image

Every once in awhile, a piece of spoof media gets passed off as legitimate. We’ve seen it happen countless times with The Onion, a satirical website that presents itself as genuine. Over the years, countless Onion articles have been shared and reported on as fact, when they’re nothing but joke pieces. Now that same kind of trend is hitting the gaming side of things.

Hard-Drive is basically the gaming version of The Onion. They publish satirical pieces about the game industry, but now one of their articles has been passed around as the real deal.

In particular, the website put together a piece on the Wii. Their feature joked that Nintendo was going to cause all Wii units to self-destruct in 2023. As absolutely outlandish as that seems, the article started gaining traction, making the rounds on various social media platforms. How someone could take such an obviously fake article as truth is beyond us, but that’s exactly what happened.

Things got so bad that Snopes, a website that built its name on debunking falsehoods, put together an article on the topic. Obviously, Snopes deduced that the article was a farce from the start, and Wiis won’t be exploding in any way, shape, or form. Crazy that we got to this point, but at least things have corrected course!

Add Comment

Comments (7)

hawk

2y ago

I enjoy Hard Drive articles. I guess their status as a "satirical news site" isn't as common knowledge as I thought.


d_says_hi

2y ago

Too many so called journalists are clueless on tech and science and they act as stenographers and this is what you get.


lucius6

2y ago

What the hell, how can someone take that seriously. I'm getting even less confidence in journalists then I already had.


hypnomancy

2y ago

@lucius6

Says something about the current state of things when things that seem too outlandish are now believable


ridleysaria

2y ago

I had to send around 7 Wiis back for repair so there were times when I thought the damn things were going to self destruct. Terrible console, but at least their customer service was great.

Edited 1 time

stil

2y ago

Wait, you mean we *can't* believe everything we read on the internet?


nekotaku

2y ago

Well there's flat earthers and religious people so... People for anything even though it's hard to accept.