Splatoon 2’s lobby contains a cool musical easter egg

Today saw the launch of Nintendo’s Global Testfire event for Splatoon 2, which marked the public’s first chance to get their hands on the game — albeit in short, one hour bursts sprinkled throughout the weekend.

While messing around with the glorified beta, we noticed something peculiar: The left analog stick allowed you to bend the pitch of certain sound effects in the lobby’s background music. Upon further examination, we discovered that this is true for the entire face of the controller: The Switch’s left Joy-Con’s D-pad activates various sound effects, and the right Joy-Con’s face buttons activate various vocal samples (which can be filtered by twiddling the right analog stick).

By using these in conjunction with one another, you can actually exert quite a bit of control over the game’s music. Above, watch one such jam session, captured during a particularly long Splatoon 2 load time.

As one commenter on Polygon’s YouTube channel pointed out, it’s possible this easter egg was thrown in to ease the loss of Splatoon’s Squid Jump minigame, which was playable on the Wii U gamepad while waiting to join matches:

While it’s not quite a full minigame, it’s easy to imagine idly messing with this while waiting to get into a match in the full release of Splatoon 2, which is due for release later this summer.