You Can Use The Shovel Knight Amiibo Without Taking It Out Of The Box
The first third-party amiibo figure was released last weekend — Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight. If this is the first time you’ve heard about this, it’s too late to buy one. The good news is that Yacht Club is prepared to run as many Shovel Knight printings as possible to satisfy demand, so if you can wait, you’ll eventually find one for market price.
A day or so after the Shovel Knight amiibo was out, social media began reporting an interesting fact about it: the amiibo could be scanned and used with the Shovel Knight game without taking it out of the box. Up to this point. Nintendo’s amiibo have come packaged with a piece of foil between the figure’s bottom and the plastic blister packaging, forcing them to be removed in order to be used with a game. This didn’t appear to be the case for Shovel Knight. Was this an accident, or intentional?
Yacht Club responded a couple days later, and said….it WAS intentional. They’re the ones paying to have these amiibos made, and though they must license Nintendo’s packaging, they’re free to exclude the foil if they want. They chose to because they’re aware of the collector’s market and the fact that a lot of people might not WANT to remove Shovel Knight from his box.
“We got a lot of feedback from fans before release who wanted to be able to scan the amiibo inside the packaging so they could still use the figure [in-game] while keeping it as a collector’s item,” David D’Angelo of Yacht Club told Polygon. “We didn’t see much issue with their request: while you can stand with a 3DS in store and try to scan it — we didn’t think that was actually something people would do due to the nature of the content we were making.”
The Shovel Knight amiibo unlocks extra content in both the Wii U and 3DS versions of Shovel Knight.