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This outrageous skydiving video is the Switch ad Nintendo should have made

This outrageous skydiving video is the Switch ad Nintendo should have made

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Don’t try this at home

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Nintendo is known for keeping things weird, and yet not even the Japanese game company’s big, splashy Switch launch earlier this year can keep pace with this mock ad for the console from Russian YouTube channel Юзя, via Kotaku.

The video, shot through a series of first-person action cam angles, shows two globetrotting daredevils traverse a number of different environments all while playing the Switch. From roofs to trains to jumping out of a honest-to-god airplane, the duo show off the play-anywhere philosophy of the Switch better than Nintendo could have ever imagined. Oh, did I forget to mention that one of them is pretending to be a Donkey Kong character the entire time?

(It’s worth noting that, when you slow the video down enough, you can see that the gameplay screen showing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild appears to have been edited in after the fact. Still, they took a Switch skydiving! And that counts for something.)

It’s a strange project, to be sure, but also a mesmerizing and beautifully shot video. It even features some tunes from San Francisco-based producer Grimecraft, whose songs mix and mash every imaginable retro auditory flourish video games have to offer with a dizzying number of modern electronic genres.

The whole package is the kind of outlandish marketing stunt a company like Nintendo could certainly pull off, if only its campaign managers were a series of artistic 20-somethings from Russia with a YouTube channel... and a skydiving license.