What the heck is going on with the official Kirby website? Only Kafka knows

The official Kirby website has undergone a strange metamorphosis that may indicate some news is on the way, and definitely indicates some web designer enjoys the works of Franz Kafka.

As spotted by eagle-eyed fans on the Kirby subreddit, Nintendo is doing something to its official Kirby site. The site's new News section, which was spotted by the Wayback Machine for the first time yesterday and was pulled offline as I wrote this, was formerly composed of six test articles. Each one has the placeholder title of "News article title text goes here" and standard "lorem ipsum" filler for its description, but click into the article itself and things get Kafkaesque fast.

Each story is composed of the first few paragraphs of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in which protagonist Gregor Samsa awakens only to realize he has transformed into a giant bug in his sleep. The news stories even break a few of the later paragraphs out into bullet points, as if Samsa wondering what strange fate has befallen him is a cool new feature in the next Kirby adventure.

The Metamorphosis is arguably Kafka's best known work - that or The Trial - but until we get six identical news articles on the Zelda site about Josef K. being arrested at work for unspecified crimes, I guess the popularity contest is settled. The 1915 novella is also an odd thing to find on the official Kirby website, even if it's clearly meant to be a placeholder for something else.

Fans are speculating that Nintendo may be prepping the new section of the Kirby site for an upcoming reveal, which is easy to believe since we haven't gotten an all-new Kirby platformer since Kirby: Planet Robobot hit 3DS in 2016. However these website changes shake out, I'll never look at Bugzzy quite the same way again.

Kafka or no, see what new games we're looking forward to from Nintendo with our guide to upcoming Switch games.

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.