Indie Game Removed From Switch eShop Due To Hidden Code Editor Is Available Again

Did he really think Nintendo wouldn't notice it when he announced it online to the whole world?

This guy is the game developer version of the morons who rob someone and then brag about it on Twitter!

@Heavyarms55 except he didn't rob any one but gave the world something cool.

Hey guys! My game can be used as an entry point to hack your Switch! Buy it on the eShop now!
*removed from eShop

Well crap, I wish I had bought it now.

Obvious concerns on Nintendo's part aside, what's even the point of an easter egg if you disclose its existence and access method mere weeks after launch?🤔

@nhSnork
So people could enjoy it?

He probably thought this would boost the game sales. I guess it didn't work out as well as he expected.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Nintendo removes the game from any account that bought it and refund their purchase.

@HumanDog good but illegal lol

P.s (edit): just to be clear, modding your console is not illegal, however selling you the way to do it is... (And yes he was clearly advertising it to add sales to the game)

On a vaguely related note - in the video above, please could someone tell me which title is between Pokemon Quest & Final Fantasy XII? I'm just intrigued by the icon!

Damn, I really wanted to play that game but was waiting since I've got too many games on. I don't care about the editor

@xanderten50 That looks like the N64 game Sin and Punishment, which is definitely NOT on the Switch eShop.

I wish N64 Virtual Console was on Switch. Looks like this person has some kind of homebrew if they're installing N64 games.

It's on the Wii U VC though if you want to check it out.

@xanderten50
The icon is probably from Sin & Punishment, a japan-only N64 game.

I'm not sure if n64 emulation in switch is already running good since I stopped following the scene a year ago.

@tonyhoro @EarthboundBenjy thanks guys

Haha that’s awesome 😁

He wants to give everyone an Easter egg but got egged by Nintendo.

@SetupDisk that's the purpose of a feature. Enjoying easter eggs comes largely from DISCOVERING them by yourself, that's kind of in the name.

If this stuff was meant to be openly enjoyed otherwise, why not announce it from the start and clear up all the potential misunderstandings with Nintendo while at it? The latter being what he has to do now anyway as long as he wants his game back on eShop - and the impression of intentionally sneaking such a thing past the radar will likely make the mood more awkward.

@xanderten50 I thought I saw a similar icon among recent eShop releases, but the title logo is really Sin & Punishment as others have pointed out. Which... likely means this announcement video was using a hacked Switch for demonstration to boot?

WHAT_COULD_POSSIBLY_GO_WRONG.JPG

It doesn't seem to me that this is likely to be able to do much, and I think it really is just an easter egg.

I guess Nintendo had to pull it, though, since they can't be sure it doesn't expose security problems. If they didn't know about it, they wouldn't have been able to test it.

@HumanDog Yeah, but the point is, he broke the rules and bragged about it. Of course he is gonna get slapped down.

Lol I'm sorry but I really hate how millennial-ized this article is. So self righteous. All this is missing is a literal wag of the finger.

"although you could argue he was even more foolish to include it in the first place." friggin gag

That's completely stupid. No sense. Wow. I'm speechless.

So that's why it's gone. I was interested.

It's Nintendo's store. He agreed to follow rules so he could make money on the store. He broke the rules and then tried to leverage it to get more sales. Nintendo removed the game.

However noble some may think he is (maybe he was ignorant of the situation enough that he was truly trying), this guy's actions have the potential to make the store more restrictive and locked down. So, that is a potential affect along with the obvious damage he has done to his relationship with Nintendo and the loss of any more potential sales on Switch.

You can argue with the rules and the way Nintendo controls its own store and licensing, but this guy didn't deal with it well. Not a great move.

Huh, I actuallly bought that game! Too bad I know nothing about Ruby. I also question if we run some risk of doing this...

This is what happens when you raise a generation that never gets told no and everybody gets a trophy. I blame his parents for raising an idiot.

Wow, what an idiot. What did he think was gunna happen?

To be fair, how was anyone supposed to figure it out if he didn't reveal it? It probably would've taken years (if ever) for someone to stumble across it. I think he fully expected the game to get pulled but wanted the people who did buy it to know how to use his "Easter Egg." In essence, his goal wasn't about maximizing sales but about spreading a way for people to mod their Switches.

It was still stupid of him to ruin his company's and the specific game's reputation over mod lobbying, but that's apparently what he wanted.

More and more I find myself loathing the type of people in the tech world as though they are plague bearers by choice. Back in the 90's I thought it was the coolest group. That's the problem, it's a group who remains in a teenage mindset for their entire lives. Smug, arrogant, self-righteous, and often zealous about one topic or another, and never thinks of the effects of their actions, or worse, never cares about the effects upon others, and worse still, often sees the infliction of that effect as their right to bestow.

Correct me if I'm wrong. But a Ruby interpreter wouldn't be able to gain access to anything that'd allow unsigned code to run on the switch. This easter egg doesn't seem to be much more than a sandbox. It'd be like trying to hack your PC with redstone in Minecraft...

Reminds me of Nintendo banning people from online services for their 3DSes even if they only wanted to screen record them.

Not sure if it's actually exploitable but it seems to use some outdated version of mruby with known public vulnerabilities. Unless he backported the fixes himself.

As others have said no access to hardware, sandboxed. So unless the sandbox is broken no you can't "mod ur switch" with this.

@xanderten50 I could be wrong but that looks to be like one of the characters from sin and Punishment.

Oh, so many naive comments 😂

@Yorumi I bet you 5 cents he violated the terms of service somehow.

Edited for clarity.

Edit again just did a little more reading. This entire thing is silly. Seems like he's been totally misunderstood.

He knew exactly what he was doing (I follow the developer on Mastodon). He took the necessary precautions, making sure that this wasn't a security hole. He gave a link to some source code so that you could learn to modify the game itself. I don't think this was "foolish" or "stupid," I think he gave us something awesome. He wanted to give us a bit of wonder instead of all of this hand-wringing.

https://ruby.social/@amirrajan/101986660334398725

https://ruby.social/@amirrajan/101991347839280423

@tendonerd lol wow so hardcore golfclap

@Yorumi it’s probably not so much that he can’t sell any programming interpreter, and more that Nintendo MUST review these kinds of things before they let a game go through.

It’s kinda like a dev selling them a funny cute animal puzzle game, and then revealing there’s a code to replace all the cute animals with topless women AFTER they got done reviewing the game. Rating boards and storefronts would need to remove it and reevaluate it.

The heck is this.......

@Yorumi I guess if the interpreter itself doesn’t represent any security concerns (aka it’s not a back door, just a neat feature), it could return. Though who knows! With how developer went about its inclusion, maybe they won’t want to have anything to do with them now.

Let's hope the right people purchased this and can make use of it.

Well, this is concerning. This means that Nintendo doesn't have an actual way to detect this kind of things before release. This may lead to some direct consequences to the rest of the indie scene, and it only took one idiot to accomplish that.

@Yorumi Pretty much. Probably Nintendo will now need to take a little more time before they give the green light, but I guess this kind of situation isn't gonna be common.

Dang I wish I could get a copy of it now.

"but you can see why Nintendo would take issue with its implementation."

Actually, I am kinda having a problem seeing that. It's Ruby - it's not like you can do anything destructive to anyone elses Switch with that and prob not even to your own. And Nintendo itself releases what amount to code editors - they are just visual and called "Labo Garage". So I am actually having a bit of a problem seeing what apparently is obvious.

@Wookietim I believe the problem is that the editor probably wasn't evaluated by Nintendo before release if it was hidden. Even if it is a harmless thing, Nintendo has to know about it.

That'd be fine. But the way the article puts it, their problem was more to do with having a code editor in the game...

I`d much rather have an Omega Ruby editor, wink wink.

@Balta666 except it's not.

It was against the terms he agreed to with Nintendo to include something like that but selling the means to mod a system is completely legal, even if it utilizes a software exploit not intended by the manufacturer.

This guy violated his terms with Nintendo but he did absolutely nothing immoral or illegal. Yes, there's a difference. Illegal is breaking a law. A contract is something enforced by agreed upon terms by 2 or more parties. The law will help you enforce a contract but in and of itself breaking a contract isn't "illegal" as in punishable by fines or imprisonment in a manner set forth by the government or the people. Refusing to abide by the terms set by the court after legal proceedings triggered by a breach of contract is illegal, but not the initial breach.

That's unfortunate, but you REALLY REALLY need to know what you're doing, if you're letting the player enter and execute arbitrary code.

And at minimum, you need to have told Nintendo that you're doing it, so they can check up on that no vital parts of the system can be accessed.

Last week I got a £25 eshop code so I was browsing through when I accidentally purchased it! I was so annoyed but erm… I love coding as well but I'm just worried that the Nintendo lawyers are going to be zooming round my house when possible. I'm not playing the actual game, I'm just using the editor now.
PS: It doesn't seen like you could hack the system through this or anything...

He probably should have kept his mouth shut on social media.

That’s a shame, having a ruby interpreter in their game sounds like it’d be pretty cool.

@nhSnork lmao it should have been Bubsy in Claws Encounters...

@HumanDog No he didn't. You can just install Ruby normally and it's ... much better. He literally provided nothing of additional value.

@Pod especially in something as easy to exploit as Ruby. I do not know why any developer would pick that for this. Might as well include a JavaScript runner with global filesystem access.

@Farbringer That may be true but it was still very stupid to do.

@LetsGoSwitch Ruby is a great language but on the fly security is not one of its strengths.

No matter how you look at it, something as drastically different from the game as a coding environment shouldn't ever be allowed to slip past Nintendo's approval team. Can it be used to bypass security or cause issues? Nintendo doesn't know since they were not made aware of its existence. A regular easter egg, like even a snake clone would be less likely to cause problems because of the different nature between the game and the programming environment.

That is sin and punishment from n64 with patched ips to english. It works great. I made the rom forwarder myself! I have many rom forwarders for nes, snes, sega master system, genesis, sega cd, 32x, arcade ps1, and psp even! Honestly in the defense of the programmer i dont think it could let anyone do anything....but yeah unsurprisingly the hack was shown on a hacked switch...😉

@SeanP2500 Any time you include a script interpretation system, you have to lock it down tight. It could absolutely cause problems.

@Balta666 100% correct

@Caterplease i think that tops someone could have injected a game mod. But i honestly have no clue. All i know for sure is that i can mod let’s say final fantasy 7 on the swtich. This is with a technique called layered fs. So i know that the switch will load stuff like pc mods. But through ruby? First thing I thought of was the shader exploit for 360 that allowed me to load linux via an edited king kong shader. Could this let someone do something similar? Time will tell. I imagine some memory hijinx on the micro sd would be involved...

@Caterplease the dev spoke in the very Mastadon thread that's linked that he did significant pen testing before publishing. That said, the game was built in a tookit called "DragonRuby" and unless they did something that I'm missing, the Ruby Interpreter being there (mind you it's mruby and not full ruby) is a requirement for the game to run. He did nothing crazy wrong, he just gave the user access to the interpreter from within the game..... nowhere else.

If that is wrong for him to do (let users modify HIS game) then so is the upcoming Fuse4 on switch (which does basically the same thing - let you write code to create games in a game) also would have the same issue.

@SeanP2500 The dev would've had to get system level access from the switch through his game first. I find that unlikely for what his purpose is here. The environment would be isolated (I've been playing with DragonRuby locally as I'm a Ruby dev myself). Unless Nintendo is giving all the games unrestricted access to the entire system and the dev allowed that from within the game, then I highly doubt you could.

@EagleDelta2 yes we agree which is why i made my video. What i theorize is someone using it in an unintended manner. Used “by the book” no i dont think it could do much. But if they found a funny memory location all sorts of things could happen. Was pulled rather fast tho...

I guess that explains fake games coming on switch like mario sunshine..

@SeanP2500 My primary fear is that this will get blacklisted just because of the Ruby interpreter. I was hoping to be able to play around and make simple games for any platform using a language I already know, but that may be a bust now.

@Caterplease yeah, it was stupid to include unannounced features he knew Nintendo wouldn't like. There's no doubt about that. He shouldn't have violated his terms with Nintendo if he wanted to continue to sell his product. It's not the kind of stupid that should earn him any contempt though. It wasn't reprehensible.

Thats what's wrong with this trash can fire of a world 🤣😂. Notice how he said world instead of pointing out everyone who hacks and messes it up for everyone is the reason why this world is trash and on fire LMFAO.. Amazing analogy

@JoyconGang except he didn't hack anything. He gave users access to the interpreter in the game and only to the game. You couldn't control the system with that prompt unless Nintendo allows games to have full system access (which I highly doubt).

@Farbringer Well I'm saying he was an idiot not a criminal. I don't think he deserves contempt but he definitely brought the problems down on himself.

This is awesome, why would they pull the game from eshop?!

@EagleDelta2 I'm not sure I can take the word of someone foolish enough to even do this as credence for quality penetration testing. I understand your point though.

@SeanP2500 Script interpreters are always a convenient attack vector.

@Caterplease my original comment was a response to someone who insinuated he was a criminal and from the article I got the perception that people have been treating him like an a**h*** and not like someone who pretty only screwed himself over and no one else.

@Farbringer My mistake. I must have misread.

@KayFiOS The dev specifically said it could NOT be used for this or to access anything outside the game.

@Caterplease no problem. I had assumed you were in the same camp as the person I was responding to because of the context.

@Farbringer No. I don't think this developer should be vilified. I don't think they meant any ill will. They were, however, incontrovertibly, very stupid to do this.

@Cyber_Akuma As a game developer myself, let me tell you a little secret about security promises.

he's gonna give nintendo paranoia

also could have screwed over his team, it's not just his work that was pulled.

@ancientlii Extremely astute point

So this guy screws up badly, then goes on to cry, play the victim and blame everyone else for his mistake.
If he wants to see a "trashcan fire", maybe he should look in the mirror.

@Caterplease By that argument any non-1st-party game should be banned.... and even then you can't be sure.

What an idiot!

@nhSnork
That's how you enjoy Easter eggs which is fine. Everyone else is not you. Some people don't have the time and look them up after they are found. For them that is the point of Easer Eggs.

@EagleDelta2 so why did they take it off the eshop?

@Caterplease stupid enough to do what?

The game was built with https://dragonruby.itch.io/, from what I can tell, all he did was show users how to access the dev/debug mode (which happens to be ~).

@JoyconGang - Knee jerk reaction based on news and users overreacting to something they know nothing about. I'm a ruby dev, the amount of ignorance on this thread directed at the dev amazes me. Don't speak to what he should/shouldn't do unless you know what you're talking about.

Okay, apparantly I was wrong and he wasn't expecting the game to be taken down, but he's still an idiot with lame excuses. No, it's not an exploit, but selling a means to others to unofficially mod their consoles still blantantly violates Nintendo's terms of service, and he should've known that.

Does he really believe this is only a problem because some news outlets incorrectly labeled it as a security exploit? What he really did has indeed gotten noticed as a major issue. For example, this very article accurately states the issue, and many of us are still roasting him for his stupidity in these comments without mistaking what he did.

@Yorumi The issue is that Nintendo (and all the other console makers) do not allow unofficial modding of their consoles, and they have every right to enforce the issue. PCs and dedicating gaming consoles are different environments that have completely different rules as to what kinds of programs are allowed to be used. If this guy wanted to include a modding sandbox in a game, then he should've done it in a PC release.

@BulbasaurusRex The interpreter is part of the game engine the game runs on, not something with OS-level access. There's the potential the game could be used as an entry point, but guess what, that can be done with any game that has user-created content. Go search for exploits related to Smash Brawl's stage creator or Mario Maker.

The only way to reasonably prevent it would be to never allow user-generated content and even that is no guarantee. He didn't advertise to Nintendo that it existed because it's part of the game engine. Can't have the game without the engine and can't have the engine without the interpreter.

@Farbringer No, it's not illegal, but it certainly was immoral to break Nintendo's terms of service like this. Like you said, there's a difference between illegality and immorality, and knowingly breaching a contract for no good reason has always been an immoral act.

@EagleDelta2 Like I said, the fact that it's not an exploit has nothing to do with the issue. It's that he's sold a way for other users to unofficially mod their Switches, which blantantly violates Nintendo's terms of service.

It's not the same an in-game level editor either, as those are officially-made in-game features that only allow you access to specific UI elements. They do NOT allow you to write your own code to create unrelated programs as this thing does.

Nintendo has always disallowed modding and enforces the rule when they can, such as when they've taken steps in the past to disallow online access or flat-out brick systems that run Homebrew.

@EagleDelta2 Are you guys dumb? Does anybody know even know how to comprehend anything a person actually says?? All I said and quote was why did Nintendo take the game off eshop if the game doesnt allow anything wrong? So how does that even sound like I'm even hating or slightly throwing shade to the game or the developer? If anyone you or anyone should be mad at is Nintendo.

Guy potentially jeopardized any future working relationships between Ninty and the dev/publisher. It isn't so much about what the ruby interpreter can do. There's potentially violations of terms and agreements Ninty had with the dev/pubs. Tweeting about this easter egg was basically showing intent on violating those terms and now he's trying to play the victim game.

He learned to code. But didn't learn the social code.

@BulbasaurusRex That's not entirely true or the upcoming game Fuze would not be allowed as it allows the user to write custom games in a form of BASIC (I believe it's based on BASIC, though why that would be chosen is beyond me as it has little modern value outside of Excel scripting).

Again, he didn't sell anything that can mod the switch. It's part of the GAME ENGINE, not specific to the game, but any game made with DragonRuby needs the mruby interpreter to run the game. That interpreter could get access to the system if the SYSTEM has a bug/vulnerability that allows it to gain access, but otherwise it's limited to the game the engine is running (since DragonRuby is self contained per application).

@JoyconGang Just because Nintendo does something doesn't mean they are right. It could be a knee jerk reaction or an evaluation of allowing a game engine that requires an interpreter to be packaged with the game on their store.

The game itself does nothing wrong, it's the GAME ENGINE that has the interpreter. Blaming the game is like saying that if Unity 3D exposed a dev console for a game built with it, but punishing the game dev instead of taking it to the Engine dev.

@boatie play it on a tablet or even a phone- as it’s a text based adventure it loses nothing from being on those platforms.

That seems like a dumb descision in the first place. He may have had good intentions, but the way he talked about it on twitter made it look like a marketing scheme. It was really just a bad move on his end.

Honestly it was the right thing to post to and forgot nintendo will remove it or all players will have would of got ban...

@EagleDelta2 I think the main issue is that Nintendo did not vet the editor to make sure it could not exploit the Switch itself. That and if there is a chance that it could be used to exploit or mod the Switch itself Nintendo will take it down. We've seen indi games taken down in the past due to them being able to circumvent Nintendo's security with an external patch or program.

That is where the issue is as even a basic code editor with the right script can be a problem if Nintendo has not tested the extent it can have (Ruby is a powerful language and not like BASIC).

EDIT: This is more of a case of the dev (engine dev) breaking trust with Nintendo rather than the editor being a problem. Most Easter eggs are harmless because they are just a song or a model. This is a bit more advance than a simple command console you'd find in Skyrim or Mass Effect that are used to edit values of in-game items, spawn objects, and turn on/off engine specific elements like lighting or particle effects.

Oh no, poor guy. He chose to be a douche and now hes crying about the consequences.

@EagleDelta2 he put something in the game that he didnt let them know about. His fault.

The more I read of this the more I understand Nintendo's decision. Ruby is not your run of the mill language as it is a rather advance coding language and even if the apps would need to be run through the game it opens the Switch up to future exploits once someone figures out how to use the editor to do something it was no intended to (or even piracy through the game itself). Anyone who has worked with Ruby in the past can tell you this is not anything like a simple in-engine level editor or in engine coding tool (think Little Big Planet). These things need to be vetted before they are implemented in a game like this as it opens up the system up to hacking or exploits that can easily circumvent Nintendo's security.

I feel bad for the game devs because it sounds like they did not know about it. And this may have ruined their relationship with Nintendo and to an extent Sony/Microsoft.

@Wexter I'd agree except DragonRuby uses mruby rather than full ruby, doesn't include all the extra ruby libs needed to exploit the system (assuming it could even gain access), and to add those from within the switch you'd have to have access to not just the dev console, but a shell and C compiler as many Ruby libs are written in pure C then compiled into Ruby (such as nokogiri - a very common dependency for external libs).

You even have to jump through hoops (for now) to require other ruby files (using $dragon.require instead of just plain require).

@EagleDelta2 That's good to hear that he was not foolish enough to do what I thought he did. Still not the brightest idea to not clear this with Circle and Nintendo before implementing a console that can execute custom code. But even then if the game access the Switch's API it can still be a problem (even if it is in a sandbox environment) in the future once people play around with it. It needed to vetted my bet for that reason alone.

I classify this as he should have known better to ask before doing it, but it was not as grievous as I initially gauged.

• 2019
• Ruby

Ban this guy!

lol

He probably had good intentions. But he should have cleared it with others first. If it is indeed properly sandboxed, it can't cause any harm. But of course Nintendo does not trust a lone guy going under the radar to implement a properly sandboxed interpreter. He is indeed stupid. Probably fresh out of college and thinks he knows everything. These things happen, so he should be forgiven, and not be allowed to commit code for a few years.

It seems silly that this team does not do code reviews though. I put the main blame on the managers and on Nintendo for not demanding this simple way of ensuring every piece of committed code is at least understood by two coders.

@Mortenb He could of done something first then post it so we can't trust him at all.

@ShinyUmbreon I don't understand what you are trying to say. I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm sorry, but could you rephrase?

@Mortenb What Im saying is he could of play it around first and did stuff then hes like hey ill show people how to play games you can't play.

@boatie the game is literally open sources and free. You can play it on your phone or in your browser. It's a great game and you should play it you just don't need a switch to do so.

How could the dev been so dumb to snitch on himself, smh. If you're gonna make an announcement like that then you should've released the game on XB1 as well since they embrace the "modding" community

@urbanman2004 Here's a easy answer Don't tell get ban tell and your safe from ban.

@PharoneTheGnome What the hell does this comment mean?

I wish he didn't snitch on himself and this could've been left for people to find. What a shame. Stupid donkey.

Damn. Yeah that's it.

does it still have the sandbox?

@SetupDisk Yeah who would have guessed that some crappy text game would have been a hacking app in disguise all along.

While I support hacking for emulation and other old games/platforms, I think it is smart to get rid of stuff like this because it can lead to hacking/cheating in online games too which I hate with a passion.

How much do you bet he's just hidden it better.

I wish they let it be. I'd like to be able to mess around with Ruby. Oh well, I guess there's fuze 4 or whatever. What's the difference anyways? If fuze can be on Switch, why not Ruby?

Hooray! I was just wondering when this game would return as I lamented not buying it before.

If someone was able to devise an exploit due to his little easter egg surprise, he wouldn't have gotten off so easily. I think if he kept quiet about it, It would do him more harm than good. He's fortunate nothing had happened that would give Nintendo a reason to press charges.

He ended up saving himself with all his talking IMO. We don't need another Switch exploit getting out for piraters to take advantage of, especially so soon after Nintendo did away with the old Switches.

@rayword45 bro remember me i was your nightmare on a simple game called Cake ninja XMAS!