Some things are certain in life: Death, taxes, and Nintendo lawyers filing DMCA claims to shut down fan ports.
The Super Mario Bros 64 creation, a tireless work by a single developer over seven years, has since been taken offline. Within days of the iconic platformer getting ported to the Commodore 64, Nintendo’s lawyers have stayed true to form by filing a DMCA claim, forcing all downloads of the fan creation to be taken offline.
Good times. Due to a DMCA takedown notice we had to remove the Super Mario Bros 64 download from our website blog post from 4 days ago. Hopefully everyone enjoys the #Commodore 64 #C64 game who was able to snag it.
— PDX Commodore Club (@c64club) April 22, 2019
Super Mario Bros 64, which was released over the Easter weekend, tries to replicate the Japanese, American and European versions of the classic platformer in a single image file. The game is playable on original C64 hardware, or through emulators, and supports a variety of emulated or hardware turbo functionality.
The amazing thing about the port is overcoming the technical challenges. There are some similarities in the base C64 and NES hardware, but there’s also substantial differences in how they render sprites, the audio, and even the viewing area. The NES, for example, can display 32×30 8×8 character cells on a screen. The C64’s screen dimensions are a taller, but thinner as well, with a 40×25 viewing area.
On top of that, getting the game to run at the proper speed across different emulators and hardware, not to mention support for all three versions of the game, is an enormous challenge. It’s not a huge surprise that it took seven years to come to fruition, but that’s never been something Nintendo lawyers have cared much for.
But much in the same way Pokemon Uranium and AM2R continue to float around the internet, so will Super Mario Bros. in Commodore 64 form.
Leave a Reply