Nintendo drops all subtlety and shoves the Switch 2's mysterious C button straight into our mortal eyes, and at this point I think the "C" stands for "Confusion"

A Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Con being used on its side
(Image credit: Nintendo)

Nintendo Switch 2 frenzy has reached heights heretofore unknown to man ahead of tomorrow's Switch 2 Direct and the additional 7 hours of gameplay Nintendo will reveal later this week through Treehouse streams. But fans' humble quest for answers is far from over – Nintendo just released a video highlighting the Switch 2's strange new C button, and now I'm even more confused.

The video – shared through the Nintendo Today news app, but only to fans located in timezones where it's already April 2 – is barely seven seconds long. It hastily zooms in on the square "C" button people can't comprehend at all, and it offers no additional information. No context. Nintendo simply forces us to ogle the almighty C and its cryptic aura and then cheerfully announces "Today!" along with text indicating it's referring to the Switch 2 direct.

TODAY (Nintendo Today App) from r/NintendoSwitch2

Call me Crazy, Cuckoo, or Close-minded, but I don't feel like this teaser tells us literally anything about the C button other than what we already knew: it's a button stamped with the third letter of the English alphabet.

But those who live and snort Nintendo conspiracies are already cooking up some new theories as to what the C could mean – Community? Call? Cooking Mama? – and, honestly, some of them are convincing. Old rumors claimed there's a "Campus" software hub feature attached, though there's been no hard details on this since.

While enabling cursor mode for the Switch 2's apparent mouse, as one Reddit user suggests, would be interesting, and dispensing corn, as another surmises, would be helpful for my fiber intake, I'm intrigued by the fact that "C" could indicate a chat feature. One fan on Reddit thinks the twinkly little jingle Nintendo Today pairs with the C button sounds a lot like the tune Nintendo used for Wii U Chat, for example, and that doesn't seem like an impossible parallel.

But to know for sure, we'll have to wait for the Switch 2 Direct and C… I mean, see.

Former Nintendo marketing leads say the Wii U flopped so bad that getting third-party support on Switch was "really hard," but the Switch 2 marks a new era: "There's no more proving yourself."

Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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