“Write an🐼 article about hidden grown-up jokes in Ninte♏ndo games,” TheGamer CEO told me.

“Impossible!” I cried. “Nintendo is the most wholesome, lovable company on the planet. You wouldཧ never be able to find a single crude joke in any of its family-friendly gameography. I’ll never do it. Never. Never. Never ... Yeah, okay."

That's the story of how I set out to find these mysterious Nintendo jokes. I knew it to be a fool’s errand. Sure, Pixar is replete with hidden off-color jokes for parents. Those Hollywood types sold their soul long ago. But Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto would never debase themselves🙈 to such icky stuff. I was wrong.

Hidden in the deepest recesses of Mario and Zelda and Pokémon were the most surprising references I’ve ever encountered. Also most were not hidden at all, and like, right there for you to see. I was appalled. I also laughed a lot. Sure, my childhood had been completely corrupted just like those no-good icky Hollywood sellouts had done to me, but these are really funny. You might think that you’ve seen a bunch of these jokes before. I can assure you that you will find some new ones here. I had no idea how weird Paper Mario was, or how many people wanna get with Link—even going back to Ocarina days. And Pokémon? Not as cute and fluffy as you thought.

24 ♓ The Pokéballs ⭕On Her

To prove that Pokémon is more off the wall than you might think, may I present to you Exhibit Facepalm: a lady trainer making an innuendo about where she hides her pokéballs. Now she may be hiding in them in any number of innocent places, I hear your protest. But do you really think Nintendo doesn’t know how this sounds? Of course, they do. It was intentional. I’m afraid she’s packing her pokéballs like she’s smuggling them through customs. Shigeru Miyamoto was standing behꦗind the designers the whole time, spreading some gelatinous substan🐓ce everywhere, and ordering them to do it. Is there no stopping this man? When will it be enough, Shigeru!?

23 Toadstool's Mi🦋dnight Fun

In Super Mario RPG, Mario finally gets access to Peach’s bedroom. Players quickly discovered there’s a secret item hidden behind the fireplace marked “Peach’s ???” The Princess gets super embarrassed and throws Mario out. In the Japanese version, the item has 3 Xs. That’s right. Princess Peach got as made as your mom did that one time you went rifling through top-drawer without permission. This joke is so raunchy for a Mario game, it blows my mind they kept it in. Legend has it that the developers desperately tried to release the game without any innuendos. They were almost successfu🍌l, but Nintendo had a break-in the night before the game was finished. Traces of Jelly were found next to the monitors in the morning.

22 🌜 Everybody Wants Link's Master Sword

When I played Breath of the Wild, I was struck by the constant onslaught of not-so-subtle remarks that everyone in Hyrule wants Link’s Master Sword. I had chalked it up to a one-time thing, but looking back on these past titles, I realize there were references to Link’s attractiveness throughout the franchise. I chalk it up to some strange clause in Shigeru Miyamoto’s contract. Take this screenshot: with a wink-wink, nudge nudge, an NPC tells Link that he could run a different business if he looked as good as him. Now that could mean a variety of things, but I just lied and it really only means one and we both know it. This dude is talking about a Magic Mike-themed Legend of Zelda or maybe a Hyrule institution run by Game of Thrones’ Littlefinger.

21 Zero Dꦚark Mario

This gag is an old Paper Mario classic. It’s a prime example of meta-humor, meaning a self-referential joke calling attention to the creation of the game itself in the outside world. It’s also a perfect showcase for the Paper Mario type of humour, which is often edgier than the rest. A Shy Guy locks Mario up and warns that he can’t do more without raising the game’s rating. It’s a clever way of making you imagine the horrible things he’d do to Mario without any of it being explicit. Since I still have a word count to hit, I’m going to describe them to you. Naturally, Shy Guy would perform every move from Zero Dark Thirty. Then he’d probably take Mario boarding on the water…. I mean, in a fun Super Mario Sunshine way… yeah.

20 Tastes Like Milk 💛

Banjo-Kazooie wasn’t messing around with their suggestive material. Midway through the game, Banjo has the honor of attending “Grab-A-Sailor-Night.” I’m going to just let that name sit for a while. At the event, you can spend five doubloons to buy a tankard seamen’s brew. It’s just the kind of adult joke that makes the ESRB grind its teeth. They have to allow ꧙it because it has a perfectly innocent meaning. Is it Rare’s fault if their brew is milky white and delicious? Fun with homophones! Again, I’m impressed by Rare’s brazenness. They didn’t let the fact they were making a kid’s game stop them from being absolutely filthy.

19 🍷 A Geek's Dreamland 🐼

If you thought Kirby would be safe from suggestive innuendo in wholesome Nintendo games, think again. In Kirby Dream Land 2, the d🌞evelopers show us exactly what their Dream Land looks like by designing a level in a very peculiar way. The blocks obviously resembles a familiar shape, which the designers needed to have described to them because they had no references themselves to draw on. If you think about it, Kirby is a pretty suggesting character himself. He’s an anthropomorphic ball whose entire purpose is to suck and blow things. To the developer’s sorrow, Shigeru Miyamoto proposed the idea himself. Kirby’s hoovering is a metaphor for the rate at which he goes through boxes and boxes of Jelly.

18 Breakღing And Entering Hearts

I am going to go out a limb and posit that there is no Nintendo game more suggestive than The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. During his travels, Link reads a woman’s diary and she mentions how she’d like him to tune her bow because “it’s been WAAAY too long.” In case the capital letters and multiple As didn’t tip you off, it’s signed “Lonely Arrow Girl.” This episode is not an aberration. Throughout the entire game, everybody is talking about how hot Link is. Since all of this is clearly canon in this world, it makes you wonder how Link is responding to all these advances i🔯n the mature version of this story. It’s more than likely he’s saving Hyrule by slowly repopulating it himself.

17 ෴ Nintendo Couldn't Help Themselves 🅘

Consider Nintendo’s dilemma for one moment: they have branded themselves as a family-friendly console yet their motion controls lend themselves best to shooters. How do you reconcile the two? By creating a game where characters shoot paint at each other instead of metals projectiles and instead perish slowly at all the toxic chemical exposure in their lungs. It seemed like a good family friendly compromise… until Nintendo couldn’t help but release one of the many adult jokes they’d been holding back. It’s hard to keep a straight face when you’re writing splat your ink zone all the time. Marina adds a suggestive ellipsis, showi♏ng that Nintendo isn’t above the occasional tongue-and-cheek adult barb even in their most wholesome shooters.

16 ꦇ 🦹 Ample Stage Presence

Paper Mario is famous in the Mario series for having the edgiest humor. Nowhere is that more prominent than in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Mario gains many new friends to help him out on his journey, but none quite have the design that Madame🐭 Flurrie does. Madame Flurrie is a wind spirit and former starlet who quit life in the spotlight to focus on her health and being sassy full-time. Her character definition here refers to her ♔ample… stage presence. A sure sign… that there’s some other material here that relies on ellipses. How else are the Nintendo writers going to signal to you that they’re hilarious and in on the joke?

15 🐼 ⭕ He's Keeping It... For A Friend

What is it with shopkeepers in The Legend of Zelda series? Every single one of them has some weird creepy interest. Here Link stumbles into a shop wearing a girl’s mask. The shopkeeper apparently can’t keep his focus and even offers to look after 🔯the mask for a while. That wouldn’t normally give me pause if it weren’t for the ellipsis “…” right before he says it. Ew. Since Link is a silent protagonist, we can only guess at his reactions to these requests. Perhaps he is mortified as we are. I like to imagine him as blissfully unaware of the human cesspool that is every single Hyrule town. Plot twist: Ganondorf is really the good guy trying to rid the world of all these sicꦅk and twisted townspeople, but Link keeps setting them free.