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Super Mario Bros. Commodore 64 Fan Port Hit with DMCA
- wolco 7y agoWhat is another strategy around this aside from release quickly and hopefully gains enough following. We see this with Disney, Star Trek but not to this extent.
- orionblastar 7y agoMake Super Tux Brothers or something that does not look like SMB.
- test1235 7y agoGreat Giana Sisters
- ddingus 7y ago...which also saw action from Nintendo.
- wolfgke 7y agoAccording to the German Wikipedia article > https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Great_Giana_Sisters&oldid=183387863#Angeblicher_Rechtsstreit_mit_Nintendo https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Great_Giana_S... there was no lawsuit between Rainbow Arts and Nintendo, but only a threat of legal steps by Nintendo, which lead to the situation that the existing copies were withdrawn from being commercially available. Also the alleged lawsuit by Nintendo made The Great Giana Sisters world-famous, even though it was - as remarked - not sold anymore.
- beatgammit 7y agoYou could just play Super Tux, which is essentially that. But that's not quite as cool as being the same thing, but for an unsupported platform.
- erfgh 7y agoWho cares, just make something original, who cares about SMB Commodore 64 port except from a bunch of nerds that will play it for 10 minutes max?
- yellowapple 7y agoRelease it as a program that patches a Super Mario Bros ROM until it functions as a C64 ROM?
- orionblastar 7y agoIt shows the C64 could run NES type games. Gaina Sisters did SMB first but also got sued by Nintendo.
- tapland 7y agoNintendo are the Disney of the gaming industry in regards to protecting their IPs. Any in-game footage of a Nintendo game on youtube can be flagged by Nintendo (of Japan usually) at any time. They don't really check for fair use beforehand.
- lancefisher 7y agoApparently, they’ve lightened up a bit on this. https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/28/18117172/nintendo-youtube-monetization-partner-program-super-smash-bros-ultimate-lets-play-livestream https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/28/18117172/nintendo-youtub...
- blackbeard334 7y agoReminds me of this for some reason. https://www.polygon.com/2015/12/14/10123754/john-romero-super-mario-bros-3-pc-demo https://www.polygon.com/2015/12/14/10123754/john-romero-supe...
- farmerbb 7y agoThis is true. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKtaFU2ky9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKtaFU2ky9E
- nanoscopic 7y agoWhile this is crappy, it is the default behavior of most large companies when it comes to copyright. As people have described I mistakenly said that copyright must be enforced or it is lost. Agreed I was confusing it with trademark. Despite that, I see many companies treating copyright the same and harassing all copyright infringers with abandon even if it is harmless. I will also share another story. Some years ago I owned n64.org. I ran a fan website of Nintendo 64 games there. It was quite popular. I was underage ( < 18 ) at the time I bought the domain, and I bought the domain before NOA registered "n64" as a trademark. NOA threatened to sue me for the domain. I refused as their claim that people would think my fan site was the official Nintendo site was entirely nonsense. In the end they wrote a check to me for like $50 or something equally ridiculous. Nintendo is not your friend. They don't do a good job taking care of their fans. They will happily sue or threaten you for doing anything they don't happen to like.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ninjin 7y agoI am not a lawyer, but I am nearly 100% sure that what you are talking about is trademark protection [1] rather than copyright, people get these wrong frequently. As far as I know, you can enforce your copyright completely arbitrarily. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_rights
- massive-tea 7y agoAre you getting confused with trademarks? When has an entity "lost copyright" due to not enforcing it?
- tty2300 7y agoI have heard they have been super aggressive about takedowns on YouTube videos showing switch modding even though there are no copyright violations
- erfgh 7y agoI don't know why anyone would want Nintendo to be their friend.
- daveidol 7y agoYeah, Nintendo seems to be pretty intense with this stuff (sometimes very unfairly, like in this instance with Modern Vintage Gamer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKtaFU2ky9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKtaFU2ky9E)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Causality1 7y agoNobody hates their most hardcore fans more than Nintendo.
- bartread 7y agoI'm not so sure why this is getting downvoted as Nintendo's approach to this kind of thing does seem unnecessarily hostile, and it's certainly a pattern of behaviour, not a one-off instance. It doesn't make any sense to me either: I mean, do they really think that because I've bought a copy of SMB 64, that I'm not going to buy any more SMB games? I've kind of lost track but, just with the 3DS I carry around fairly regularly, I have at least 3 SMB games (one or two for DS OG), plus a bunch of other games around the Mario IP.
- wolfgke 7y ago> Nobody hates their most hardcore fans more than Nintendo. Perhaps you should not become a fan of a company with such a bullying behaviour.
- lostmyoldone 7y agoOne can certainly stop being a fan, but a Nintendo fan was probably one before they knew anything about how they treat their fans. Blaming the victim for not knowing enough about ostensibly bad company practices when they became fans seems more than a little unfair, especially as many became fans when they were quite young.
- wolfgke 7y agoI openly say I cannot stay a fan as soon as I hear of such bullying behaviour.
- throwayEngineer 7y agoI find Nintendo to be the gaming equivalent of Apple. Horrible to customers and developers while taking nice profits. I don't buy from either, but I know these are popular gifts from uninformed parents to kids who watch lots of commercials.
- ddingus 7y agoDissappointing, but entirely expected. That's OK. The DMCA action will have little impact on the community of people who enjoy this kind of thing. (people who have been around long enough to know better is possible here)
- Ace17 7y agoI fail to see how this takedown benefits Nintendo. How could a C64 port of a NES game released more than 30 years ago could threaten any sale of anything ?
- stingraycharles 7y agoIt's probably related to trademarks: you lose a trademark if you don't enforce it. If they let this go, chances are they would lose the Super Mario trademark, which would hurt them.
- qaucnnnsicuwbr 7y agoI'm no copyright lawyer but couldn't they have issued a licence to use the trademark to the author if this was the case? They could have supported this as a homage to the franchise, supported their fans creativity, and gotten lots of free publicity to boot.
- andai 7y agoHere we see not the absence of a way, but of a will.
- estomagordo 7y agoThat does not explain why less draconic companies still get to keep their trademarks.
- glenndebacker 7y agoI hear that a lot but it's certainly not that black and white. * Capcom for example allows fan games as long as you don't profit off them. There are a couple of Megaman games for example. * Konami allowed the fan game "Castlevania: The Lecarde Chronicles 2" as long as they did not profit from the game. * Valve allowed the HL fan game Prospect - https://store.steampowered.com/app/399120/Prospekt/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/399120/Prospekt/ And there are other examples out there. Nintendo could perfectly allow it under certain conditions. Did Sega not work for Sonic Mania with somebody who made sonic fan games for example?
- slowhadoken 7y agoI grabbed a copy of it if anyone’s interested.
- andai 7y agoWhere do I sign up?
- slowhadoken 7y agohttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1-fDPJ2Z2pMmrqW6FTxv-Osi92zmiZc8A https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-fDPJ2Z2pMmrqW6FTxv-Osi92z...
- bartread 7y agoThank you!
- slowhadoken 7y agoYou're welcome. I respect Nintendo. I also respect the indie game community and fans who have kept retro gaming alive all these years. I believe the two can combine efforts some day. I hope you enjoy the game.
- Ros2 7y agoThey seem to really hate direct ports of their work. Curiously, there is a thriving Super Mario 64 rom hacking community that is rarely hit with notices. Afaik, no one really knows why. There are 100+ games and even a nearly complete level editor. Even when Nintendo were demonetizing videos of their games, these were spared.
- AstralStorm 7y agoMostly because they're more akin to a remix. These also do not infringe trademarks.
- floatingatoll 7y agoNo bigcorp wants to be the first to lose an infringement case to "fair use", because that would be a beachhead from which much less palatable uses could be launched. While it's impossible to derive corporate motives from corporate (in)actions, their inaction certainly does suggest that they think they'd lose to "fair use" if they tried to shut them down.
- molticrystal 7y ago> thriving Super Mario 64 rom hacking community that is rarely hit with notice Probably limited resources. The ones that do get hit are the big ones like Super Mario 64 Online [1] . Instead of the hacks themselves they seem focus on youtube quite a bit. I know a lot of Super Mario 64 emulation and emulation of other Nintendo properties is often DMCAed on that platform. [2] discussion [3] [1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43axqp/nintendo-shuts-down-the-internets-favorite-super-mario-64-modder https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43axqp/nintendo-s... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKtaFU2ky9E&t=192s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKtaFU2ky9E&t=192s [3] https://www.ign.com/boards/threads/nintendo-is-abusing-youtubes-copyright-system-to-get-switch-homebrew-videos-taken-down.455352104/ https://www.ign.com/boards/threads/nintendo-is-abusing-youtu...
- Ros2 7y agoThe article is confusing about the details. "Last Impact" never got a takedown notice and PC Gamer even wrote an article about it (as well as Nintendo clearly being aware of Kaze). As I said, there is a lack of aggression against SM64 hacks and it has never really been explained--but yes, they do hate copies or extensions to their engines that are essentially their own game, but better. SM64 online definitely qualifies. But again, this isn't correlated to how popular or how much of an online footprint the games have. (Article here https://www.pcgamer.com/super-mario-64-rom-hack-last-impact-is-the-sequel-we-never-got/ https://www.pcgamer.com/super-mario-64-rom-hack-last-impact-... )
- warent 7y agoThis is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19730987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19730987
- wodenokoto 7y agoA lot of people here a like "Nintendo hates their fans", but seriously, this is a product that Nintendo is currently selling (Well, technically renting to subscribers) why should they stand idle as people pirate it?
- rizzin 7y agoThey did the same with a fan-made remake of Metroid 2, though that was Nintendo USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM2R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM2R http://metroid2remake.blogspot.com/ http://metroid2remake.blogspot.com/
- fit2rule 7y agoBummer. I was fully prepared to exhibit this amazing bit of work at my new retro-computing exhibit [1], and I expect it would have been inspiring for a lot of local indie game developers to have had the chance to see it in person .. Well, instead, I'll just focus on some of the other gem releases of the retro-dev scene, and fortunately there are a LOT of other great works being produced for these old machines - of limited commercial value - but massive cultural worth. Still, seeing a near-perfect port of Super Mario Bros. on the old C64 is an amazing thing, and fills me full of inspiring thoughts. Bummer, Nintendo. [1] - https://subotron.com/7635-timetron-2019/ https://subotron.com/7635-timetron-2019/
- Endy 7y agoDon't worry, it's still out there, just like AM2R. Give it a few weeks so Ninty can parade around like they won something, and if you're in the right places, you'll hear about the continued development.
- bmn__ 7y agoWhere should I look? Have AM2R_131, will travel.
- slfnflctd 7y agoWow, the Slashdot thread on this was actually more informative. I think that's a first for me. The issue is trademark: if they don't defend it, they could lose it. It's really that simple.
- mysterydip 7y agoI know people are arguing about how much a port to a 30 year old system could really harm them, but I think it's a twofold issue of precedent leading to dilution: If they allow this, what about a port of (same or other mario game) to (same or other platform)?
- snarfy 7y agoHow does DMCA apply to trademark? I thought the DMCA was only about copyright.
- DanBC 7y agoPlease read the thread, where your "defend it or lose it" point has been rebutted several times.