We don't often hear about Nintendo releasing a bad game, but if the online grapevine is speaking the truth about the just-announced Everybody 1-2 Switch due out later this month, we could be looking at a rare bomb from the famed publisher.  See, it all goes back to 2017 when the Switch had a tiny library and people were caught up in that fever of buying lots of stuff for a new console.  The Switch was the new kid on the block, everyone loved it, and games were bought rather they were good or not.  One such title, 1-2 Switch from Nintendo, was a collection of tech demo mini-games in the style of Wii Play aimed at the family and casual markets, and apparently it sold a lot after being produced for a modest cost.  That's when things get weird, as last year over at Fanbyte, Imran Khan told us about a sequel in the works that, at the time, seemed like it would never be released because Nintendo's own internal playtesting pegged it as absolutely terrible.

When playtesting groups received the game, the feedback to the development team was brutal. The target audiences Nintendo was hoping to hit — families with children — found the games boring; many didn’t even want to play through entire rounds. In the Bingo example, one player would use the joycon to mime digging out a number before reading it off the TV screen — a process that playtesters reported as tedious.

The main mode of the game, the Team Battle Mode, pit at least two teams of players against each other in various minigames. This mode prominently featured Horse, who would give color commentary during the games. During the localization process, sources started calling the game “Horseshit” as shorthand.

Yikes.  There's a few theories as to why Nintendo is releasing this game now, and most of them involve the company having spent so much on development that they can't just cancel the project (including an angle that the publisher printed up the cases and title cards long before anyone knew how bad the game would test).  I jokingly say that Nintendo needs to get Horse out there now so he can appear in the next Super Smash Bros.  There can be an allure to bad media (I enjoy the films featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax, for instance), so there might be some value in spreading the word through the mists of the gaming community that the new Nintendo party game is so bad, you just have to see it, but it seems obvious this game is being sent out to fail and be done.  Not every game can be The Legend of Zelda!