The new terms, spotted by Game File, redefine “Nintendo Account Services” to cover pretty much anything fun such as video games, or add-ons. If you so much as breathe near a third-party mod, the company warns it could “render the Nintendo Account Services or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part”.

Nintendo’s small print gets nastier. It says it can suspend access to your games without notice, not just after you break the rules but if it merely thinks you might. Specifically, the company can act if it has "a reasonable belief such a violation... will occur, or as we otherwise determine to be reasonably necessary for legal, technical or commercial reasons". In plain English, "because we felt like it."

Under the revised rules, playing a pirated game earns you a death sentence, as does “modifying, adapting, translating, reverse engineering, decompiling, disassembling, bypassing, decrypting, defeating, tampering with or otherwise circumventing" anything Nintendo slapped a copyright on.

No one yet knows what technical trickery the company will use to brick machines or whether desperate users might manage a resurrection ritual.

What’s clear is that Nintendo is preparing to bring a tactical nuke to its long-running war against hackers and pirates.