Splatoon

About

Splatoon is a third-person shooter announced for Wii U video game console during the Nintendo Digital Event at the 2014 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

History

Splatoon was first announced during the Nintendo's E3 Digital Event on June 10th, 2014. The title gained notability for its unique take on the shooter genre and for being one of Nintendo's first new products for hardcore gamers.

Gameplay

In Splatoon, players compete against rival teams to cover a battlefield in ink. Whichever team has splattered more ink across the field by the end of the match wins. Players can walk and shoot ink while in human form and switch into a squid to swim through their own team's ink. On May 7th, Nintendo released an official Nintendo Direct dedicated to Splatoon, in which they showed and explained nearly all of the game's features and the gameplay.

Online Relevance

The same day, two Reddit^[1][2] posts highlighting the trailer reached the front page, with each gathering upwards of 2,500 upvotes in the first 72 hours.

"Squid Kid" Commercial

On May 12th, 2015, Nintendo America released the official TV commercial for Splatoon, titled "Squid Kid." The commercial was met with mixed reviews, with the official Youtube video (shown below) reaching more than 3,700 dislikes against 3,100 likes in the 8 days following its upload.

Alongside the criticism, the lyrics of the song used in the commercial, aimed at a younger audience, quickly became a target of mock by the more mature fans of the game. The most notable examples of this was the opening lyric, which repeated "You're a kid" and "You're a squid" several to promote the game's feature of turning into a squid; and the closing lyrics, which quickly repeated "Spla". Both lyrical sections were quickly met with various photoshops and other edits.

Fandom

On June 14th, 2014, NeoGAF Forums^[4] member maxcriden posted a thread about Splatoon fan art. Within five days of its announcement, over 350 fan arts were uploaded to DeviantArt under the tag "#splatoon."

Release and Reaction

Splatoon was released in Japan on May 28th, 2015, in North America and Europe on May 29th, 2015, and in Australia on May 30th, 2015. The user reviews were overwhelmingly positive – it received an almost 82% ranking on GameRankings^[5] and Metacritic gave it an 81 based on 67 critics.^[6] It debuted first in the Japanese Software sales chart, selling over 144,000 copies in its first week. Many of these copies were pre-installed on new Wii U consoles, causing the overall sales of the system to rise by 10,000 units.^[7] In addition, over 100,000 amiibo were sold to accompany the game.^[8]

As Splatoon rolled out all over the world, it was mentioned on Twitter over 25,000 times a day for the week after the release.^[9] Searching for the keyword "splatoon" on Tumblr returned hundreds of results. DeviantArt returned over 4,800 results for keyword "splatoon" as of June 5th, 2015.^[3]

A popular type of Tumblr post consisted of a screenshot of in-game chatlogs. These are customizable, and users may use the console to draw stipple-type drawings that can be used in the chat. The screenshot or photo is then posted to Tumblr or another social network.

Splatoon 2 Release

On July 6th, 2017, Nintendo unveiled two new character, Pearl and Marina, two pop idols in the group "Off The Hook." They take the place of the first game's Marie and Callie, who were split following one of the game's "Splatfests."^[10] In advance of the game's July 21st release, Nintendo is releasing the demo, and players with the demo will be able to compete in the first Splatfest on July 15th from 12-4pm EST, choosing between "cake" and "ice cream." Nintendo also announced that a Smartphone App allowing Switch owners to communicate with the device on the 21st.^[11]

Search Interest

External References