Nintendo troubled by data breach as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate leaks two weeks early

Nintendo is having a cyber security nightmare after one of its biggest new games leaked early, with pirated copies being trawled by data miners for hidden information.

According to scmagazineuk.com, copies of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch were being sold in Mexico a full two weeks ahead of its December 7th release date.

It is unlikely that the leak and early piracy will impact sales much and Nintendo is issuing takedown notices to any YouTubers brave enough to post new gameplay footage.

Instead, the iconic gaming titan is more likely to be concerned about how the game leaked.

According to tech website Motherboard, the pirated version of the game first appeared on a Discord server for WarezNX, a popular Switch piracy community that uses the communication platform to coordinate leaks.

The group's administrator immediately banned all lower level users from the server in an effort to protect the game from leaking too early. That wasn’t enough though and various versions of the game - some better than others - soon sprang up elsewhere online.

Other sources say the leaks were partly down to an unpatchable hacking method in the Nintendo Switch itself, which allows an attacker to run arbitrary code on the device.

Additionally, data miners are sifting through the game’s data with hex editors with a view to extracting all hidden content, ranging from lists of stage names to unlockable assistive "spirits" drawn from Nintendo history.