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Incidentally: This Forgotten ‘Touch Me Tour’ Tent Proves Nintendo Isn’t 100% Family Friendly In The DS Era

Download Touch Me Tour 2005
Image: Robin Hosgood

Nintendo has always had a reputation as a family-friendly brand, going back to the NES days when the company thoroughly censored many of its games to make sure they weren’t likely to cause offense. While the company’s stance is said to have softened during the GameCube years, by the time the DS came out, Nintendo was poised to enter a new era of family-friendly marketing – and the results spoke for themselves. increased, with the DS selling more than 150 million units worldwide.

However, Slopes game room discovered part of a promotion from this period was embarrassingly mature and very much at odds with Nintendo’s typical stance. In the United Kingdom ‘Download’ Heavy Metal Festival in 2005 – which featured plays such as Black Sabbath, My Chemical Romance, Billy Idol, Motörhead, Slipknot and Megadeth – Nintendo erected a tent as part of the ‘Touch Me’ Tour to advertising a DS console with a touch screen.

Inside are demo groups where festivalgoers can try out the latest DS titles, but one of the tent’s main attractions is the open microphone section, where attendees are encouraged to step up and tell jokes, with the results being broadcast not only inside the tent but also outside through the big screen.

As you can imagine, the kind of jokes told by drunken and rather loud rock fans wouldn’t correlate very closely with Nintendo’s usual marketing stance, and it’s been said that the stand managers get access to a button designed to cut the audio short if any of the jokes become ‘adult’ (spoiler alert: most of them did). Amazingly, though, Nintendo didn’t make any effort to remove the opening microphone part from the tent in the three days it was in use, so it’s clear whoever was responsible shouldn’t have a problem. big with it.

Indeed, despite the tendency to see this as something of a misjudged PR ploy on Nintendo’s part, it seems whoever arranged the tent was fully aware of what was to come. Embellished on one side of the tent is ‘The Bear’, a rudimentary figure created for Leigh Francis’ late night sketch show Bo ‘Selecta.

To my surprise, no footage of the inside of the tent appeared online. If you attended Downloads that year, let us know in a comment – maybe you were brave enough to go on stage and tell one of your best (worst) jokes?

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