Sunday, June 12, 2005

The next hoax

Unfortunately, the mysterious website Nintendoon.co.uk turns out to be almost definitely fake. The person behind the ominous company Melee Webdesign (which doesn´t seem to be registered anywhere) is called William McClean. He just turned 25 and must have been a Nintendo fan for some time. He´s still registered with this Nintendo fanpage. Though he never posted much, it´s clear that he owned Nintendo systems and is probably a fan. Before getting Nintendoon.co.uk, he had a number of other websites dealing with Nintendo; namely Nintendopower.co.uk, Nintendo-E-Reader.co.uk and Touch-DS.MeleeWebDesign.com. They are all defunct now. I saw the last one and, though decently done, it was a microsite, at best. What intrigued me was that the flash intro to the new site - cunningly titled pre-release.swf - looked quite impressive for a fanjob.

He is probably a professional web designer, alright. In that sense, the company is most likely real. But simply the fact that he must be described as a Nintendo fan strongly suggests the whole thing was done on his own initiative - so it´s a hoax. If he wanted to attract attention to his company, it´s a successful hoax to boot. I emailed him and confronted him with my findings. I´ll post his reply once (and if) I get it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have your read this months UK issue of Nintendo Official Magazine there’s a W McClean listed in the Chain Comps Challenge. Could this be him?

Anonymous said...

The microsite that was related to the DS revealed information that wasn't known at the time about the DS.

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