, they're not only going to copyright strike the channel, they might try to go for a channel takedown. So that's one thing. It's just too risky to get in Nintendo's, you know, crosshairs, you know, they're going to be trying to find all the live streams of this, they're going to be nuking channels. And while we have a right as press to cover this stuff, I do think that outer respect for the way Nintendo handles things and making sure my channel stays online, we're not going to be covering that stuff. The other thing is that we have a number of people that only really like leaks to a point they like when things leak until the game leaks because the game leak is then everything right at this point, up to this point leaks from the game didn't really mean that much right we didn't have any context we didn't have any real story details. It was mostly just in good fun and us just having a desire to see more of the game right the art book leak or leaked gameplay footage or you know whatever like all that was just we wanted to see more. But once the whole game is out there, that's no longer about seeing more because you could see the entire game you can know everything. And at that point, why would we want to cover that? Why would we want to ruin the entire now if you're like me and you're not sensitive to spoilers and they don't ruin your gameplay experience and you want to go ahead and go find all the details on the game by all means be my guest. But look, we're not going to force that upon our viewers. If you guys choose to go do that you choose to go emulate it that's your choice we do not condone it we will not be linking to where you can get emulators or where you can get the wrong will never provide that information to anyone not even privately you hit me up privately I'm just going to ignore requests for that kind of stuff. But what I will say is this I am stupidly excited for tears of the kingdom. And so are you likely if you're at this channel I know not everyone here is a fan of Zelda I know shocker but we actually cover all of Nintendo. So what are we going to do with our tears of the kingdom coverage moving forward? Well, we still have official media to cover there's going to be a launch trailer we're going to have review reviews and previews dropping from the game next week. There might be new footage that crops up in say a commercial and hey if new footage crops up in a commercial we'll cover that right so that's official media so if we get any news from official media or new merchandise or new updates interviews there's a potential interview I believe IGN reference an interview they did with Fubi Ashi the director of the game so like we'll cover all of that stuff we're just not going to be covering leaks anymore and it's going to make the next two weeks a bit harder around the channel trying to cover Zelda stuff when we're no longer going to be covering leaks but I do think that this is the best choice and it is the same choice I've made every single game that's leaked on switch. Super Mario 3D all stars heck we knew everything about the games right those are old games and we still stopped covering leaks once the game itself leaked well you know we did the same thing with Splatoon 3 we did the same thing with Animal Crossing we did the same thing with Super Mario Odyssey etc etc etc we just do not cover leaks anymore because now we're talking about the entire game and not just little tidbits here and there as an example I could right now ruin the entire beginning of the game for you guys in this video because I now know what happens in the entire beginning of the game and I'm not going to do that because I don't think that's fair to you so thank you guys so much for being here and choosing to get your coverage right here just know that you will have spoiler free coverage of Tears of the Kingdom here on moving forward we will not be talking about the leaks whether I'm aware of stuff or not we're just going to stick to what is officially known you guys are awesome and amazing be sure to set your filters on all the social medias if you don't want to hear stuff but just know you're safe here all right guys we'll catch you in that next video