Doug Bowser chats on LinkedIn about Walmart selling ROM hacks

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser in recent months, it’s that he loves LinkedIn. Just a few months back, Mr. Bowser was caught up in a back-and-forth about plane etiquette on LinkedIn, and now he’s back at it again, but this time the conversation is very much related to Nintendo.

Have you ever gone snooping through Walmart’s official website? While you can purchase all kinds of in-store Walmart items through their website, the company also opened up sales to all sorts of third party vendors. That means you can snag products Walmart will never, ever stock…and apparently that includes some nefarious Nintendo items.

Prof. Stephen E. Dinehart IV put together a LinkedIn post talking about his discovery of Walmart’s website selling ROM hacks for Nintendo games. Again, this is a third party selling these things through Walmart’s website, so it’s more like Walmart by proxy. Nonetheless, you don’t have to dig too deep to find all sorts of unofficial Nintendo projects that were hacked together by fans.

Professor Dinehart made sure to tag both Nintendo and Doug Bowser in his post, and somewhat surprisingly, Mr. Bowser took the time to response. Bowser dropped a comment in the replies thanking Dinehart for bringing the situation to light by saying, “Appreciate the visibility. 👍” It’s most likely Nintendo is already very well aware of the situation, but Bowser saw fit to tip his cap to a do-gooder out there.

You have to wonder if situations like this have anything to do with Walmart and Nintendo having a rocky relationship lately. We’ve seen pre-orders for Switch games cancelled a handful of times in recent months, and Nintendo fans have been trying to figure out what the cause was. We haven’t gotten any official explanation yet, but with Walmart funneling sales of ROM hacks for Nintendo games, you can easily imagine a situation where Nintendo isn’t keen to work with them.