A recently published 2D fan adaptation of Nintendo’s newest addition to The Legend of Zelda series was recently taken down because of a copyright claim made by Nintendo of America.
The fan project, titled “Breath of the NES”, was a free game available to download on Windows PC. The creator, known online as Winterdrake, combined the visual elements of the original 1987 Legend of Zelda title with the open-world gameplay of Breath of the Wild, and released it online after showing a 2D prototype at GDC 2017 (Game Developer Conference, which is “the world’s largest professional game industry event”). Winterdrake had uploaded a demo to itch.io last week, but the website received a complaint from an attorney representing Nintendo of America. The email complaint included the copyright citations of the protagonist (Link), the source material (The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild), as well as the fact that it infringed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Often abbreviated as the DMCA, the act punishes the production and spreading of services, devices, and technology pertaining to copyrighted works. The DMCA also heightens the consequences and penalties for copyright infringement online.
This is not Nintendo’s first takedown of a popular fan work; the video game giant has already ordered the removal of more than 562 fan games on a single day back in September. A post on itch.io from December confirms just a fraction of the games ordered to be removed, again listing the copyright citations of various Nintendo works and links to the infringing material requested for removal. Although there are game companies that have shown to be more tolerant of fan created material, use of copyrighted material is something that the game industry takes very seriously, and Nintendo is no exception to this.
Infographic showing the number of copyrighted works Nintendo of America specified that were infringed, in comparison to the number of fan games created depicting content from these copyrighted works. All data shown is from the 2016 Takedown notice.
Nintendo was approached regarding this at a companywide annual meeting in 2010; a shareholder of the company asked how it would approach fan-created content. Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo at the time, answered by saying, “We cannot say that we can give tacit approval to any and all the activities which threaten our intellectual properties. But on the other hand, it would not be appropriate if we treated people who did something based on affection for Nintendo, as criminals.”
Although the creator’s project was forcibly removed from itch.io, Winterdrake still seems determined to continue the project. As per an update on his Twitter, he said that he is “going to make the next release a lot bigger.”
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