Mysterious Creatures

Pretty much, yes.

To me 15 years ago 

They think that they’re thieves, agents of an elite criminal group led by Giovanni, stealing rare pokemon and advanced technology and such. And there might have been a time this actually was their jobs. In the first season or two, they frequently get angry phone calls about how they’ve fucked everything up, or get their expense account cut off because they have literally never turned a profit on their criminal enterprises and constantly procure and then lose/destroy expensive and elaborate devices.

But then the world came within a hair’s breadth of being destroyed, several times, and Jesse, James, and their weird cat rescued everybody. As terrible as they’ve always been at criminal endeavors of any kind, when the apocalypse approaches and they’re forced to step up, they’re really fucking good at saving the day.

And Giovanni is over here like… if the planet is destroyed, or time/space becomes unrecognizable, or civilization collapses, there’s no way for me to run a profitable criminal enterprise anymore. I need this planet, because it’s where I keep all my stuff. And I don’t pretend to understand the why of it, but these couple of bumbling nutcases that I should have fired years ago seem to be an important component of that? Somehow? So you gotta stop thinking about them in terms of acquisitions and start considering them… loss prevention. As in, even if you waste a million dollars a month on giant cat-faced robots and a vast array of fancy ball gowns and they never turn a profit, they are preventing all of your assets from going away at the same time because of something you can’t do anything about.

Me: Oh haha, what a weird thing, probably some remnant from the debugging process -

“Since that was a game that Satoru Iwata programmed himself, this could have been intended as a way of saying that Iwata is spiritually a part of every Switch and is watching over and protecting every system.”

Me:

On July 11th*, the date of Iwata’s passing, doing Iwata’s “directly to you” motion with the Joy-Cons on the home screen will play a sound clip of Iwata and launch the game.

(* Before you try this yourself, note that simply changing the date on your system will not work, as this runs off the Switch’s internal internet-synced clock, meaning that changing the date manually will only work if the system has never been connected to the internet)

Firstly, opening the game like this person is in the video is only possible with a brand new unit on system version 1.0.0 that has never been connected to the Internet. Because of this, opening it is pretty hard to replicate, unless if you have a completely brand new Switch. So, even if the system’s internal date is on July 11, it still won’t open if the system version is up to date.

The thing is, it’s not supposed to be opened.

The hidden Golf game has been described as an omamori, which, in Japanese culture, is a charm usually bought at shrines that offers spiritual protection and good luck if you keep it close to you. Sometimes they’re made of cloth, and look like a tiny bag, which can contain a written prayer. People often tie them to something like a purse or a backpack, so that it’s always with them. Here are a bunch of different ones:

Omamori are not supposed to be opened, as doing so is said to remove its blessing.

All of the files of Golf in the Switch system were removed in an update back in late December.

As @lunarhalo24 helpfully pointed out, this inclusion of Golf in the Switch system was meant to be an omamori, a blessing from Iwata. And there’s another important cultural thing about omamori to note here:

An omamori’s blessing is only good until the end of the year, after which it expires and the omamori is traditionally disposed of in a sacred fire. So the files being deleted at the end of last year seems as though it was symbolic of the blessing’s time expiring.