Nintendo pulled out of Tokyo 2020 Olympic opening ceremony, report claims • Eurogamer.net

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic opening ceremony featured a suite of video game music – together with tracks from Ultimate Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and Sonic the Hedgehog – however one writer was notably lacking from the lineup. The place was Nintendo? In accordance with leaked paperwork, it appears that there have been as soon as plans for the writer to be extra concerned with the opening ceremony, with Nintendo songs included within the soundtrack and numerous Mario-themed shenanigans.

The information comes through Japanese media outlet Shukan Bunshun, which has obtained a number of paperwork for the opening ceremony starting from April 2020 to July this 12 months. In accordance with these plans, the occasion would have featured performances impressed by the “8-bit world of video video games” together with Tremendous Mario and Area Invaders, overseen by Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto.

One composition plan dated 4th October 2020 featured a proposal that may have seen the return of the warp pipes from the Rio de Janeiro Olympics closing ceremony… with one thing of a twist. One graphic reveals Woman Gaga coming into a pipe, solely to re-emerge as comic Naomi Watanabe (sporting a blonde wig and pink cap).

A music listing dated sixteenth June 2021, in the meantime, included 5 Nintendo songs that by no means made it to the occasion. The principle theme of The Legend of Zelda, the opening of Pokémon and tracks from Tremendous Mario Bros. have been apparently as a result of be performed through the athletes’ entrance march.

Shukan Bunshun additionally studies that Miyamoto at one level attended conferences concerning the opening ceremony, and that Nintendo was as a result of supervise the present. Ultimately, all of the music was eliminated – and Nintendo had no presence within the closing ceremony. Shukan Bunshun means that the chopping and altering of previously-arranged ceremony content material may need influenced Nintendo.

As defined by the Japan Times [paywall], the unique proposal despatched to the IOC (and leaked to Shukan Bunshun) detailed plans for the opening ceremony to be a celebration of Japanese popular culture, that includes the Akira bike, riffs on “Neo Tokyo”, and dancers fitted in uniforms to symbolize completely different practice stations. The IOC reportedly favored the plans proposed by choreographer Mikiko Mizuno and her workforce, however due to Covid-19 and a sequence of PR disasters, issues started to crumble. As a result of 12 months delay brought on by the pandemic, a brand new inventive director referred to as Hiroshi Sasaki was introduced on board in December 2020. Sasaki reportedly lower a lot of the content material and sidelined Mizuno, who subsequently left the workforce together with a number of different members. In Spring 2021, Sasaki was the main target of a scandal for suggesting that Watanabe ought to be dressed as an “Olympig”, following which he resigned from his place.

The issues did not cease there: on twentieth July musician Keigo Oyamada resigned as a composer for the ceremony after an interview surfaced wherein he boasted about abusing classmates with disabilities. Then final week, a day earlier than the ceremony, present director Kentaro Kobayashi resigned after a skit resurfaced on-line wherein he made a Holocaust joke. And all this after the pinnacle of the organising committee for the Tokyo video games, Yoshiro Mori, resigned in February for making sexist feedback.

The Video games themselves haven’t precisely been widespread in Japan, too. Many Japanese individuals really feel that holding the Video games mid-pandemic is harmful for public well being, and too costly to host – all for an occasion spectators can’t attend. An Asahi Shimbun poll discovered that 55 p.c of respondents didn’t need the Video games to go forward, and protestors gathered exterior the stadium through the opening ceremony to name for his or her cancellation.

With this mix of scandals and controversy over whether or not the Video games ought to even be going down, maybe it is no shock that Nintendo sat this one out.