“It wasn't enough for them to have their cake. They ate ours too.”
December 7, 2019 5:11 AM   Subscribe

What a YouTube Copyright Strike From 2015 Has to do With 'Mario Maker 2' in 2019 by Patrick Klepek [Vice Gaming] “The same week Nintendo released Super Mario Maker in 2015, Nintendo launched a copyright strike at Mario video uploaded by Andi McClure, a designer of numerous web curiosities. [...] Corporations have enormous power on YouTube if they choose to wield it. Your video can instantly disappear, with few options to fight back. But what made things curious was the news Nintendo announced on Monday: Super Mario Maker 2 - The Master Sword & Ninji Speedruns [YouTube][3:30]. What makes the connection between McClure and Nintendo curious is the video Nintendo directed a copyright strike at on McClure’s channel. The video is “Many-Worlds Mario: Kaizo level 1,” and you can view here in archived form.”

“It’s possible Nintendo came up with the idea on their own; Nintendo has included “ghost” features in games like Mario Kart, where you can race against a record of another player’s run. But McClure’s creation, an emulator hack building on a hack of Super Mario World itself, later served as partial inspiration for one of the most influential platformers in the last decade, Super Meat Boy. [...] Part of video game design has been, for better and worse, taking ideas from other games and building on them, legally and illegally. It’s not hard to see the leap from McClure to Meat Boy to Mario Maker, and it’s also hard to imagine Mario Maker existing without kaizo hacks.”
“Now, I'm not angry Nintendo is using an idea similar to one I had first,” said McClure on Twitter earlier this week. “What *does* make me angry, actually really angry, is they copyright-takedown the video showing I had the idea first, and THEN they use the idea. IN THE SAME GAME (mario maker) THEY TOOK DOWN MY VIDEO OVER.”
• Mario Maker 2's New Speedrunning Mode Looks A Lot Like A Popular Fan-Made Hack [Kotaku]
“While there’s no evidence that Nintendo was directly inspired by McClure’s creation, it’s possible the company was at least aware of its existence. In 2015, following the release of the first Mario Maker, a video showing her Super Mario World level being completed by dozens of Marios, each representing a different speedrun attempt, was removed from YouTube after Nintendo filed a copyright strike against it, according to a screenshot McClure shared on Twitter this week. A version of it is still viewable on the Internet Archive. Nintendo did not respond to a request for comment. “The moment the video went up, like three people I know immediately @ed me because it looked to them like my video,” McClure told Kotaku via Discord message. “So when I woke up I had all these twitter messages and my girlfriend was like, ‘’Did you see the Mario Maker video?” because she was thinking of Quantum Mario also and I was just like, god damn it.””
posted by Fizz (4 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Also, you can now play as Link: Mario Maker’s New Update Is The Closest Thing To Zelda II Maker We’ll Ever Get [Kotaku]
“Super Mario Maker 2 has finally leveled up with today’s release of the version 2.0 update. Some carefully-considered new enemies and items open up new creative possibilities, but the big change is the fact that Mario can now transform into Link, with a full suite of new moves that turn Mario Maker levels into Zelda ones—specifically, the side-scrolling Zelda II. And it’s more detailed than you might think.”
posted by Fizz at 5:13 AM on December 7, 2019


This took me a while to parse but it's about showing all the ghost duplicates of previous attempts to complete the level. And the video was taken down in 2015 but was made much earlier than that because Super Meat Boy was released in 2010.

I remember playing a Flash game called The Company of Myself where you could interact with previous versions of yourself. You had to do things like jump on top of your ghosts to reach the goal. It looks like that came out in 2009? At the time I thought of it as influenced by Braid. Maybe that's still fair because it was more puzzle-platformer than Kaizo.
posted by RobotHero at 8:47 AM on December 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


It's not surprising that Nintendo is like this.

Related: Did Nintendo download a Mario ROM and sell it back to us? [Eurogamer][Video Analysis]
“Nintendo's stance on emulation has always been a rigid one. As far as the company is concerned, if you're downloading and playing games from unofficial sources, you're a software pirate. "It's that simple and not open to debate," says its corporate FAQ. And yet, here's a thing. If you download the Wii version of Super Mario Bros. using the Virtual Console, there's evidence to suggest Nintendo might have actually repurposed an illegally-copied ROM and then sold it back to us.”
posted by Fizz at 9:55 AM on December 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


I don't like this.

On the one hand they are aggressively claiming IP rights, but will also happily steal the work of others. They go and download ROMs like the rest of us because they do not have their own shot together to archive, or don't want to be bothered with conversion work.

Sucks all around. Greedy and hypocritical.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:45 AM on December 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


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