Nintendo Switch NES Golf Game Only Works On July 11 As Tribute To Late President

A few days back we talked about hackers digging into the software that runs the Nintendo Switch and discovering a version of NES Golf. This version of the classic Nintendo golf game was enabled with Joy-Con motion controls and supported two players. When the game was discovered many wondered how they could access the game on their own console.

The answer to that question according to sleuths who have continued looking into the Golf game is you don't, at least not if the date isn't July 11. Nintendo fans might recognize that date as the anniversary of the death of former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. The game will only activate and play on that date each year, assuming you have connected your Switch to the internet.

Gamers with a new Switch or a Switch that has never been connected to the internet can fool the console into playing the game. Before you connect to the internet with the Switch, it will allow you to manually enter a time and date on the console. You can set that date to July 11 and apparently play the Golf game.

Once the Switch is connected to the internet, even one time, it will then pull the date from the network and block the user from manually entering a date. This fact was discovered by a Switch hacker going by the name yellows8. The user wrote on the Switchbrew forums, "The month+day must match the date of Iwata's death: July 11. The loaded date originates from network-time-sync'd time, regardless of whether the user has it enabled or not. When the system was never connected to the Internet, it comes from the user-specified date instead."

Other than the date requirement, the user has to remove both Joy-Cons from the console and make Iwata's hand gesture used to signal Nintendo Direct (you can see that gesture in the video above from 2014). The hackers claim that when the Golf game launches you will hear a Japanese voice clip from one of the Nintendo Direct presentations that Iwata performed.