What happened?

A gameplay video went viral in the gaming community a few days ago. It showed a first-person shooter in Unreal Engine 5, where the player shot at Pokémon like Pikachu or Mewtu with assault rifles and shotguns.

Viewers of the video found some of it horrifying to shoot at the cute Pokémon. On the other hand, they were curious and wanted to try it out for themselves. But the game was never intended for release. And yet Nintendo intervenes.

Nintendo reports copyright infringement

What was that shooter?

The developer, who calls himself Dragon on Twitter, worked on the shooter for about 30 days. The first-person shooter is part of his project to develop something new with Unreal Engine 5 within a month. He took templates from the Unreal Engine for weapons and environments and built in “real” Pokémon as enemies.

So you could encounter Pokémon like Arbok in the wild and shoot them down. There were also boss battles against legendary Pokémon like Mewtu or Arktos. The bosses had more health than the Pokémon in the wild and also had special attacks that players had to dodge. Within a few days, the gameplay videos exploded. The video garnered over a million views on Twitter alone.

On Twitter, the developer shared a gameplay video. On YouTube, he shared a documentary about the development of the game, also with gameplay. In the documentary, Dragon explained that the game is not intended for release, joking “Please don’t sue me, Nintendo”.

Here’s how Nintendo reacted:

The fan project was shot down by Nintendo with “copyright strikes”. On Twitter and YouTube, the videos with gameplay can no longer be seen and have been removed. Instead, the message “This media has been disabled due to a notification from the copyright holder” appears on Twitter.

However, the gameplay hasn’t disappeared everywhere yet. On reddit, you can still see the video. Even though the thread has already been removed by the moderators:

Here Nintendo is cracking down again. According to the developer, the project was never supposed to be released. It was his project, of which he shared gameplay videos with the community. After all the positive feedback, Dragon developed a boss fight against Lugia, and the video was also blocked.

How do the players react?

On Twitter, you can read sentences like “You develop fast, but Nintendo’s copyright department is faster” under the blocked videos. Among the first gameplay videos, many players already warned that Nintendo will probably react quickly. One user writes (via Twitter): “I see you followed the WikiHow article ‘How to get contacted by Nintendo’s legal department in 10 steps’.

This feedback and concern is related to the fact that Nintendo is known to crack down on such unofficial fan projects.

Just recently, the story of one went through the gaming community. The artist raised €270,000 for hand-painted guides to Nintendo classics like Zelda and Metroid. Nintendo sued and cancelled the artist’s project.