Halloween is the one holiday a game company cannot reschedule — and Nintendo just had to cancel it. The “Trick or Treat!” event in Kirby Air Riders, the Switch 2 racer’s first Halloween event, launched this week and immediately started freezing players’ screens mid-race. On Friday, October 30 — the day before Halloween — Nintendo pulled the event outright, Kotaku reported. It will not make it to its own holiday.
The announcement came from Nintendo’s Japanese support account. “We have identified an issue in the currently ongoing ‘Trick or Treat!’ event, where the screen may temporarily freeze during gameplay,” the post read, via machine translation quoted by Kotaku and Nintendo Life. “As a result, we have decided to cancel this event.” Not pause it. Not patch it over the weekend. Cancel it — with an apology, and a promise attached.
A racer that kept stopping
The failure was not subtle. The event had been scheduled to run from October 28 through November 4, offering Halloween-themed rewards including ghost headwear, Nintendo Life reported. Players hit the freezes from the event’s first matches — screens locking for seconds at a time in a game built on speed and chaos, with community clips of the bug circulating before Nintendo acted, per Kotaku and Nintendo Wire’s coverage. In a racing game, a frozen screen is not a cosmetic glitch. The race keeps happening without you, which players’ footage showed in painful detail.
The rewards were the hook of the whole event — ghost headwear and Halloween cosmetics that exist, for now, only in Nintendo’s key art and in the two days of matches players managed to finish before the freezes took over. Limited-time rewards are a promise a live game makes to its players: show up during the window, do the thing, keep the prize. Nintendo broke the window itself, which is exactly why the rerun promise matters — and why players will hold the company to it by name.
Nintendo Wire’s report adds useful texture on why this event, specifically, may have broken the game: the Halloween event was a City Trial variant in which attacking rivals made more power-ups appear — a design that floods a match with on-screen objects, in a mode already famous for barely controlled mayhem. Nintendo has not confirmed a technical cause, and we are not going to diagnose one for them. What Nintendo has confirmed is the symptom, the cancellation, and the intention to fix it.
The cancellation was not a Japan-only whisper, either. Nintendo’s official English-language support account posted the same apology and cancellation notice, per follow-up coverage of the announcement — which matters, because this is the weekend North American and European players had circled. A Halloween event is a plan as much as a feature: players schedule sessions with friends, chase the themed rewards before they vanish, and treat the holiday weekend as the event’s natural peak. Pulling it on Friday did not just remove a mode. It cancelled a few million weekend plans, forty-eight hours before the holiday the event was named for.
The promise: the treats come back
Here is the part that matters if you bought a Switch 2 partly for this game’s live calendar: Nintendo says it plans to hold the event again so players can earn the associated rewards, Nintendo Life and Kotaku both reported from the official post. No date has been given — and as of Saturday, follow-up reporting still had the rerun date unknown. Ghost headwear earned in November is not quite the same as ghost headwear earned on Halloween, but a rerun with the rewards intact is a meaningfully better outcome than the quiet cancellation players have learned to expect from live-service games.
Some context for the scale of the embarrassment: Kirby Air Riders is Masahiro Sakurai’s follow-up to the 2003 GameCube original, one of Nintendo’s flagship Switch 2 titles — the kind of game whose seasonal events are supposed to be the victory lap, not the apology. A first-party Halloween event that cannot survive Halloween weekend is a genuinely rare public failure for a company that polishes its games to a shine.
Why two days of freezes became a cancellation
Live events are the heartbeat of a game like this. Nintendo Wire’s coverage describes Air Riders’ rhythm of special weekly events that let players earn stickers, themes and street names to customize their drivers — the steady drip of reasons to come back between bigger updates. A Halloween event was supposed to be the biggest drip of the fall: a seasonal room, themed rewards, a deadline with a costume on it. Instead, the clips that spread this week were of races freezing solid. One widely shared player video — posted by the player TAHK0, whose footage helped surface the problem — showed the game locking while the match continued underneath it; in a follow-up post Saturday, the same player clarified he had actually found the near-breaking chaos fun. Nintendo, understandably, could not ship “fun, but broken” as the official line for its flagship racer’s first Halloween.
One distinction worth keeping straight, because the follow-up coverage has muddied it in places: the cancellation is specifically the “Trick or Treat!” event. Nintendo’s seasonal theming around the game — the Halloween-styled menus and Paddock dressing — was listed on its own, later schedule in Nintendo’s notices. What died on Friday is the event itself and, until the rerun, the only road to its rewards.
The event is gone, the rewards are promised back, and the date is a blank. When Nintendo names the rerun, that is the second story — and we will be watching for it. More games coverage on the Previously games desk.
