For the past two months, an amateur game dev has been posting .gifs of his Pokemon FPS game. Then Nintendo’s lawyers came knocking.
The fan-made game is built in Unreal Engine on PC and it puts players in an open world, armed with guns to defend against pokemon. It’s a bit jarring to see some of the gifs from the project, where someone is shotgun blasting a Kabutops or Hitmonlee.
Shortly after the redditor posted a few clips of going on a Pokemon rampage Doom-style, they blew up on social media. That virality comes around the time of Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which is releasing this week. Nintendo’s lawyers sprung into action to remove the copyright offending content immediately.
The videos themselves that were uploaded to YouTube were quickly given copyright strikes to remove them. Several tweets of .gifs of gameplay have also been removed, presumably after Twitter received copyright complaints from Nintendo’s lawyers. In fact, the only place you can still find .gifs of the fan-made game are on reddit.
The initial post with the video is still available to view on the IndieGaming subreddit, but content previews for it have been disabled completely. It should come as no surprise that Nintendo’s lawyers are working overtime to scrub fan-made content like this. Game Freak’s first 3D semi-open world Pokemon game is right around the corner.
Nintendo doesn’t want anything to tarnish the image of Pokemon and showcasing them shot (complete with blood spatters) is a bit jarring. Especially for kid’s games that have always been designed to receive an E for Everyone rating. But hey, at least Nintendo’s lawyers haven’t stalked the original creator of this fan-made game, like they did a 3DS hacker.
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