Nintendo support studio Monolith Soft has been making changes to its website which has left fans theorizing that it is gearing up to make an announcement soon.
According to a post in the Nintendo Switch subreddit (opens in new tab), Monolith Soft began making changes to its website (opens in new tab) as recently as yesterday. If you head to it now, you’ll be greeted with a shiny new homepage which is stamped with a ‘2022’ trademark at the bottom of the page.
There are a bunch of reasons why this change might prove significant. First of all – as pointed out in the Reddit post – composer and frequent Monolith Soft collaborator Yasunori Mitsuda tweeted (opens in new tab) on January 21 thanking fans for all of the birthday wishes he had received that day. In the tweet, Mitsuda said: “I’ll be returning the gratitude in the form of my artwork, so please look forward to my first announcement as soon as next month” – meaning February 2022 at the time.
This alone isn’t enough for fans to come to the conclusion that Monolith Soft could be making an announcement soon. However, on that very same day, the studio itself put out a post announcing that its website will be down for a short period due to server maintenance, giving us the shiny new website we have now.
If you take a look at the ‘news’ portion of the website, however, all posts from 2017 – 2022 have been removed with the first news post now being from today announcing the website is back up and running again.
All that doesn’t even mention the fact the studio appears to be hiring for a number of roles at both its Tokyo and Kyoto offices. Unfortunately, the job roles don’t appear to give us a clue into the kind of projects both locations are working on, but we do know that they must be recent listings due to them still appearing on the website after its 2022 revamp.
These changes, along with the studio’s history of developing games such as Xenoblade Chronicles, and assisting Nintendo on games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Splatoon 2, have got fans excited. It’s also worth noting that Nintendo has a long history of hosting Nintendo Direct presentations in February.
We already know Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 is in development at the moment, as is Splatoon 3. We’ll have to wait and see, however, if all of these coincidences actually do line up and we end up getting some kind of Monolith Soft-related announcement this month.
To find out what Nintendo has officially got in the works at the moment, take a look at our upcoming Switch games list.