Small disclaimer here: Neither Nintendo's logo nor their people show up to people's doors with sunglasses pointing guns at people telling them to shut things down, this picture was made only for satire purposes.
Nintendo, may I take a knee, amongst other developers, you stand the test of time and have been recognised as the very saviour of the video game industry as you brought it back from the grave after E.T went ahead and fucked everything up... But you gotta keep trusting people a little bit more...
The thing I love about this generation of gaming is that there's so many tools for people who have the passion, knowledge and ability to make games of their own. With that, comes alot of controversy from time to time - whether we're talking about games like Hatred or people making games that are in one way or another too similar to some other game - which is why I decided to tackle this topic.
When the first console war took place (between SNES and Genesis/Master System), the one think you'd quickly realise is that Nintendo took their IPs very seriously and rarely let somebody else tamper with them, whereas SEGA were more lenient with this and instead almost embraced 3rd party developers and fully supported them.
Now, you'd probably think that since there's so many tools for people to make their own games that Nintendo would be a little more forgiving with what people make as long as it doesn't directly copy their IPs... NOPE!!
Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R)
Well, to be completely fair, this one did in one way completely copy Metroid 2: The Return of Samus since it's a remake, so that Nintendo was going to shut this down came as no surprise. But it still really sucks!!
This is/was a project that a bunch of people decided to make in order to try and get the second Metroid game - which was on the GameBoy - screw attacked into this generation and they worked on this for almost a decade. The reason behind this is probably that Nintendo for one reason or another didn't seem to want to make this remake and I have to wonder... why??
Nintendo already made a remake of the first one and released it on the GameBoy Advance titled Metroid: Zero Mission... so why not do the same with the second game!? So I'd guess that they decided to take matters into their own hands and make it themselves. Once again, I know that Nintendo were in their legal rights blah blah blah, this is the same as Blizzard vs. Nostalrius disclaimer I made... but once again, why aren't they seeing the bigger picture??
These people weren't doing this for any sort of profit, it was once again only for the love of the game. So... once again... why are Nintendo shooting themselves in their PR foot? The fact that they made this remake and people would share it around, would to some degree peak some peoples interest in the Metroid franchise which in turn would probably make these people try to seek out more Metroid games and in turn earn Nintendo more revenue, not stealing it from them.
I mean, look at this:
That's what Metroid 2 looked like on the GameBoy...
Now look at this:
It's like fucking night and day!!
So when this fan-made, NON-PROFIT, remake was released it didn't take long for Nintendo sending them a cease and desist letter telling them to take it down. Thankfully (as far as I'm concerned) alot of people still managed to download it while the download was still up and active who have decided that 'screw Nintendo, this game is amazing' and decided to upload this to various sites and whatnot so others might have a chance to download this.
AM2R Blog (more or less dead nowadays, but still an interesting read)
Pokémon Uranium
Now here's where things start treading into a little gray area. Yes, Pokémon is more or less a Nintendo IP, but as opposed to AM2R, every asset was completely original and the only thing that was copied from Nintendo/Game Freak was the whole aspect of Pokémons, capturing them and battling with them... and well the logo sort of too, but they changed the colour palette from blue and yellow to dark and brighter green so while it's still the same "font", I think this is from a copyright stand point still okay (don't quote me on that, still haven't got any sort of lawyer's degree).
As with the former, this was a fanmade game that the people who made it also worked on for almost a decade as well. The creators made completely new and original Pokémons, towns, people, music - like I said; ALL the assets... and people were really looking forward to this game, more so than the former.
So they release it and it got downloaded 1,500,000 times before Nintendo once again decided to show up, but how they handled this game, I've gotta cut them some slack here. Instead of outright sending them a cease and desist letter (main reason here is probably that they "couldn't" do it but once again, don't quote me) and instead simply told them that they wish they would take this down for one reason or another, the creators decided that they wanted to respect Nintendo's wishes and shut down the whole site. But it was downloaded 1,500,000 times, so as with the prior game, people decided to put up their own download links so other could download it.
So while Nintendo wasn't really cold blooded here, I still don't get it...
I mean look:
You can clearly see similarities here... but once again, they didn't do this for profit, they only did this for fun and for the love of the game. And also once again, maybe somebody decided that they didn't wanna invest in the money to get a Nintendo handheld to just play Pokémon, the fact that this was released on PC (point here being that alot of people have a PC), they could get this for free, try it out, like it and buy a Nintendo DS or whatever and getting a "true" Pokémon game... earning revenue for Nintendo, AGAIN!!!
I would give the link to the official site, but it's (as stated above) taken down.
Conclusion
I love games, the industry (for better or worse) and the developers whether they be AAA or Indie... but it always breaks my heart to see that some developers are so greedy that they shut down non-profit games that their fans make as a tribute to the game that they try to emulate or make a remake of. If these games had some form of price tag on them and not giving Nintendo their share, THEN I would completely understand this since in that case they would be stealing profit.
And it hurts even more when it's a developer that have more or less dictated your entire fucking childhood to do something like this, because you've more or less been looking up to those developers, since you knew even back then that their games were - usually 90% of the time - up to par with the rest and really good overall. You grow up adoring them... and they do something like this... that fucking sucks.
As with my Blizzard vs. Nostalrius, I understand that Nintendo are in their full legal right, they are a massive company and want to protect their reputation by protecting their IPs and I'm not trying to undermine them or something... It just sucks...
Remember To Stay Awesome, TAG signing out!
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