You’ll never guess what Nintendo have done. In an entirely uncharacteristic move for them, they’ve shut down a genuinely cool non profit fan project that we were all enjoying. Shock.
Earlier this week, an amazing “3D” remake of the original NES Zelda appeared online. It was playable in your browser over at zelda30tribute.com, and was an amazing technical achievement. So of course Nintendo couldn’t let it live.
Creators Scott Lininger and Mike Magee have been pretty relaxed about Nintendo enforcing their copyright, though.
A post on their website read:
Nintendo asked us to remove this site for copyright infringement. I guess Zelda30Tribute was a little too pixel perfect! We’re sad about that, but we get it. We started this project because we love Nintendo and the joy they have given us throughout the years. From the start of development, we knew this result could potentially happen. Nintendo has every right to protect their IP. No complaints from us, we had a blast working on this tribute and made some friends along the way.
The two plan to share the source code for the project through Github once they’ve had a chance to remove any Nintendo owned assets from it. Good on them – it truly was an impressive bit of work, especially considering it played in browsers.
Fortunately, some footage survives on YouTube (for now) which you can watch below.
The Legend of Zelda is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. While everyone waits for the fabled open world Zelda Wii U, Nintendo have released a HD remake of Twilight Princess and a 3DS Dynasty Warriors crossover to keep us ticking over.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.