by Doc – Owner, Founder, Thought Smash Would Be The Only Game With This Problem
You’ve probably heard that two unreleased amiibo were datamined for Tears of the Kingdom, being a “Gerudo King” amiibo and a “Zelda” amiibo. Amiibo card makers were quick to start selling cards that function as these amiibo, and it’s served to reignite interest in both amiibo and Tears of the Kingdom. I think it’s pretty cool.
But how were these amiibo datamined, and why do they already work in Tears of the Kingdom when the figures haven’t even been announced yet?
Datamining Amiibo
“Datamining” is a term that really just means “looking through the files of the game to figure out how it works and what content it has”. Tears of the Kingdom was datamined pretty early on, but nobody paid attention to what we’ll call the amiibo list for TOTK. The amiibo list is a set of amiibo IDs that exists in every amiibo-compatible game. If you scan an amiibo into that game, it follows the instructions appropriate to that amiibo.
In Smash Ultimate, for example, scanning a Smash Bros series Mario amiibo will produce a Mario FP. That’s because the ID of the Smash Bros series Mario amiibo is in the amiibo list.
However, if you scan a Super Mario series Mario amiibo, it’ll also produce a Mario FP just like the Smash Bros one. That’s because amiibo-compatible games check for two IDs: one ID tells the game what game series it’s from (the Smash Bros series or Mario series) and then which individual character it is (Mario). Smash Ultimate’s amiibo instructions check the amiibo list for the character ID, not the series ID.
Why Do The TOTK amiibo Work?
The TOTK dataminers looked at the amiibo list in TOTK’s files and found that all the previous Legend of Zelda series amiibo were accounted for, but that there were two more amiibo with the TOTK series ID, but not the Link amiibo ID. They deduced, correctly, that these were TOTK amiibo for characters besides Link. So the dataminers took an amiibo bin file, replaced its character and series ID with the TOTK series ID and the mystery character’s ID, and scanned it into TOTK, proving that it was a real amiibo.
They worked because Nintendo programmed content for these amiibo way ahead of time. Smash Ultimate amiibo trainers have had this problem for years – just about every DLC character had amiibo functionality in the game before their figure was ever released. Every copy of Smash Ultimate can produce a Pyra and Mythra FP if given an amiibo with the right ID. The same is true with TOTK and these two unreleased amiibo.
Why Does Nintendo Do That?
Well, I’m not sure. I imagine it saves Nintendo the hassle of having to issue an update for the amiibo down the line, but I can’t otherwise imagine a benefit to making it so easy for people to find these amiibo and make cards of them before they release. It clearly doesn’t hurt Nintendo’s bottom line (or they would stop doing it), so I don’t think it’s much concern to them. There’s probably a solid argument that having modern day video game mysteries like these would even help keep Nintendo products in the headlines, so they shouldn’t stop doing this any time soon.
Amiibo Doctor 