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Wed, 21 Oct 2020
Nintendo Nukes 'Zelda' Fan Game, As Per Usual
Furnished content.
I've tried with Nintendo. For some years now, I have both complained about how strict and hamfisted the company is when it comes to allowing fans to express their fandom in the form of fan-created games and content, as well as offered the company advice as to how it could be just a little more cool about all of this. The frustration really starts to boil over when you realize just how much cool content the world could have if Nintendo could figure out some way not to be as protectionist as possible and instead seek out ways to work with fans to allow for this sort of thing. To be clear, as I have said in the past, Nintendo certainly can act this way when it comes to how it treats its fans, but it doesn't have to act this way.But, when you jump at every fan-made work like a toddler on meth jumps at their own shadow, I suppose you just can't help yourself. The most recent evidence that Nintendo isn't changing course comes in the form of a fan-created Zelda game put up on GitHub that Nintendo swiftly got taken down.Well-known modder Kaze Emanuar, who has been releasing a number of unofficial Nintendo-based projects over the last few years, launched a title called 'The Missing Link' earlier this year. The game made use of the very same engine from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and aimed to bridge the gap between Ocarina, and later N64 title, Zelda: Majora's Mask.The game was available from GitHub, but following the copyright claim, has since been removed. To be charitable to Nintendo, there is no lawsuit thus far involved in this story. Given that the company has never been litigiously shy, perhaps that's progress of a kind. And, again, Nintendo is well within its rights to take this action. The takedown request itself at least nods at any question as to whether this game would constitute fair use."The copyrighted works are the video games in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda video game franchise, including without limitation the audio-visual works, story lines, characters, and imagery in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (U.S. Copyright Reg. No. PA0000901848), The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (U.S. Copyright Reg. No. PA0001940271), and others.Nintendo has reviewed the reported material and does not believe it qualifies as a fair use of Nintendo’s copyright-protected work." All true, except that isn't where this story has to end. There are plenty of ways that Nintendo could sanctify these sorts of fan-made games and content that don't involve taking them down. It could work out some arrangement with the fans who make these fan-games to make them official, thereby alleviating any concern for copyright protection. On the copyright side specifically, the company could simply ignore these fan-games, like plenty of other game studios do. Hell, if it's some monetary corporate itch that requires scratching, Nintendo could even build a fan-creator program that allowed it to make some money and have curation abilities over these expressions of adoration turned into gaming content.But, no. Instead, out comes to the copyright takedown request, down goes the game, and the world is an objectively slightly worse place for it.
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posted at: 12:00am on 21-Oct-2020
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