Man, if you thought Metal Gear fans were crazy, you haven’t ever come across Super Smash Bros. fans, who will literally break down a single pixel from every possible angle to try and analyze what hidden meanings may be masked within it.
On the heels of the most recent purported leak for the game, which apparently tipped the existence of no fewer than seven unannounced characters for the massive crossover fighter, we now have Smash fans obsessively trying to analyze another source to infer the existence of an unannounced character—except this time, the source in question is Nintendo themselves.
Nintendo and US fast food chain Wendy’s are currently doing a Smash College Tour promotional cross country gig, and a new video posted by Nintendo for this has apparently shown off an item corresponding to a character not yet announced for the game. The time stamp for this is 0:27, when Ness and Captain Falcon are fighting—in the right corner, you can see a new item which doesn’t seem to fit with any existing, known items.
Fans have concluded, in their infinite insanity, that this item is Growth, the Synergy Spell from the Golden Sun series. Going from there, they have made the jump that this can only mean that Isaac from that series will be in the game (never mind the fact that many franchises get items or stages in Smash without getting a character in it). Given that Isaac was one of the characters leaked in the other leak previously mentioned, this has led to a sort of… feeding frenzy among them.
Maybe this is real. Or maybe this is just confirmation bias, and people seeing what they want to see. I’ll let you decide that. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launches for Nintendo Switch on December 7.