3 ms·
Creating a game like that from scratch is a lot of work, but it would be a lot easier to do if people could start with the Full Screen Mario codebase. There's
by scrabble 13y ago
Creating a game like that from scratch is a lot of work, but it would be a lot easier to do if people could start with the Full Screen Mario codebase.
There's nothing that prevents the creators from making their own thing that people could start from. It doesn't need to be Mario.
Game designers could also incorporate parts of "Super Mario Brothers" as a "mini game" within modern video games.
This also seems odd to me.
Generally I think I stand for reasonable copyright terms, but on the other side, I never applied those terms to Mario. I can't imagine a character like Mario being used by many companies in many games across many systems where it is not tightly controlled by Nintendo. That is really a dreadful outcome. Nintendo has grown the brand and character over the years and it would be immediately diluted.
I could very easily picture a game like GTA starring Mario using a gun to shoot goombas and koopas, while Bowser snorts crack off of Princess Peach. That's not the kind of thing I'd like to see.
- jiggy2011 13y agoWould it necessarily be such a terrible outcome? The idea of providing protection for intellectual works is to incentivise the creation of these works rather than to protect any particular brand from being diluted. What would be the upshot if the character of Mario entered the public domain, in the same way that characters from Greek mythology or Shakespeare are in the public domain? Nintendo might decide to expend creative effort creating a new set of characters to figurehead their brand, this could well be a win for society at large. Other unaffiliated developers might then decide to take mario in interesting new creative directions that would not have happened under Nintendo, this could also be a win.