Nintendo has filed takedown notices against websites hosting Super Mario Bros. 64, a fan-made Commodore 64 port of the company’s 1985 NES game Super Mario Bros.
The project’s developer ZeroPaige worked on the port for around 7 years and released the finished game online last week.
According to TorrentFreak, however, Super Mario Bros. 64 has already been met with a number of takedown notices across file hosting websites as Nintendo looks to protect its IP rights.
It’s an unsurprising end given the fact that the project is an unauthorized reproduction of one of Nintendo’s classic games, and one that the company itself still has up for sale on various platforms.
It’s also a move that comes during a period of time where Nintendo is very adamantly shutting down the circulation of its classic games online, to the point of threatening (and sometimes taking) legal action against websites hosting sizable ROM libraries.
Nintendo has taken similar actions against fan-made games that, either partially or entirely, used elements from Nintendo-owned properties in the past. Last year the company filed takedown notices against a decade-old Pokemon fan game creation tool which had been used to make the Pokemon Uranium fan project Nintendo took similar action against years before.
Around that same time, legal threats from Nintendo prompted the emulation site EmuParadise to remove its entire ROM and ISO file libraries and, more recently, Nintendo was awarded up to $12.23 million in a copyright and trademark infringement case against the websites LoveROMS and LoveRetro.