The fan-game, Mario Royale, has now been renamed to Infringio Royale/DMCA Royale, with all the sprites having had their shapes and colors changed so as to no longer resemble Super Mario Bros. The creator, who is only know by their username of InfernoPlus, stated on Twitter “Uhhhh…. It’s not pretty but hopefully it won’t get me sued.”
While they didn’t confirm that they received a cease & desist from Nintendo, it’s more than likely that the publisher did send them an email. Either that or InfernoPlus, having already managed to accrue a player-base for the game, is being reactionary and taking steps to avoid having the game taken down by Nintendo before they notice. In a recent interview with VICE, they specifically predicted this happening, when asked what the worst case scenario was:
InfernoPlus’ fears aren’t unfounded, as Nintendo has gained a notorious reputation for how it responds to fan-games based on their properties. The likes of Pokemon Uranium and AM2R, both of which were created as passion projects, were forcefully taken down, much to fans’ chagrin. The former was even still being kept alive thanks to fans sharing the download link after being shut down but its developers eventually chose to stop supporting it, citing that they wished to move onto other projects.
For those more interested in official Mario titles, they won’t have to wait long to play Super Mario Maker 2 - the long-awaited sequel which allows players to create their own levels to share online, including this monstrosity that took 4.2 million attempts to beat.
DMCA Royale is available to play on web browsers right now.
Source: GameInformer, VICE
