This could get messy…
In 1982, Universal Studios sued Nintendo, claiming that Donkey Kong was an infringement of their King Kong movie copyrights. Nintendo refused to settle with Universal, so the case went to court. Nintendo successfully defended itself resulting in a $1.8 million counterclaim to seek compensation for damages due to Universal’s conduct. After this legendary lawsuit Nintendo had numerous courtroom battles in the 80s and 90s with Blockbuster, Tengen/Atari and Game Genie, to name a few.
The current generation of gamers might be more familiar with Nintendo’s lawsuits against fan games, emulators, and ROM websites. Case in point: Nintendo has always been very protective of its intellectual property.
That’s why I was very surprised to see a Kickstarter project that tries to commercially exploit the Nintendo World Championships branding and imitate the original product and, so far, seems to be getting away with it.
Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition
Due to its illustrious scarcity the NWC cartridge, with which the original tournament was played and given out to the contestants, has been fan-reproduced before. But not at the same time as Nintendo has opted to reboot the product itself. It just so happen to be that on the 18th of July 2024, Nintendo is going to release the Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition for the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo does deviate a bit from its original concept as in this game you can take on over 150 speed-running NES game challenges (check out our article about NWC: NES Edition here). These speed run challenges are based on 13 classic Nintendo NES titles like Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid.
Nintendo’s upcoming Switch release is an homage to its own Nintendo World Championship from 1990, 2015, and 2017. It is going to get a digital and physical release. As always, this kind of hype attracts some shady people like scalpers and resellers, but some sinister Kickstarters are also trying to cash in on the NWC hype.
Kickstarter
Retrolike.net has put a few Kickstarter projects in the spotlight before (Christmas Crisis and Flap Happy, for example) but for people who are not familiar with Kickstarter, here is the rundown:
Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform that helps bring creative projects to life. It’s a home for film, music, art, theater, games, comics, design, photography, and more. Many homebrew video games for the NES, SNES, Game Boy, Sega Megadrive/Genesis (and many other platforms) wouldn’t have seen the light of day without this platform.
In other words, Kickstarter is a great platform, but it’s not without its controversies, and the newest NES Kickstarter project is outrageous, to say the least.
NWC 35th Edition: A New Pro Version for the NES
The project we are talking about is NWC 35th Edition. This is a ROM hack of the original 1990 cartridge that was used in the Nintendo World Championships. The people behind the project have altered the ROM substantially to make it more difficult. So it is not a straight republishing of the original ROM. It does use the original games, Super Mario Bros, Tetris and Rad Racer, albeit with different difficulty and changed game sections to play. The project has been launched on Kickstarter a couple of days ago. The project has a very cool promo movie featuring E-sports legends Robin Mihara and Thor Aackerlund. Thor was the 1990 Nintendo World Champ.
Robin Mihara seems to be main the man behind this production. Robin is a competitive Classic Tetris player and co-founder of the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) and inducted in the Video Game Hall of Fame as he is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest video game tournament players of the 90s. He was also one of the main characters of the 2011 documentary “Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters.” Being a long time friend, unsurprisingly, Youtuber ‘The Immortal’ John Hancock has been out there promoting the project.
OK, so what’s the problem?
Going on the remarks made by the developer in the comment section of the Kickstarter campaign, we can safely presume no licensing deals have been arranged for either the original NWC 1990 ROM or the individual ROMS of Rad Racer, Tetris, and Super Mario Bros. Additionally the box of this Kickstarter project has none other than Super Mario on the front. The same image is featured on the label. We love a good fan-project but, these guys mean business.
Wait, what?
Yes, the creators of this project have blatantly not only ripped off Nintendo’s mascot, but they also included Nintendo’s NWC logo with minor alterations and flip it for a immense amount of money. We all would like Nintendo to loosen up a bit and stop trying to send out all these cease and desist letters and let it fan-made projects slide. And yes, Nintendo goes after community-driven hobby projects that celebrate its brand and games, most of the time these game recreations or ROM hacks get CaD’ed once the get enough buzz to get noticed. This wish for more leniency towards cool projects isn’t helped by business endeavors like this: The purple cartridge goes for a not-too-shabby $152, while the signed gold cartridge will set you back a whopping $379. Yikes!
If you think that the illegal use of the Super Mario character and exploiting some NES ROMs is crazy enough, think again. Because this Kickstarter takes it to a whole new level: In the comments, an actual project backer asks: “I’m wondering if this is licensed by Nintendo. I’m concerned that this project may be shut down by them.” Robin himself responds, “There have been dozens of NWC repros made and have not been shut down.”
Mihara at least seems to be aware that this project isn’t really fully within the rule of law or Kickstarter’s rules, as he acknowledge the fact that NWC trademarks haven’t been policed much. This NWC 35th Edition Kickstarter campaign was launched a couple of days ago, and I’m wondering how this campaign will end in a few weeks. Currently, it has already managed to get 85 backers, responsible for a pledged total of just short of $20K.
So many questions…
Kickstarter reviews every project before it is launched. My first question is an obvious one: How did this project get through Kickstarter’s review process? After the launch, backers ask about the legal side of this project in the message section, and there still seems to be no red flag alert on the Kickstarter website.
The second question I have, and this is the one I am most curious about, is what will Nintendo’s reaction be? Like I mentioned in the introduction of this article, Nintendo has always protected its IPs and trademarks but has been lacking on the ‘NWC 1990’ IP front. By the account of the creators of this project themselves, even. Retrousb.com, for example, made a lot of NWC 1990 reproductions in the past couple of years and got away with it.
I guess we will have to wait and see how this will pan out, but with Nintendo’s legacy in the courtroom, why would you ever want to tickle this snoozing monster’s toe? Let me clarify, we have better things to do than to protect the interests of billion dollar corporations, but we are of the opinion that people are being price-gouged with this project, as it is apparently, presented convincingly enough let people let people think these carts are licensed or not. last but certainly not least, this endeavor is more likely to hurt the homebrew community than help it.
