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by chungy 942 days ago
It's even possible that Nintendo evaluates the harm of these projects to be rather lower compared to distributing the complete games themselves. Even though it's not based in any legal reality, the projects' firewall of "You must provide art assets from your own copy of the game" may suffice to keep the lawyers away.

I know, Nintendo will litigate anyone for any reason, but it is possible for a company to look away when these measures are taken.
1 comments
LegibleCrimson 942 days ago
Yeah, seems most likely. In the past, they've explicitly taken down distributions of things like the SM64 PC port, but left the decompilation.

Companies don't have to C&D. If something poses very little financial danger, but taking it down presents significant risk of PR harm, it's not worth it. The C&D would cost more than it would save, so it makes no business sense.

Don't ask me why they even bothered taking down fan games, though. They seem to care a lot about art assets in particular.

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chungy 942 days ago
> Don't ask me why they even bothered taking down fan games, though. They seem to care a lot about art assets in particular.

If talking about AM2R, it posed a rather credible threat against the success of the official Metroid 2 remake (ignoring the fact that AM2R is of much higher quality anyway). Plus it contained ripped sprites from Zero Mission, Fusion, and incorporated all of the characters and enemies that Nintendo owns.

You can't just make your own Lord of the Rings or Star Wars without infringing the copyright of the original work. Same with fan remakes.

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LegibleCrimson 942 days ago
That one I get to a degree, but they've hit a lot of others for less clear benefit.
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