The Japanese video gaming giant refused to acknowledge that most of these games were simply homages to much more famous titles of the past. Now hundreds of these products, including the largely anticipated Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R), a game that has been under development for at least 8 years. Earlier this year, another takedown request was already issued, but the developer Milton Guasti (known as “DoctorM64”) kept updating it nonetheless. This time, though, on his blog he announced that AM2R is not going to be updated anymore and that the project is permanently over.
A total of 562 other Nintendo fan projects have been hit by the order and have been immediately removed since they violated the company’s copyright. The takedown request has been filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and most of these titles have been removed already, regardless of the fact that many fans waited for them for years. The company claims that most of these products infringed their copyrights on many famous video game franchises such as the Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros and Pokémon. The web pages hosted on Game Jolt displayed images that copied the various characters, music and other features that were otherwise protected by international laws, and had to be taken down. As the user @CROS explained in his Fireside post, all games hit by the notice will be “locked.” This means that the page will still be showed in the dashboard for historical purposes, but only the developer can access it to avoid losing his own data. All the future DMCA notices will be uploaded in a continuously updated public archive.
