Paper Mario: The Origami King Leaked Through PC Emulators

Paper Mario: The Origami King is playable via PC emulators thanks to a surprising (and mysterious) leak.

Paper Mario
Photo: Nintendo

Upcoming Nintendo RPG Paper Mario: The Origami King has been leaked to PC emulators days ahead of its official Nintendo Switch release.

This odd story comes to us from ResetEra where users have been posting videos of what seems to be the final version of Paper Mario: The Origami King running via a Nintendo Switch emulator on PC. Yes, there are Nintendo Switch emulators available via PC, but as you can imagine, they’re about as unofficial as such things get.

The source of this leak has not been identified yet, but considering that several different YouTube players have uploaded videos of the PC emulation, it seems pretty clear that the leak has spread and may be difficult for Nintendo to contain (despite their fondness for shutting down such projects).

While Nintendo Switch emulators have been available on PC for quite some time now, most of the games they support are not added until weeks (or at least days) after their official release. Even then, they tend not to run that well at first.

Ad – content continues below

That makes this emulation that much more interesting. While it doesn’t run perfectly (at least based on the videos that have been released thus far), it does seem to perform pretty well considering that the entire thing is an elaborate home brew hack that was completed before the game was ever officially released.

That’s the other odd thing about this situation. It’s not common for major Nintendo games to leak ahead of their official release date. Even when that does happen, you certainly don’t see those leaked games appear on any other platform besides official Nintendo consoles and devices.

So how did this happen? As we said, nobody seems to be saying where this leak originated from, but what we do know about this scenario suggests that someone got their hands on an early copy of Paper Mario: Origami King, played it on a hacked Nintendo Switch, uploaded it to an emulator, and (possibly with the help of other hackers/modders) got it to run reasonably well on PC. All of that means that they either got their copy of the game quite a while ago or are otherwise very good at hacking modern games.

We imagine that Nintendo is not going to be happy about this. Regardless, you’ll soon have the chance to play Paper Mario: The Origami King properly (and legally) on Nintendo Switch as its set to release on July 17.