Nintendo cracks down on fan-made games

It's not uncommon for fan-made games using big-name IP to get shut down as soon as they draw some interest online. It's less common for rights-holders to aggressively and indiscriminately squash those projects by the hundreds.

Freeware site GameJolt yesterday announced that it received a DMCA takedown notice from Nintendo for 562 projects infringing on its rights to the Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Pokemon franchises.

"These web pages display images of Nintendo's video game characters in connection with unauthorized online games that copy the characters, music, and other features of Nintendo's video games," Nintendo's representatives wrote in the takedown notice. "The web site at gamejolt.com generates revenue from advertising banners displayed on the site and advertisements played while users wait for the games to load."

GameJolt has removed public access to those games, but their creators can still access them "for historical purposes."

Nintendo has been cracking down on fan-made projects recently. Last month it squashed Pokemon Uranium, a PC version of the franchise nine years in the making that was pulled down less than a week after launch, but not before it was downloaded 1.5 million times. That was just a week after it had a free fan-made remake of Metroid 2 pulled.

Interestingly, Nintendo's GameJolt requests were limited to those three main properties. As of this writing, the site still hosted numerous projects based on franchises like Metroid, Donkey Kong, Earthbound, and Yoshi.