“To gamers this is as egregious as trying to play a DVD on a record player.”
Yesterday, BBC Breakfast published a video report on the booming interest in retro games, featuring an interview with UKIE CEO Prof. Nick Poole OBE.
But the segment hasn’t exactly gone over well online, with most people ignoring the content of the piece itself and instead being fixated on a clear and obvious error with the arrangement of the props brought in to illustrate the report (thanks VGC).
In case you somehow miraculously didn’t spot it from the lead image of this article, during the segment, the somehow made the mistake of inserting a Super Mario Bros. NES cart into an SNES — a move that slightly ended up undermining the retro credibility of the report and sparked a ton of reactions online on Twitter/X, Reddit, LinkedIn, and BlueSky.
“Crime spotted on BBC Breakfast this morning…” wrote Chris Brandrick, the editor of Nintendo Switch newsletter Switch Weekly, sharing an image of the segment on BlueSky.
Meanwhile, another person commented in reply, “To gamers this is as egregious as trying to play a DVD on a record player.”
Following the report, a spokesperson for UKIE ended up clarifying how this mistake came to be, telling VGC that though Poole provided the props, he wasn’t the one responsible for setting them up.
“For transparency, the studio team set up the in-studio display independently and handled the placement of the consoles – unfortunately, we couldn’t adjust it whilst on air,” the spokesperson stated.
To give the benefit of the doubt, it’s possible that this wasn’t a case of the BBC studio team misunderstanding the difference between the NES and SNES, but simply someone improvising a way to prop up the cart to better show off the game’s label and underestimating people’s capacity for pointing out errors.
You can watch the full report here (the segment appears at 1hr 48m 49s).
Hailing from Manchester, Jack has a particular fondness for point-and-click adventure games. In the past, he’s written about lost games from studios like Sony Manchester, Genepool Software, and DMA Design, and has made a habit of debunking video game rumours.
