Article for Maitre
By MaitreDesBlocsI feel like really catching up with sharing recent findings that I’ve been keeping to myself for a while, so here goes with another thread! I know that the title of this thread sounds a bit like clickbait, but this is literally how crazy this is. Nintendo plagiarized Disney in Endless Ocean: Blue World and I believe that almost no one who worked on this game had any idea about it. Here’s how this happened and how this was found.
At this point you might be wondering if I posted this on the wrong board, since I am talking about Endless Ocean: Blue World but yet posting this on the message board for the first game, and no. This is exactly where it belongs as the root of this discovery was
actually made in the first game, even if this one is only partially plagiarizing Disney. This all started when I found a file in this game’s “interface” folder called “c00btes2.tdl” on the 24th of January, 2021. “c00b” is a common beginning for interface textures names, but I was more interested in the “tes2” part, meaning “test 2” (there is also a “tes1”, but that will be the focus of another article). At the time of finding of this file, I was still using the emulator to dump textures, so I hacked in a texture swap with the calendar texture, then opened the calendar to dump the mysterious texture. To my surprise, it corresponded to a very, very old version of the game’s main menu:
Where the investigation all started.
We know that this is a menu as it displays a very old version of the game’s logo (interestingly showing it both in English and katakana), and the text below reads “Press A to continue”. One of the most interesting things about this title screen, is that it is currently one of the oldest snapshots of development that we have about this game, and there are many reasons for me to believe this. Here they are, listed in order:
1) The early design of the logo is unlike anything seen since. The font used for the logo is actually very similar to a font used in a loading screen of Everblue, a game made by Arika before Endless Ocean and also a spiritual prequel to the game.
2) Even the Everblue games have dynamic title screens with moving effects, which this title screen doesn’t have at all. I believe that for this reason, it is pretty fair to say that this title screen was made to be temporary, and was never considered to be part of the final game.
3) The lighting/fog engine in which this photo was taken looks to be primitive. The shadows, light colors and fog colors are unlike anything seen in the game. This image was either a model render,
or something taken in a very early underwater scene, before most of the final game’s effects were created. In either case, I suspect that the reason for this is because it was made before beautiful picturesof actual in-game scenes could be created.
4) The terrain it displays does not correspond to terrain from any of the maps included in the final game (I checked thoroughly). The terrain is not even part of the
test stage, which leads me to believe that it might predate even the earliest terrain found in the game’s files.
5) There is a weird fan-like purple coral that seems to either have been added post-editing, or that existed back then and has since been removed. This coral does not exist in the final game at all, and its texture is not present in the files (once again, I checked thoroughly).
The other most surprising part about this old title screen to me, after its old status, is how the water in the background looks. It definitely couldn’t be how the water looked in the game ever, because of how different, yet detailed it looks. I immediately guessed that this was some artist’s rendition or some free asset used to provide a background to an unfinished underwater scene. As the old title screen was probably meant to be used for a tech demo more than a final game product, this made sense.
At this point, I thought that I understood this title screen well, and started grouping it with other early development history snapshots. I was ready to make a thread about it in the near future (remember, this was back in January of 2021), and I thought that I was done with this.
I didn’t understand the true implications of this image until the 20th of April, 2021, when I decided to watch Finding Nemo again. I wanted to watch it again for nostalgia, but also because of the suspicion I had that the developers were inspired by it when they made Endless Ocean. This was mostly because of development screenshots shared by Ichirō Mihara on Twitter, which show various early zoom screenshots with a clownfish, which I jokingly theorized could’ve been an internal joke between the developers of Marlin looking for his lost son in every single zoom of the ocean. Here is the Tweet in question:
Exibit A. Everblues loading screen.
Exibit C. There are also Aquarium panel textures in Endless Ocean: Blue World showing one single clownfish in different zooms
During my viewing of Finding Nemo, I was looking to see if anything connected to Endless Ocean, either with these zoom pictures or something else, but never did I expect that I would pause on the first image of the movie.
“It so happens that the water surface, rays and background are 100% identical to the ones used in the early title screen.“
Finding Nemo’s opening scene starts with Marlin and Coral, a clownfish couple, overlooking the empty blue of the open ocean from a coral reef cliff. The first frames of the movie, however, do not even show the clownfish. They simply show the empty ocean before panning to the left and then showing the clownfish and the reef. Before the camera even got there, I noticed that the water looked familiar, so I paused.
It so happens that the water surface, rays and background are 100% identical to the ones used in
the early title screen. I was completely baffled by this. I guess one or a few artists were looking for a temporary water background and either watched Finding Nemo and thought “hey, we could use this!”, or simply thought about the movie and went to it to grab a screenshot from it. Either way, this is complete and blatant (albeit hilarious) plagiarism, and looking at how Arika and Nintendo both are with this kind of stuff, I expect that only one or very few of the team members knew about the source of the image.
Someone could argue that this is not that bad because the title screen was a test anyway (even indicated by the file name) and therefore not something that was supposed to be seen by players or even make it to the final release.
This is true, and something that I agree with, even though I love that it stayed in the files because this is both funny and informative about the development history of the game (we now know of at least one direct connection between Endless Ocean and Finding Nemo).
However, arguably one of the funniest things about this whole thing is that the plagiarism was re-added back into
Endless Ocean: Blue World. It turns out that the same water background was re-used for the Dolphin leveling up requests in Hayako’s menu:
Therefore, while Endless Ocean only plagiarized Disney internally, Endless Ocean: Blue World did it again and it stuck even in the final release. It is possible that
both occurences were by the same artist or developer, and it is pretty much certain that Nintendo and its QA had no clue about this before the game’s release, and maybe still don’t know at all.
Exibit E. Background water look familiar?
