Nintendo lands a huge blow to gamers, kills over 500 fan games

As the title suggests, the game had enabled players to play as Mario while traveling in space has immediately attracted the attention of Nintendo, which asked developer ASMB Games to shut it down. DMCA’s Sky has risen up to take its place.

It’s free, and available for download right now.

The games in question were all based on or feature Mario, Zelda, or Pokemon – arguably Nintendo’s most valuable pieces of intellectual property. In a notice posted on the website, ASMB reveals that its game was the latest to fall victim to Nintendo, but informed everyone that it will continue to live on under a thinly-veiled guise: DMCA’s Sky. Can we expect another DMCA notice?

Any longtime fan of Nintendo knows the company is extremely strict about its intellectual property, which is why it comes as no surprise that the company issued a DMCA takedown notice on September 2 for hundreds of fan-made games featuring its characters. (Weird Al Yankovic famously gets permission to use the songs he parodies despite the fact that he doesn’t legally have to.) Whether or not some aspects of the game are jokes, it’s also a fully-playable Mario clone with the gimmick that its worlds are procedurally generated.

ASMB also injected a bit of humor and rebelliousness into the new version, now called DMCA’s Sky. It isn’t overly inventive, but it doesn’t contain names from the Mario series, likely protecting it from future DMCA notices. Mario is now named Spaceman Finn, Peach is Princess Mango, and Goombas are now Moombas. “Featuring insane Moombas, an Infinite Universe, muscle, fantastic physics and a radical space ship”. Even superior products like the Metroid 2 remake AM2R don’t stand a chance in Nintendo’s attempts to protect its IP.