The Game Awards will be held next week, celebrating AAA gaming as well as smaller projects. Two fan games based on Nintendo IPs, AM2R and Pokemon Uranium, have disappeared from the “Best Fan Creation” nominees.
AM2R is a fan remastering of Metroid 2: The Return of Samus. Released earlier this year, the project was hit with a DMCA claim. The game files can no longer be hosted on the project’s website and must be found on upload sites or torrents. Pokemon Uranium is an original project that took nine years to complete. The creators removed the game files from their site to avoid legal action from Nintendo.
Nintendo has taken a hard line stance against fan creations and projects. In addition to these larger projects, they were allegedly responsible for a DMCA that took down over 550 titles from Game Jolt. Their aggressive protection of intellectual property lead to the creation of a parody mash up of No Man’s Sky and Super Mario: DMCA’s Sky.
Both games were up for consideration in the “Best Fan Creation” category of The Game Awards. They have since been removed, leaving Brutal Doom 64 and the Skyrim mod Enderal: Shards of the Order as the only remaining nominees.
The removal of the games has not gone unnoticed to developers, with one Pokemon Uranium designer expressing some disappointment:
It is currently unclear why these two titles have been removed from consideration. Kotaku reached out to both The Game Awards and Nintendo for clarification, but had not received a response at time of writing.
Comments
8 responses to “Game Awards Show Mysteriously Removes Two Nintendo Fan Games”
“Sigh. Worth a shot.” says to me it was always intended as a brazen and shameless attempt at getting attention, so fair play.
The Game Awards isn’t some holy institution and never will be, why are people so precious about it? Weird hill for people to die on, there’s already a litany of things to hate Nintendo for.
We should have seen this coming, like the developers behind the two games clearly did.
I truly believe the guys behind those two games should just go make their own adventure game about capturing monsters in devices, they’ve already spent so much time on the artwork and the story, all they’d need to do is edit what they call the game, a couple of UI differences and a different looking device to replace the Pokeball and they’d have a solid game and would not be in shit from Nintendo.
You have kinda hit the nail on the head as to why Nintendo went after them. It’s not JUST that its a fan-game, its that they could easily remove the trademark and copyright infringing elements and have the game pretty much stay the same. Essentially showing that they were only using the pokemon name in order to get more attention.
Well the point of AM2R was to do the remake that Nintendo itself should have done, but had not. AND they did it right.
AM2R is the best of the fan remakes currently available. And that’s saying something as there is some damn fine fan made remakes of games out there.
Ehhh, mostly right 😛
Plus they’d have to redesign ~700 monsters to not infringe. After already designing 150 of their own from scratch. That alone seems like an awful lot of work.
For me, the category itself is a loaded minefield. By default, anything fanmade is going to rely on someone else’s IP, and hence be ripe for DMCA takedowns.
Which is a shame, because for the most part (there are always exceptions), these arent products made to make money off, but as a homage to the parent product.
Nintendo has every right to protect their assets, but come on, these are the very people that have made the products popular in the first place.
This is NOT what copyright laws were created to prevent.
Not at all surprising.
Nintendo was horrified to realise that one guy in his South American garage managed to make the best Metroid game in over a decade.