Now, how about
beyond what’s been released or officially announced? I’m talking about scrapped/unreleased amiibo and potential future amiibo! How can we know things like that? It’s all thanks to the data within each amiibo! If you’re unfamiliar with the data structure of amiibo, I’ll have to explain some things first…
Basically, within the data of each amiibo, there is a string of 16 characters with various hexadecimal values that hold all of the identification info about the amiibo. I’ll use the Isabelle (Winter Outfit) amiibo as an example to explain how this works. Those identifying 16 characters for that specific Isabelle amiibo are as follows:
01810100023F0502
Now if that doesn’t mean anything to you, let’s break it down into parts:
0181 01 00 023F 05 02
The first four characters (or two bytes) contain the character information, organized by franchise. For example: 0000 is Mario, 0001 is Luigi, 0002 is Peach, etc., while 0100 is Link, 0101 is Zelda, and so on. Animal Crossing characters start at 0180, which is Villager, and Isabelle is next in line at 0181. Any Isabelle amiibo should have this exact value here.
The next two characters/single byte tells if this is a certain variation of the character in question. Usually this is 00 in most cases, meaning that’s the standard, non-variant form of that character. For example, most Mario amiibo are 00 here, but Dr. Mario is variant 01, and Cat Mario is variant 03. In the case of this Isabelle amiibo, the value is 01, indicating that the Winter Outfit is a variant; the Summer Outfit and Super Smash Bros. Isabelle amiibo figures have a value of 00 instead, which says that Isabelle’s Summer Outfit is her non-variant form.
Next we have another byte of two characters that says what physical form the amiibo takes. 00 is figure, 01 is card, 02 is plush, and 03 is band. Since this Isabelle amiibo is a figure, the value is 00. Simple!
Leading off the back half of this string of data are four characters that are
very important here. This can be called the amiibo’s print/model/ID number or whatever you wanna call it (I’ll refer to these as “amiibo ID numbers” or simply “IDs” here), but basically it’s a unique identifier that’s different for each specific amiibo release. This value is how games can tell the difference between amiibo that are otherwise identical in their identification data outside of this value. For example, the Super Mario series Mario, Mario - Gold Edition, Mario - Silver Edition, and Mario (Wedding Outfit) all share the same identification data (00000000xxxx0102)
except this ID number. These IDs start with the Smash Bros. Mario amiibo at 0000 and are assigned to new amiibo sequentially, with
very few instances of IDs that are skipped and left unused. But these rare gaps in ID numbers have been reliable in giving us hints towards future amiibo releases multiple times before—some notable example being the Breath of the Wild Champion amiibo being expected months in advance and the Animal Crossing Series 5 amiibo cards being similarly foreshadowed, both of which I had discovered myself simply by looking at the data. Anyway, more on these ID gaps soon.
After the aforementioned ID number, there are two final bytes. The first of which are two characters that signify the specific amiibo series—00 being Smash Bros., 01 being Super Mario, etc. For Isabelle here, 05 is Animal Crossing, which is used for both the figures and card series. After this series value, the final byte always consists of 02. And that’s it!
Sorry if that was a lot of info, but now you hopefully have an understanding of how amiibo identification works within the data (if you didn't already), and how this identification data can lead to interesting observations like what I'm about to detail. So, onto the exciting stuff!
Remember those rare instances of ID gaps I mentioned above? Here’s where they come into play. Because amiibo IDs are almost never skipped, it’s extremely likely that the few that are skipped actually
do belong to unknown, unreleased amiibo—some of which may just not have been announced or released yet, while others might have been planned to release at one point but ultimately cancelled. Based on the known amiibo that come before and after them and how many unused IDs there are in a gap, we can make some educated guesses as to their true identities. But before I get into which amiibo may be hiding among these ID gaps, I’m gonna eliminate the gaps that I can assure you
aren’t hiding anything:
Previous ID | Unused ID(s) | Following ID |
|---|
01D8
K.K. (Pikopuri)
Animal Crossing series | 01D9–0237 | 0238
Mario - Classic Color
Super Mario 30th Anniversary series |
02C2
Pink Gold Peach (Horse Racing)
Mario Sports Superstars series | 02C3–02E0 | 02E1
One-Eyed Rathalos & Rider (Boy)
Monster Hunter Stories series |
031E
Toby
Animal Crossing series | 031F–034A | 034B
Link - Ocarina of Time
The Legend of Zelda series |
03D7
Faith
Animal Crossing series | 03D8–040B | 040C
Razewing Ratha
Monster Hunter Stories series |
These ID gaps all share one thing in common—they’re immediately preceded by large series of amiibo cards. It seems that Nintendo allocates extra IDs for these amiibo card series, perhaps in case they intend to release more cards later, like what happened with the Animal Crossing promo cards. The Animal Crossing amiibo cards Series 1–4 take up 400 IDs—100 per series. Then the 5 promo cards come right after Series 4, but there are another 95 unused IDs after that—that’s because Nintendo saved another batch of 100 IDs for these promo cards, even though they only used 5. The same is true for the Animal Crossing: New Leaf - Welcome amiibo series; 100 IDs were reserved for that, with half being used for the 50 cards in that series, plus the 6 Sanrio cards right after that, leaving 44 empty spots. And once again, another 100 IDs were reserved for Animal Crossing: New Horizons’s Series 5 cards, of which only 48 were used, leaving 52 unused.
The Mario Sports Superstars cards are similar to the Animal Crossing cards, but that series saves 120 IDs instead of the usual 100, 90 of which are used while 30 remain unused. Nintendo probably saved an extra 20 IDs there in case they wanted to release a set of promo cards (maybe, like, one or two for each of the 18 characters), but they never did. The Shadow Mewtwo card, Jikkyō Powerful Pro Baseball cards, and Yu-Gi-Oh! Rush Duel cards (and the Super Mario Cereal amiibo, since that's technically classified as a card too, lol) aren’t really whole series like the others so they don’t follow this same trend of allocating batches of 100 or so IDs regardless of whether the series will actually use all of those IDs; instead there are no skipped IDs at all after each of those, as is the case with the vast majority of amiibo.
So, basically, we can just ignore the above ID gaps, because they’re clearly just placeholder IDs. The ones below, however, are almost certainly more than just placeholders, and very likely belong to unreleased amiibo!
Previous ID | Unused ID(s) | Following ID |
|---|
003A
Chibi-Robo
Chibi-Robo! series | 003B | 003C
Mario - Gold Edition
Super Mario series |
023B
(Dark)* Turbo Charge Donkey Kong
Skylanders SuperChargers series | 023C | 023D
Mewtwo
Super Smash Bros. series |
0350
Toon Link - The Wind Waker
The Legend of Zelda series | 0351 | 0352
Zelda - The Wind Waker
The Legend of Zelda series |
0356
Zelda - Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda series | 0357 | 0358
Daruk - Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda series |
0399
Link - Link’s Awakening
The Legend of Zelda series | 039A | 039B
Mario Power-Up Band
Super Nintendo World series |
0415
Inkling (Yellow)
Splatoon series | 0416–0417
[2 IDs] | 0418
Link - Tears of the Kingdom
The Legend of Zelda series |
042D
Malzeno
Monster Hunter Rise series | 042E–042F
[2 IDs] | 0430
Golden Power-Up Band
Super Nintendo World series |
*Both Turbo Charge Donkey Kong and Dark Turbo Charge Donkey Kong (as well as Hammer Slam Bowser and Dark Hammer Slam Bowser) share the same amiibo ID; while the Skylanders side does differentiate between the normal and Dark variants, they’re identical in data on the amiibo side, so there isn’t a separate ID for Dark Turbo Charge Donkey Kong following 023B.
The first two unused IDs are 003B between Chibi-Robo and Mario - Gold Edition, and 023C between Turbo Charge Donkey Kong and Mewtwo. These two are hard to crack. We don’t really have much in the way of hints towards what either of these two could have been, and given how long it’s been by this point I’m not sure we’ll ever know. I do believe that there’s a good possibility that one of them, likely the latter (023C), may have been the scrapped transformable Arwing amiibo that Miyamoto has talked about. Based on the information Miyamoto shared, it seems like that amiibo may have gotten fairly far along in development before it was shelved, so it’s possible that it could have made it far enough into the production process to have been assigned an ID, which would explain one of those unused IDs. As for the other ID…I’ve got no clue, really. Whatever it was, it seems to have been planned and scrapped very early on, since the only amiibo that come before it are the initial Smash for 3DS / Wii U amiibo, Super Mario amiibo, and the Chibi-Robo amiibo.
Moving on, the next couple instances of unused IDs can both very comfortably be identified as belonging to the Zelda series. One—0351—falls between Toon Link - The Wind Waker and Zelda - The Wind Waker, and the other—0357—between Zelda - Breath of the Wild and Daruk - Breath of the Wild. These unreleased amiibo seem to have more hints towards their existence than others, including known product codes (a four-letter code that nearly all amiibo have that are similar in concept but different from amiibo IDs; you can generally find these codes on the bottom of an amiibo’s base or in the URL for an amiibo’s page on the Japanese website, for example) based on gaps in the sequence (again, not unlike amiibo IDs)—these are AKAH and AKAP, respectively. The possibilities for what these two amiibo could be are much narrower than other unused IDs, given that they’re very obviously Zelda series amiibo, and their locations seem to imply one being from The Wind Waker and the other being from Breath of the Wild. The former is probably either Tetra, Ganondorf, or Tingle from The Wind Waker (with Tetra being the most likely, I’d say), while the latter is likely...well, something from Breath of the Wild. Maybe Kass? A second Zelda? A third Link?? Possibly even a mega-sized Calamity Ganon amiibo?! It’s kinda hard to say, but it’s pretty safe to assume that whatever it is, it’s from Breath of the Wild. (My guess as to what’s most likely is a second Zelda in one of her other outfits.) Whether these amiibo were truly scrapped or are just being held back for some reason remains unknown. I would hope that one or both of these amiibo may still be released eventually, but it looks unlikely at this point sadly…
The next unused ID is 039A, between Link - Link’s Awakening and the Mario Power-Up Band. Amusingly enough, this one may
also be another scrapped/unreleased Zelda amiibo, given that it immediately follows the Link’s Awakening amiibo. Perhaps a Marin amiibo? However, unlike 0351 and 0357, there isn’t a gap left in the product codes for a second Link’s Awakening amiibo; the product code for Link - Link’s Awakening is AKAV, and the one for Zelda & Loftwing - Skyward Sword is AKAW, leaving no unused product code between the two, so it’s probably unlikely that it’s a second Link’s Awakening amiibo after all. But if it’s not that, then I’m honestly not sure what else it could be. Like 003B and 023C, this one doesn’t really give us a whole lot to work with, unfortunately.
Next we have what might be the
weirdest gap between known IDs: 0416 and 0417. Previously, this was a larger gap of five unused IDs between Inkling (Yellow) and Octoling (Blue), but we now know that three of those IDs (specifically 0418–041A) belong to the Tears of the Kingdom amiibo. Yes, for some reason there are 5 seemingly unrelated IDs separating the Splatoon 3 Inkling amiibo from the Octoling and Smallfry amiibo, which all released together. It’s quite bizarre, and I’m not sure why they would have split those three up like that. I had speculated before that three of those IDs could be amiibo for Shiver, Fry, and Big Man, but Link - Tears of the Kingdom ended up being 0418, and datamining has revealed that the upcoming Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom and Ganondorf - Tears of the Kingdom amiibo are 0419 and 041A, leaving us with only two unused IDs between Inkling (Yellow) and Link - Tears of the Kingdom, so it seems unlikely now that they would be related to Splatoon 3 at all. It’s very possible that this is where the upcoming Noah and Mio amiibo are going to fit in, or it could be something else…
Finally, the last of the observable unused IDs are 042E and 042F, two IDs between Malzeno and the Golden Power-Up Band. As with the previous two unused IDs, it’s very possible that these may be the upcoming Noah and Mio amiibo as well. Either way, though, that still leaves us with another two unknown IDs! So, assuming they’re not scrapped amiibo, we’re due for two more unknown amiibo that have yet to be officially announced!
Aside from what’s been officially announced, however, we can expect that we’ll very likely be getting more Power-Up Bands in the future. We actually know that four more Power-Up Bands have been planned, specifically, thanks to our own
@MondoMega discovering evidence of unreleased Power-Up Bands for Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Rosalina, and Toadette via datamining the official Super Nintendo World mobile app. It’s possible that two of these Power-Up Bands might account for either of the last two gaps of two unused IDs.
So yeah, what we can gather from the current gaps in amiibo IDs is that there were seemingly two unreleased The Legend of Zelda amiibo planned at one point (one for The Wind Waker and one for Breath of the Wild), and that we’re likely due for at least two other new amiibo to be announced relatively soon. I assume that most of the older unused IDs are just cancelled amiibo that will probably never release at this point, unfortunately.
But before I’m done here, I want to present one more thing in regard to the speculation of unreleased amiibo—series IDs. That is, the byte that immediately follows the individual amiibo ID numbers and tells which amiibo series (not game franchise) an amiibo is from. Because, just like with the individual amiibo IDs, there are some gaps in these series IDs, too! Currently, there are only two—08 and 0B.
Code:
00 Super Smash Bros.
01 Super Mario
02 Chibi-Robo!
03 Yoshi’s Woolly World
04 Splatoon
05 Animal Crossing
06 Super Mario Bros. 30th
07 Skylanders SuperChargers
08
09 The Legend of Zelda
0A Shovel Knight
0B
0C Kirby
0D Pokémon
0E Mario Sports Superstars
0F Monster Hunter Stories
10 BOXBOY!
11 Pikmin
12 Fire Emblem
13 Metroid
14 Dark Souls / Super Mario Cereal
15 Mega Man
16 Diablo
17 Jikkyō Powerful Pro Baseball
18 Monster Hunter Rise
19 Yu-Gi-Oh! Rush Duel
––
FF Super Nintendo World
Super Nintendo World is given the absolute highest value that a series ID can have at FF, which is surely intentional, so we can obviously ignore the massive gap in IDs between it and Yu-Gi-Oh! Rush Duel. And, yes, Dark Souls shares a series ID with Super Mario Cereal. Why? I have no idea. One’s a figure and one’s (technically) a card, though, so it works out fine I guess, but it’s amusing nonetheless.
But that’s not all! Remember those product codes I talked about? They’re structured similarly, with the first two characters signifying the amiibo type (figure, card, plush, or band) and amiibo series, while the following two characters denote each individual amiibo release in that series. These codes only use the characters A–Z (excluding I and O). So, for example, the Super Smash Bros. Mario amiibo would be AAAA, with Super Smash Bros. Peach being AAAB, and so on, while the Super Mario series Mario amiibo is ABAA, with Super Mario series Luigi being ABAB, etc., and the Mario Sports Superstars cards start at MDAA.
Anyway, just as with the amiibo series IDs above, these product codes also have gaps that may give us some insight into unreleased amiibo! Currently, the gaps in figure product codes are AD, AG, AV, and AW, and the gaps for cards are MB and MF (however I’m somewhat convinced that those latter two are intentional gaps left by Nintendo for the Animal Crossing cards in case they ended up releasing enough cards in either series that it would have to overflow into a second series value).
Code:
Figure:
AA Super Smash Bros.
AB Super Mario
AC Chibi-Robo!
AD
AE Splatoon
AF Super Mario Bros. 30th
AG
AH Shovel Knight
AJ Animal Crossing
AK The Legend of Zelda
AL Kirby
AM Monster Hunter Stories
AN BOXBOY!
AP Pikmin
AQ Fire Emblem
AR Metroid
AS Detective Pikachu
AT Dark Souls
AU Mega Man
AV
AW
AX Monster Hunter Rise
AY
AZ
?? Skylanders, Diablo
Card:
MA Animal Crossing amiibo cards Series 1–5
MB
MC Pokkén Tournament
MD Mario Sports Superstars
ME Animal Crossing: New Leaf - Welcome amiibo / Sanrio Collaboration Pack
MF
MG Jikkyō Powerful Pro Baseball
MH Yu-Gi-Oh! Rush Duel
?? Super Mario Cereal
Plush:
YA Yoshi’s Woolly World
Band:
?? Super Nintendo World
The Skylanders, Diablo, and Super Mario Cereal amiibo presumably don’t have product codes because they weren’t manufactured or distributed by Nintendo. The Super Nintendo World Power-Up Bands
might have product codes, but if they do I’ve not been able to confirm what they are yet. If they do have product codes, it’d be on the boxes they ship from, assuming they’re even manufactured/distributed by Nintendo at all—it may be all Universal’s doing, in which case I’d assume they don’t have product codes after all.
So what does this information tell us? Again…not a whole lot, unfortunately. I believe it may be possible that series IDs 08 and 0B and product codes AD and AG might be related, though. I think one may correspond to a Star Fox amiibo series (probably 08, and either AG or AD) since we know there was a transforming Arwing amiibo that was cancelled due to issues meeting safety guidelines for children, and the other (0B and AD/AG) might be a Mario Kart amiibo series for reasons that I’ll explain towards the end here. Interestingly, both would have presumably been amiibo with small moving parts, which could explain why they were both cancelled if they couldn’t meet CPSIA certification. The AV and AW product codes are very interesting, though. Since those are still relatively recent, there’s a chance that one or both may be for unreleased amiibo that are still set to be announced sometime, but it’s impossible to say for sure.
So that’s the series IDs and product codes, but it doesn’t end there, either! Some other interesting gaps in data can be observed in the franchise/character IDs and character variant IDs. I won’t go too in depth on that here since I’ve already detailed so much, but some notable examples include a gap between Mario’s character variants for Dr. Mario (01) and Cat Mario (03) which implies that there was another Mario variant amiibo planned at some point—maybe a Mario Kart amiibo like I mentioned above?!—and a gap between Tiki (2109) and Byleth (210B) in the Fire Emblem character data that suggests the existence of an unknown Fire Emblem amiibo that hasn’t released—perhaps a cancelled Lyn amiibo that was going to release alongside Chrom and Tiki for Fire Emblem Warriors? Just a guess.
Other examples include a gap of eight IDs between Toad (000A) and Daisy (0013)—maybe for Toadette and the 7 Koopalings?—plus one skipped ID between Goomba (0015) and Boo (0017), followed by another gap of eleven IDs until Koopa Troopa (0023); one skipped ID between Wolf Link (0003) and Daruk (0005); two skipped IDs between Falco (0581) and Wolf (0584)—just enough room to squeeze Slippy and Peppy right after Fox and Falco; and finally one skipped ID between Olimar (0640) and Pikmin (0642)—very likely for Alph, I’d assume. For character variant IDs, we’re also missing a variant of Zelda between Sheik (01) and Zelda & Loftwing (03), which is probably Tetra, which would also align with the missing The Wind Waker amiibo.
Now, it’s very unlikely that all of these skipped character IDs are for characters that actually have amiibo planned to be released for them, because there are simply too many compared to the number of unused amiibo IDs we know of. It’s most likely just Nintendo future-proofing the list of character IDs on a case by case basis per franchise just in case they do make amiibo for any of them in the future. They’ve already done this on a much larger scale for the Pokémon and Animal Crossing amiibo, with character IDs reserved for all Pokémon by Pokédex number, and character IDs reserved for all Animal Crossing characters by species (…which Nintendo chose to throw out entirely with the Series 5 Animal Crossing cards, for some reason, but that’s beside the point, lol).
I did see a post before that claimed that datamining the original Super Mario Maker revealed that the amiibo character ID between Wolf Link and Daruk (0004) unlocks the Tingle costume in that game, which would seemingly confirm that character ID as Tingle (and may even suggest that the unreleased The Wind Waker amiibo was actually Tingle rather than Tetra or Ganondorf); additionally, that same post claimed that a Mario (0000) amiibo with the series ID set to 0B (one of the two skipped series IDs) unlocks the Kart Mario costume, implying that series 0B is actually for some unreleased Mario Kart amiibo. But I’ve not been able to find more confirmation of this anywhere online, and I’m no dataminer myself (at least outside of amiibo, since I guess looking at amiibo data like this is technically datamining to some degree, lol) and I wouldn’t even know where to begin trying to check it myself, so I’m not entirely sure how credible this is. I have heard that a number of Super Mario Maker costumes are coded to be able to be unlocked with amiibo that don’t actually exist yet, though, so a deep dive into that data could be very interesting and revealing.
Finally, if anyone would like to look through this amiibo data for themselves,
@MondoMega has compiled a comprehensive spreadsheet that lists everything!
) but it’ll be neat to have it all written, documented and explained in a nice way. Past explanations are scattered across different forum posts and DMs, lol.
But yeah, I’ll try to have it up as soon as I find enough time to sit down and try to gather everything together and present it in a clear but concise enough way, though that might take awhile with Splatoon 3 competing for my attention a lot right now, lol.
