Nintendo unintentionally leaks Switch developer menu in recent trailer

By Jon Martindale February 1, 2017

Nintendo is gradually ratcheting the hype train up to high-speed as we head toward the early March launch of its new Switch console, which means trailers, screenshots, and other content reveals by the boatload. But the company also recently revealed something it didn’t intend to show off — its back-end developer menu, which appeared in a recent Portuguese trailer for the console.

Considering that filming screens running gaming content with a camera isn’t exactly the best way to record footage, Nintendo’s strategy as of late has been to add in the game footage over the dev menu in post-production. That’s partly the reason there was so much confusion about which games the console would launch with following the Switch’s original reveal.

But if you are going to do that, you do need to remember to actually do it. Otherwise, you end up in a situation like this, where eagle-eyed Nintendo fans on the NeoGAF forums take a screenshot of your trailer featuring the previously hidden developer menu.

As you might expect, Nintendo has jumped all over the video, so finding it online right now is a little difficult. What we do have are screenshots from the trailer, a number of which show the dev menu open and accessible on the Nintendo Switch.

This doesn’t tell us too much about the final console itself, but we can see that the development version of the Switch seems to come with 64GB of storage space, double that of the planned consumer release. Some commenters pointed out that it also appears to have an auto-brightness control, which suggests that the Switch display will alter itself to be most visible in your environment, while saving as much battery as possible.

The screenshot featuring the 1-2 Switch logo also shows some information about the firmware in use by that particular Switch. It looks like internally at least, those releases still use the “NX” moniker that acted as the Switch’s code name before its official unveiling.

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