Cabel Sasser didn’t think much of it when he asked his teenage nephew Max if twenty dollars was a good price for Firewatch. That was around last Christmas, about six weeks before the price would be announced. It was very much on his mind at the time: Sasser is the co-founder of the Portland-based software company Panic, Inc., which funded Firewatch’s two-year-plus development.

“It was an extremely fast conversation,” Sasser remembers. “He seemed enthusiastic and I was content that we had arrived at a teen-friendly price.”

When Max, writing as Pingu the Noscoper, posted his account of the conversation — “my uncle works with the game he asked if $20 was good and I said yeah” — Cabel was as pleasantly amused as the rest of the Campo Santo team. “Right up until Nels typed some words that made me instantly freeze in place: ‘Wait a minute, do any of us have a weird nephew who might actually be posting those?’

“I very frantically launched Steam and pulled up the Steam profile of Pingu the Noscoper and clicked the little ‘Past Usernames’ drop-down. I recognized another handle of my nephew’s in the list — somewhere above ‘Papa John,’ ‘Guy Fieri’,’ and ‘GuyFieri’ — and lost my mind. Nobody could believe I was the uncle. Least of all me.”

The boy who cried Uncle from Nintendo was, for once, telling the truth — not that anyone believed him. “When I wrote it I didn’t know that it was a meme or a famous phrase kids say to act cool,” Max says. “I still can’t really remember why I was in the Firewatch forums, but I saw the post [asking how much the game would cost] and I thought why not comment on it.”

“Wait a minute, do any of us have a weird nephew who might actually be posting those?”

Sasser didn’t let on to Max that he knew about this until late February, a few weeks after the game was released. He told the story to the whole Sasser family at his daughter’s second birthday party. “When I got to the part about his post I could see he was getting really nervous — his glasses actually steamed up a little bit as his face flushed — which is exactly how I would have felt.”

“Right as I heard him say someone at Campo Santo found something on the Firewatch forums,” Max recalls, “my face practically turned red instantly and I started laughing, I knew exactly what this was about. My entire family couldn’t tell why I was laughing so hard until he said ‘…and Pingu the Noscoper was our Max!’”

Above: Cabel Sasser embraces his nature.

For what was possibly the first time in history, an uncle from Nintendo was actually real. It was quite a revelation for Sasser. When he was Max’s age, he’d call bullshit on anyone trying to get away with some ‘uncle from Nintendo’ nonsense. And now, here he was: that nonsense.

“I still have Nintendo’s customer service number memorized by heart — 1–800–422–2602 — because I would call all the time just to ask the poor game counselors questions about new games,” says Sasser. “My parents would sometimes buy me import Famitsu magazines from Japan from the local Japanese store, so I was really, really tuned into the reality of games in the 80’s and 90’s. Put another way, you couldn’t get anything past me. I would very voraciously call BS anytime somebody tried to float some nonsense about Super Mario 9 featuring Metroid or whatever, and I’m positive this stuff came up a lot in the hallways of my school.

“I was the uncle-buster, and now I’m the uncle,” reflects a thoughtful Sasser.

If we live in a world where the Uncle from Nintendo can really exist — what else might exist? An alligator in the sewer? A psychopath calling the babysitter from inside the house? An escaped killer with a hook for a hand, menacing teenagers at Makeout Point? Could they all be real, too? And if so, how many of them are Cabel Sasser?

Who knows. But the next time someone insists to you that Mario is Luigi’s son, think to yourself: Maybe he knows what he’s talking about. Maybe there’s an uncle.