Nintendo celebrated the anniversary of its Pokemon Masters mobile game over the weekend by rolling out a series of Pokemon Masters EX updates. The company had ample cause to celebrate, as the game grossed a whopping $33 million in its first month and was downloaded tens of millions of times.
Yet all that revenue still couldn’t pay for a quality control specialist who could steer Nintendo away from its accidentally horny social media promotion.
Nintendo also launched the #PokemonMastersEX hashtag on Twitter to mark the occasion, replete with a Pokemon trainer avatar reminiscent of the first-generation Pokemon Game Boy titles. Unfortunately, the hashtag takes on a vastly different meaning without the intended punctuation, and thousands of #pokemonmastersex tweets soon made the rounds. (As in “Pokemon Master SEX.”)
Pokemon Master Sex memes
Plenty of people feigned shock at the lewd hashtag.
Others applauded Nintendo for its handiwork. Maybe the company’s social media team knew what it was doing all along.
Others still banished the gaming company to horny jail.
Many Twitter users failed to reach a verdict on what exactly the hashtag was trying to say.
Even if the #pokemonmastersex was a blunder on Nintendo’s part, it probably ended up earning the company more free promotion than a less suggestive hashtag would have. Well played, Nintendo.