Paper Mario: Color Splash

Shufflegate

The game became the subject of a minor online controversy back in 2016, when demo footage was shown during a livestream event at E3. It showed a Toad inviting Mario to participate in a mini-game, involving keeping track of "Five Fun Guys" who keep shuffling around; after Mario reveals that the mini-game is rigged, the Toad says: "I can see the headline now: ‘Shufflegate: Exposed!’". This drew the ire of Zoe Quinn, an indie game developer. Quinn was convinced that the quoted phrases were references to Gamergate, a controversial online campaign which involved accusations that she had slept with "five guys" from the videogame journalism community in exchange for positive coverage. On June 22nd Quinn complained on Twitter that Nintendo had turned her "suffering into a fucking joke". Multiple Twitter users supported her and spoke negatively of Nintendo.

Nintendo released a statement on June 23rd, stating that the jokes were never meant to be a reference to "an online hate campaign", but were simply a shout-out to the "Fungi Fun Guys" from Mario Party 8 and to the Watergate scandal, respectively. On June 24th, Quinn assented on Twitter that the jokes were, in fact, "an extremely specific unfortunate coincidence."