Over time, fans have noticed that underneath all those bright colors and cheery attitude, Splatoon can be a pretty creepy game. Surely Nintendo has an explanation for that, right? Well...
Some background, in case you’re not caught up with it: earlier this year, YouTuber Siertes found that certain Splatoon boss levels play disturbing sounds that would be more at home in a hellscape than in a Nintendo game:
People came up with lore-specific reasons as to why these sounds exist—notably, fans decided that the sounds must be evidence of a civilization that is falling apart at your hands. This of course is just a fan theory. The only people who can refute or confirm the idea is Nintendo itself.
So, Eurogamer asked Splatoon’s director, Tsubasa Sakaguchi what is going on with the mysterious boss sounds. Except he has no clue, either.
“It’s the first time I’ve heard this!” Sakaguchi claimed. “I was the one who was in charge of the mechanics and the effects for the final boss. Towards the end, though, I was running out of time so I was asking the staff around me to do things for me—like the staff credits and many other things.
Sakaguchi does think there are a couple of possibilities here, though.
“Maybe it’s a curse from those other staff. The final boss was one of the last things that we were working on. We were all high on adrenaline. Maybe there’s some element of that in there, of that energy in there. Once I go back to Japan, I’ll play it and have a look.”
Ha. It would be amazing if the creepy sounds are the work of a rogue designer who sneaked the audio in without anyone else’s knowledge. Whatever it is, I encourage you to read the rest of the Eurogamer article on Splatoon here—it’s full of curious tidbits, like the fact that around 80% of players use the motion controls.