Miyamoto’s definitely teasing something with this Super Mario shirt

Shigeru Miyamoto appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon this week wearing a shirt that’s garnered some attention from Nintendo fans. Turns out they may have been right for analyzing his fashion choice, as Nintendo of America’s senior product marketing manager Bill Trinen teased on Twitter.

Miyamoto wore a striking red T-shirt with an image of Mario in a samurai costume for his Tonight Show spot. Some fans admired the item as a stylish, unique fashion piece, but others felt confident that it pointed toward something more.

Reddit users, as we previously reported, immediately saw it as an explicit hint about the next Super Mario game, which we know is bound for Nintendo Switch at some point in the future. Since we’ve seen so little of that title thus far, however, it was hard to see their speculation as anything more than just that: speculation.

Trinen all but confirmed that their speculation was not unfounded. Although he hasn’t said where Samurai Mario will appear — if at all — we now know that the costume is more significant than just emblematic of Miyamoto’s sartorial aesthetic.

Miyamoto even went so far as to wear the shirt a second time during his New York trip this week. We attended a press event where the designer was speaking, and he was once again wearing the samurai Mario piece.

Chelsea Stark/Polygon

It’s a move reminiscent of another beloved game creator: Hideo Kojima, who subtly teased his title Death Stranding by wearing a T-shirt bearing its initials just before the game’s reveal at E3 2016.

Thoughts diverge on what this could all mean. There’s a chance it could have to do with Super Mario Run, the new mobile game that Miyamoto swung by The Tonight Show to promote. Most agree that it must pertain to Super Mario on Switch, a game we know next-to-nothing about. They’re already postulating that a samurai Mario outfit could mean we’ll see the plumber double-jumping around a diverse world, visiting several themed areas on his travels.

Even with almost nothing to go off, we analyzed the five seconds of gameplay we’ve seen from the Nintendo Switch’s Mario adventure, which is unnamed and undated. Here’s to another several months of heavy investigation into a minute piece of evidence.